View From a Height

Peggy Noonan today says everything about airport security that we don't:

I gave the speech that night, and returned the next morning to the West Palm Beach airport for the flight home. Here, at 9:30 a.m., it was worse. Again roughly a thousand people, again all of them being yelled at by airport and TSA personnel. Get your computers out. Shoes off. Jackets off. Miss, Miss, I told you, line four. No, line four. So much yelling and tension, and all the travelers in slump-shouldered resignation and fear. The fingers of the man in front of me were fluttered with anxiety as he grabbed at his back pocket for his wallet so the woman who checks ID would not snap at him or make him miss his flight.

This was East Germany in 1960. It was the dictatorship of the clerks, and the clerks were not in a good mood.

We don't say it when we're in the airport, for fear of getting taken to a small holding cell and interrogated like Nina at CTU. We don't say it when we're home from the airport because we'd just as soon forget the whole thing.

I am almost always picked for extra screening. I must be on a list of middle aged Irish-American women terrorists. I know a message is being sent: We don't do ethnic profiling in America. But that is not, I suspect, the message anyone receives. The message people receive is: This is all nonsense. What they think is: This is all kabuki. We're being harassed and delayed so politicians can feel good. The security personnel themselves seem to know it's nonsense: they're always bored and distracted as they go through my clothing, my stockings, my computer, my earrings. They don't treat me like a terror possibility, they treat me like a sad hunk of meat.

I don't think most of us get extra screening because they think we are terrorists. I think we get it because they know we're not. They screen people who are not terrorists because it helps them pretend they are protecting us, in the same way doctors in the middle ages used to wear tall hats: because they couldn't cure you. It's all show.

It's not like this a secret.

As with the port deal, it's a matter of bureaucrats following rules. There's no more risk-averse group in the known universe than civil service bureaucrats. Nobody ever gets fired for following the rules, and the rules are entirely a substitute for judgment. There are no consequences to being wrong, only for being out of line.

I know everyone points to Israel, and the fact that despite being the terrorist target, Israel never gets its planes blown up for flown into Shalom Towers. Why? Because 1) they teach their screeners judgment and 2) their screeners care enough to use it.

TSA workers shouldn't be allowed to show up at the airport in uniform. They should have a locker room with a 24/7 continuous loop of 9-11, 7/7, Khobar Towers, the USS Cole, and the rest.

Then, like WWII parachute packers, they should be required to serve drinks on a 707 at least once a week.