Political analysis
Menace in Seat 36F
- By The Beast
- April 01, 2007
I walked onto an airplane yesterday, carrying a weapon in my pocket. It wasn’t much of a weapon – a Swiss army knife with a three-inch blade, plus the usual assortment of other sharp edges. All in all, though, it probably represented twenty counts of some Federal crime.
I didn’t commit these crimes deliberately—just forgot the knife was in my coat pocket. The coat was taken off, as ordered, and sent through the X-ray machine; but perhaps the operator was tired, or distracted, and failed to notice the knife, or perhaps it was lying at the wrong angle to cast a telltale shadow. I put my hand in my pocket as I was walking down the plane’s aisle to my seat, and found the deadly thing there. “Shall I hijack the plane?” I asked myself, and answered, “Oh, what’s the point.”
During the predictably squalid and brutish flight, I found myself gripping the knife in my pocket as if I were an apprentice Jack the Ripper, and contemplating my sharp little friend’s implications for national security.
If a mild-mannered middle-aged citizen can carry a deadly weapon undetected onto a plane, without even meaning to, it’s likely that a determined individual could find a way to do so with intent – particularly if he didn’t care what happened to him. These reflections weren’t disquieting – quite the reverse. If it’s so easy to blow up a plane, in spite of all the “security” rigmarole at the airport, does it not follow, from the fact that planes seldom are blown up, that very few people really want to blow them up?
In fact, plane-exploders are probably no more likely to affect your life than serial killers. Both classes of people undoubtedly exist, but most of us don’t go through our day taking elaborate measures to avoid serial killers, or lose sleep over the prospect of encountering Hannibal Lecter at the produce counter.
Is it too cynical to wonder whether the “security” in question is really job security? In recent years the policing and incarceration complex has become an economic and political force in its own right – like the military-industrial complex, though not on quite such a grand scale. New York state alone spends $2.7 billion a year just on prisons, not counting police, private security guards, purveyors of surveillance devices, and the like. According to a recent New York Times item, “the [New York] state prison system has become, in effect, an economic development program…. [A] powerful alliance of upstate lawmakers and correction officers’ unions guard their constituents’ and members’ state-financed jobs and are likely to resist any effort to downsize the system.”
That explanation, by itself, is probably too simple. Dr Freud would remind us that human behavior is “over-determined”—much of what we do has more than one sufficient cause. A darkly suspicious person might conjecture a broader political motive for this theater of surveillance and scrutiny, this gauntlet of barking, hectoring coplets, this petty humiliation and fetishistic pawing through our underwear and toothpaste.
George W. Bush recently reminded us that “The enemies of liberty come from different parts of the world, and they take inspiration from different sources.” Our darkly suspicious person might fear that some of those enemies come from right here at home – and their “inspiration” is the hope that their power and wealth will grow if the rest of us are reduced to something more passive and tractable, more fearful and grovelling, than free citizens of a free country.
I’m old enough to remember when flying was a thrill. To step into an airplane was to step into the future – a future of once-unimaginable freedom and almost godlike exaltation, where ordinary Joes and Janes could lean back and sip a Martini among fabulous Tiepolo clouds, en route to some exotic destination their parents never heard of.
Now we’ve come full circle: airplanes and airports no longer suggest a gleaming future, or trail any clouds of our Golden Age glory. They look more like outposts of the booming prison sector. The emblems of triumph have become the insignia of degradation.
The story of this reversal can be summed up in one word: blowback. Imperial ambition made us do this to ourselves. We sought to be top dog, and now we have agreed to be treated like dogs.
Among their other over-determined functions, our grotesque airport liturgies are what anthropologists call apotropaic magic—rituals to ward off evils that we can’t otherwise control. On the practical level, airport apotropaia is an ineffectual response to a rare threat. But we are not seeking practical answers to practical problems. We are seeking something that’s not available in the real world.
We can’t acknowledge the fact that the totems of our once-golden way of life are vulnerable, like all things human. If we charge through the world like Lizzie Grubman in her SUV, the world has ways to hit us back – but we’re not yet ready to hear that. The imperial mystique still has too strong a grip on our imagination.
It’s not enough for us to take reasonable precautions, and reduce our risk to the prosaic, low but non-zero level that we tolerate in daily life when we cross the street or ride in a taxi. Instead, we have to convince ourselves that like Superman, defender of the “American way,” we are invulnerable – because otherwise, we would have to reckon up the real costs of empire, and ask ourselves whether it’s worth what we’re paying for it.
We still don’t want to make that reckoning. So instead we make more and more costly sacrifices to the Moloch of security, and prostrate ourselves before a priesthood of cops and security guards, to enter an illusory paradise of perfect safety. Of course these rites don’t really reassure us – on some level, we know better— and further exertions are always needed. Now we have to take our shoes off, and stand barefoot like Moses or a Spanish penitent; what will we take off next?
Personally, I’d rather divest myself of the empire, and hang on to my Swiss army knife – and my privacy, and my dignity, and my shoes. And I’ll happily take my chances with all my shiv-packing, or even dynamite-shod, fellow-travellers.
Mumblety peg, anyone?
Michael J. Smith lives in New York City, and when he is not carrying deadly weapons on airplanes, he spends his time trying to undermine the Democratic Party on his blog.
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Who knows what evil can be done with a Swiss Army Knife. The take over of Airport passenger screening by the TSA has become a nightmare for flyers and another public relations fiasco for the Government. That should have been expected. Washington can not run a one car funeral either efficiently or ecconomicaly.
599 days ago by James E. Fish
It’s true that the airport and any other Homeland Security department for that matter are all bureaucratic cesspools that serve as convenient ways or bushie to keep the unemployment numbers down. I’ve gotten a lot of things through security at the airport (Accidently of course-except that bag of weed)
598 days ago by PracktoMite