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CounterPunch
January
6, 2003
If
9/11 was a Joke, TSA was the Punchline
Come Fly With Me
By ANTHONY GANCARSKI
High on life and the promise of 2003 in America
At War, I settled into a coach seat in a jet at Atlanta's airport.
While waiting for the commencement of Delta Flight 1605 to Denver,
I reached into the magazine pocket on the back of the seat in
front of me, eagerly grabbing the January 2003 issue of "SKY
- A Traveling Magazine". The airline's own publication,
offered to me bright and early on New Year's Day itself, featuring
an article describing how actress Nicole Kidman "debeautifies
herself to take on the role of Virginia Woolf."
However, a couple of other pieces caught
my eye before I could read the feature. The first, a "Delta
Perspective" piece entitled "Safe, Secure, AND Convenient"
boasted a byline by no less estimable a personage than Leo Mullin,
Delta's own Chairman and CEO. Mullin's piece addressed various
aspects of "improving the travel experience through strong
partnerships and customer-focused technology." CEO Leo also
gave mad props to TSA head James Loy, crediting his organization
with providing "air travelers with a safe, secure aviation
system that is also highly focused on customer convenience."
Two pages later, a letter from James
Loy himself was featured under the title of "Aviation Security
Update". The purposefully folksy tone of this missive was
a true joy to behold. "Dear Traveler", the note began,
"I'm Jim Loy, head of the Transportation Security Administration,
better known as the TSA. I'm sure you've noticed some of my --
some of YOUR -- new employees as you made your way through the
airport today."  And
I indeed had noticed some of my/your new employees. At 5:30 AM
in Daytona, Florida's airport, I remarked to my fiancée
that they looked like they had come into their current positions
fresh off stints in the field of shopping mall security.
The letter goes on to make the expected
claims under the expected pretexts. Loy's "motivated crew"
is dedicated to "providing world-class security and world-class
customer service." It goes without saying that Loy's "federal
screeners in the new blue, white, and maroon uniforms at the
security checkpoints" are still "painfully aware of
9/11". As is Loy himself, undoubtedly, as well as every
other unelectable civil servant like him and John Poindexter
and scores of others who don't let their contempt for Americans
get in the way of them serving our purportedly democratic government.
Once it was said that patriotism was the last refuge of the scoundrel;
no better illustration of that adage exists than in the politicians
and pundits across the so-called spectrum who use "that
shocking and surreal day in 2001" as a justification for
any number of Stalinist enterprises dressed up as national security
initiatives.
But God forbid I get in the way of people's
hard-ons for badges, guns, uniforms, and the ubiquitous corporate
logo that the US flag has become. My eyes might get poked out,
for one. So I simply closed the magazine, placed it back in the
seat pocket in front of me, and focused on pleasant thoughts.
A Boxing Day spent doped up on cold medicine, camped out on my
mom's couch watching the burlesque theatre of public access cable
programs. Stuff along those lines, intended to lull me into a
semi-permanent sleep.
But sleep wasn't to come on this flight.
A faith-based group took over the plane, even without hijacking
it. No less than 36 Religious Extremists, walking the aisles
for the entire flight, with their strange interpretations of
holy books plastered on their clothing. Loud conversations spanning
the width and breadth of the plane. Projectiles thrown across
the cabin. Flash photographs every few minutes.
A frightening situation, to be sure,
exacerbated by the apparent inability of the flight attendants
to rein in this group. Requests for noise-control from the crack
in-flight staff came to naught, as they only were capable of
providing water [and that after fifteen minutes spent with the
"service" light activated"]. Portable DVD players
with their sound playing so that everyone within five rows could
hear, likewise unchecked by the Delta staff. This group had run
amok, and had essentially performed a silent, bloodless coup
on the operations of the flight itself. And no one was willing
to fight it!
Luckily, these weren't some hate filled
Muslims, ready to destroy freedom with a Zippo and an M-80 lodged
in the sole of a decrepit shoe. The group I speak of was simply
a collection of "youth ministers" representing the
Second Avenue Baptist Church of Rome, Georgia. Since they weren't
reading the Koran or speaking in some indecipherable tongue,
it apparently was just dandy that they flouted so-called airline
security and treated this flight like it was a ride on a school
bus.
Allah help a group of Muslims that acted in a similar way. That
goes without saying. But as I voiced these sentiments to the
Delta representatives at the gate, couching them in the national-security
booster language found within the pages of the in-flight magazine,
my complaints were derided and dismissed. After all, the SABC
gang "paid for their tickets too", claimed the Delta
representative. As did the doddering old lady I saw leaning on
one of the TSA workers as another one wanded her. And as did
the man I saw the previous week, driven to anger by the security
regimen, wondering if the TSA was accountable in any way if terrorism
should befall the plane. Air travel frustrates otherwise passive
people to no end, precisely because so much of it seems deliberately
rigged to elicit one's reaction to being coerced. The disingenuousness
of the Delta rep's stance toward my position is only underscored
by his reliance on such a discredited trope as the rights of
a consumer, in the Orwellian climes of a United States airport.
