December 30, 2002

As I've stumbled through the murky forest of opinions and rants over the past several months, one of the key characteristics of certain segments of the American polity has been made clear to me: vast, unplumbed depths of ceaseless impatience.

A case in point is this incident as related by Nicholas Monahan, the summary of which is pretty much explained by the title. Basically: idiot airport security person has no sense, commits egregious and insulting offenses against pregnant wife, husband flips out, authoritarian mindset sets in, lawsuits pending. Since then the story has been picked up by BoingBoing, (twice), Silflay Hraka, and probably many others.

Now, I'm pleased to observe that the most idiotic comment I've seen to date on the story--to wit, that America is becoming "a fascist military state worse than anything Soviet Russia could ever be"--was posted by someone who isn't an American citizen and doesn't live here. It is a comment almost perfect in its stupidity, both ill-informed and internally contradictory at the same time, a fine example of its type. I stuck a pin through its head and put it in the case next to the "...we'll be just like in fucking Russia" comment made in 1997 by Big Doofus Frank, a housemate of mine whose political insights were startling in their inanity.

That being said, there are of course plenty of American citizens who will read Mr. Monahan's story of airport breast-groping and see in it grim confirmation of all that they have suspected: Oh we've seen it all before in other countries, the thin end of the wedge. Before we know where we are we will have the full apparatus of totalitarianism. Never mind that these days the U.S. airports process well over 600 million passengers a year, and that even 1,000 breast-gropings wouldn't constitute the advent of the vast machinery of oppression whose name shall be called BUSH. To some people, any failure of judgment on the part of anyone in authority is evidence of their True Thinking, a glimpse of leather jackboot beneath the cheap flouncy petticoats of "Liberty." Such failure is an occasion for wonderfully overblown rhetoric: "Secret laws and 'security' measures that do not arise from real threats, but rather from an opportunistic drive to roast civil liberties on a pyre of the smouldering 9-11 dead do not make us secure."

To which I respond: in whose interest, exactly, is it to "roast civil liberties on a pyre of the smouldering 9-11 dead?" Unless you already suspect that the Guvmint's got legions of Gestapo-clones ready to be let out of their goo-filled vats and unleashed upon the citizenry, who will then be forced to mine oil-shale for the Cheneys and Bushes, such spouting doesn't make a lot of sense.

Which is more likely: a Freemason-like cabal somewhere, ready to go at a moment's notice with a carefully pre-coordinated plan to strip us of our freedom when the opportunity presents itself, or a vast slow-moving bureaucracy that, when prompted by circumstance to react quickly, produces something sloppy and ill-considered?

People had different responses to September 11, and those who could take some sort of action did so. That's a very human thing to do in a time of trauma and crisis. So, Photographers photographed. Poets poetted. And legislators...well, they legislated.

Most probably, they legislated badly, and we accepted it. As has been remarked, this wasn't because we're stupid or they're evil; it was because we're human and so are they. Now that some of that immediacy has faded, many Americans have shaken the stupor from their eyes and realized that things are different. There's a whole new system being put in place in America's airports. It's only a few months old. And--good god!--it's not perfect! There are idiots in positions of authority! Rules and procedures that aren't clear! Breasts are being groped! We're not going to stand for it!

None of this is intended to excuse the offensive conduct of the authorities involved in this incident--to use a Rummyism, there's no question but that this needs to change. But the nifty thing about the American system of government is its ability to fix itself when broken, which in turn is largely the result of the citizenry's freedom to complain loudly and often about things they don't like. That's where the unplumbed depths of American impatience come into play. As much as I mock the shrill, fearful alarmism of certain parts of the political spectrum, I've come to see it as a necessity that contributes to a certain beauty in the system as a whole: it is because of this impatience that things improve. It is because of this vocal, perpetual dissatisfaction that slothful bureaucracies are moved into action. It is because of this petulant demand to have everything work perfectly right now that changes for the better eventually happen.

Less than a year after it was legislated into existence, we don't have an efficient, well-run airport security infrastraucture with the latest technology managed by an army of experienced, well-trained, professional security experts. What we do have is a vast array of impatient, incredibly dissatisfied Americans who will, quite simply, bitch and moan until the system improves. And then they'll complain about that.

Ain't it grand?