We are still overwhelmingly more likely to die as aresult of getting into our cars every day than we are from boarding anairplane. But what air passengers know from experience is that any time anairplane is threatened, the government’s immediate reaction is to institute newsecurity measureswhether they make any sense or notto pretend it isprotecting us.
Sure enough, within hours of the failed attempt toset off an explosive on a flight descending into Detroit, airplane passengerswere confronted with new rules for the last hour of flightsrules forbiddingthem from going to the bathroom, using pillows or blankets and, in at least onecase, from reading books.
No one ever explained why special rules had to be inplace for the last hour of a flight just because that’s when the young man onthe Detroitplane tried to detonate an explosive. Since the flight originated in Amsterdam,blowing up an airplane with more than 300 passengers bound for Detroit over theAtlantic or anywhere else over the United States would have been no less an actof terrorism.
Banning the reading of books aboard airplanes maywell be an attempt to reduce literacy among air travelers. Reading can lead to thinking. It’s moredifficult to get American citizens to jump through hoops in the name ofsecurity if they start wondering how terrorists starting a pillow fight canbring down an airplane.
Whatever It Takes?
But, of course, most Americans don’t bother to thinkabout the justification for any of the freedoms government officials claim theyhave to take away to keep us safe.
“Whatever it takes” was the most common responsefrom air passengers interviewed about anything the government wanted to do toits own citizens in the war on terrorism. If the latest airplane scare means nobathroom breaks between Europe and the Midwest,go ahead and suspend the Geneva Conventions against torture. Everybody willjust have to hold it.
It was President Bush who first learned how to usefear of terrorism to manipulate Americans. When he wasn’t brazenly exploitingfear to win votes or justify unnecessary war, he was putting us through evermore absurd rituals at airports, none of which apparently made us any safer.
For the past eight years, all of us have beenpadding around airports in our stocking feet like good, little citizens becausea goofball named Richard Reid made a failed attempt to blow up his own shoesaboard an American Airlines flight in 2001.
After spending hundreds of billions of dollars tocreate a Department of Homeland Security and to hire thousands ofTransportation Security Administration (TSA) screeners, the failed ChristmasDay bomber succeeded in carrying exactly the same explosive aboard an airplane.
We may not have made any progress in keepingexplosives off airplanes, but let the record show the TSA has succeeded inclosely scrutinizing millions upon millions of shoes.
The Bush administration began adding ridiculoustwists to the airline boarding ritual, apparently testing whether there wereany limits to what government could order the American people to do to fightterrorism. In 2006, air passengers began lining up to throw away killer lipgloss and potentially explosive Dippity-do to prevent those deadly personalgrooming products from falling into the hands of terrorists.
We have a new administration now that presumably isless interested in exploiting fear to justify suspending civil liberties andthe rule of law. But President Barack Obama already has been put on thedefensive by attacks from Bush’s bellicose vice president and otherRepublicans, accusing Obama of not being warlike enough against terrorism.
Republicans want us to believe the attempted bombingof the Detroit plane should have been averted bythe Obama administration because the father of the suspect told the AmericanEmbassy in Nigeriahis son was becoming a radical.
When I was in college in the ’60s, the parents ofeverybody I knew thought their kids were becoming radicals. If we groundedeverybody in their 20s whose parents disagree with them politically, all theairlines would go out of business.
What we need most out of the Obama administrationnow is common-sense improvements to the watch-list procedures set up under Bushto try to identify more real threats instead of taking up the TSA’s time byputting former Vice President Al Gore through additional screening.
At the airports, let’s start using technology thatexists to detect actual explosives instead of wasting our time with emptyrituals of pretend security to confiscate nail clippers and eyeball all thelatest footwear.