It is ultimately appropriate that the
airlines are capitulating to federal mandates in the area of
airline security, and that they seem to find purpose in providing
working labs for behavioral science experiments. After jawing
with the aforementioned Delta rep for a few minutes, I was instructed
to cross Stapleton Airport and plead my case further at the Delta
ticket counter. Hoping to get at least a food voucher for our
trouble, my fiancée and I proceeded to that location.
The ticket counter rep played good cop, and extended lachrymose
sympathies with no material backing behind them. We left the
counter embittered, and that feeling only intensified when we
realized that we had to go through yet another security checkpoint
to get back to our departure gate.
We walked through a maze intestinal in
both design and length, and I couldn't shake the feeling that
I was king of the marks for walking through a structure designed
to frustrate and dehumanize. My fiancée and I walked through
a sensor and beeped; it happened that we had loose change in
our pockets. We, along with a sixteen year old girl in a halter
top with PRINCESS on the front in sparkly cursive lettering,
were whisked into a hockey-styled penalty box and left there
for a minute or so, with no notification as to why we were there.
As we took a "timeout" in government-imposed confinement,
we watched pudgy TSA reps belly up to each other and jabber about
nothing at all.
After finally being permitted to walk
out of the timeout box, we were asked to step aside for further
inspection. An unspoken part of the bargain air travelers have
with the TSA is to pretend that the process is justifiable and
is not intended to strip one's dignity in any way. I failed to
fulfill my part of that bargain; I walked out of the box with
my hands high in the air, as if at gunpoint on popular Fox sitcom
COPS. I was informed that such behavior was construed as "mockery"
and that I must stop making light of Jim Loy's attempts to "safeguard
our nation's aviation transportation system."
I knew that anyone with a minimal interest
in self-preservation would drop his arms and say "sorry,
sir, I was just funnin'." I went to public schools and was
harassed by all manner of police as a youngster, same as everyone
else, and know very well when to shuck and jive like a minstrel.
But for some reason, this time it wasn't possible to suck it
up and make nice. I looked into the eyes of the TSA reps and
saw avarice and cowardice and the serenity of those who make
salaries for busywork tasks that don't heal the sick or feed
the starving, but instead remind people that they are slaves
to the whims of unselected leaders.
I have often wondered who really benefits
from such self-consciously meticulous searches, and found myself
especially wondering that when a middle aged man ran a wand up
and down the shaft of my cock, three or four times, with a slight
smirk animating his porcine countenance. For all of the sanctimonious
bilge penned and spoken about 9/11, the true legacy of the day
revealed itself to me when I looked down into the face of that
blown-up rent-a-cop and saw the flicking eyes and the quivering
lips of a molester.
But what a depressing image that would
be to close on. If I found any hope in my New Year's Day travel
experience, it rests in the idea that a system so sensitive to
external criticism from the powerless cannot be long for this
world. The TSA would've been at home in South Africa thirty years
ago, the USSR fifty years ago, or Germany seventy years ago.
It is a mechanism for patronage, graft, and extortion; a self-conscious
cry for authority from a police state whose architects are conscious
of both its moral and financial bankruptcy. When I was being
lectured by a group of TSA staffers after the wand session, my
unwillingness to say something along the lines of "The TSA
is A-OK!" led one of them -- they all look alike, regardless
of gender, as the uniform is desexing in the manner of sackcloth
-- to ask my fiancée if I was a "foreigner."
And in a sense that was a perceptive
question to ask. This America that eats its young and whores
out its natural resources while focusing on such comic-book hooey
as the "preemption of evil" is not any America to which
I feel kinship. The young girls get knocked-up by boys who get
trained to kill, one way or another. All of them seemingly locked
into unattainable fantasies, into ideas that silicone tits or
fiberglass cars can offer any salvation from the drudgery of
their daily tasks. They live in some permutation of tense between
a bleak present and a future of limitless possibilities, all
of which must be underwritten by one corporation or another.
Because that's all there is. But they don't think too much about
it. Thinking ends up shutting you out of the good things in life
-- the emergence of Michael Vick as the next great NFL QB, a
sizzling steak at the Outback, a thongy lap-dance on a rainy
Sunday afternoon. Better to just chill out and enjoy it, because
things are pretty much OK. Those people that make you piss in
a jar just to make money to spend on rent and watered-down beer,
they'd never screw you over, would they?
Anthony Gancarski's only published book, UNFORTUNATE
INCIDENTS, is chock full of verse and prose. A frequent
contributor to CounterPunch, he lost track this holiday season
of how many people told him they lacked the "Christmas Spirit".
Emails are welcome at Anthony.Gancarski@attbi.com.
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December 24,
2002
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