By degrees, over the years, the airport experience has become an extreme example of a totalitarian regime at work, making you small and suspect, depriving you of control. Such is the clumsy questioning of motives that one’s usual response is the sort of suppressed rage that was the traveler’s emotion in Soviet-era Eastern Europe with its bullying policemen. Travel was once a liberation; now it is the opposite—air travel, that is. Younger travelers have no idea what has been lost.
