Airport Twenty-Ten

Here is wishing everyone a New Year of Jurassic-sized felicity. I’ve just returned from Philadelphia, where I spent the weekend. Which means I had to fly since I live nowhere near Pennsylvania. Which means I had the high honor and distinct privilege of experiencing how the authorities dealt with a perceived elevation of the terrorist threat thanks to Christmas Day’s near-disaster.

Lines were at least tolerable, but slower. I arrived at PHL hoping to get an earlier flight. Silly me. By the time I got to the airport around 6:30 a.m., boarding pass in hand, the security line was already very long and not moving very fast. We all know you can’t trust granny with that menacing walker of hers—she just might be al Qaeda. But me they singled out for a patting down. I suspect it was just so they could find an excuse to handle a living fossil, not because they thought I might belong to some radical group. Well, no harm done. At least they didn’t yank my tail and call me “stupid lizard” the way children do.

It’s been well said by others that much of what we do at the airport by way of vigilance is “security theater” rather than genuine protection. I feel neither taught nor delighted, nor rendered safer, by this participatory theater of the absurd. Maybe the title of the play ought to be, after the manner of Luigi Pirandello, Mille personaggi in cerca di buon senso.

The Detroit incident suggests that to a significant extent, safety is in the hands of the passengers. No security regimen – not even the eminently sensible proposal to invest more in intelligence and dot-connecting than in the above-described “theater” – will prove 100% effective. I suppose this just means that if and when someone near us stands up mid-flight and tries to set fire to his shorts, makes as if to light the wick hanging ever so oddly from his snappy new netbook, or begins to carry out some other cartoonish but deadly scheme our adversaries think of next, we are going to find it necessary to take notice. Polite attentiveness should become part of flight culture. Of course, there’s no need for paranoia – the odds of anything bad happening on any given flight (terrorist-induced or otherwise) are low.

Evidently, it is all but impossible to get certain agencies to act with the necessary common sense and alacrity. If a young man’s father walks into your office and says something on the order of, “My mixed-up son is consorting with terrorists and I am convinced he’s going to do something irretrievably awful. We must stop him!” you’d think that you would be able to issue an immediate request to keep that young man off any airplane whatsoever. But even something this obvious only begins to set the creaking wheels of the security apparatus in motion, and evidently requires weeks, if not months, of processing, bethinking, and consideration. I wish I could see it getting better, but it’s just too predictable human behavior to expect improvements with confidence. People dither, and even the authorities, when confronted with the need to act rapidly and boldly, tend to look around and bleat, “why don’t the authorities do something?” Still, the demand for improvement in intelligence connectivity should be made, and followed up on, too.

On a positive note in keeping with the new year, I believe the most important thing we can do to make ourselves safer is to get out of the oil-consumption business as quickly as possible. We are targets at least partly because of our entanglements in the politics of a certain region of the world. That need not be interpreted as “blaming Uncle Sam”; it’s simply to point out that changing our relations with the Middle East to something less complex or high-stakes than they are at present would benefit us, as would finally arriving at a workable solution to the longstanding Israeli-Palestinian tensions. Neither accomplishment would make terrorist outfits regard us kindly, but both might lessen the appeal of their warped, murderous ideology to the lost individuals they turn to their purposes. In the long run, what we have on our hands is a political problem, not a directly military one or even one that can be settled by ever-increasing security measures. I think it's worth keeping that in mind.