Snap out of it, America

Osama bin Laden is dead, and I've been thinking about the last ten years - the escalating lunacy of security theater and foreign wars - and I wonder if now we might finally snap out of this 21st century Red Scare.

The final months of 2001 brought some quite sensible reforms in aviation security, like locks on cockpit doors.  But then security was institutionalized in the form of the TSA, and bureaucracies exist to perpetuate themselves.  Fear, plenty of it whipped up by the institution itself, fueled a cycle of dehumanizing regulations.

What began as security quickly became security theater.  The thing about theater is that it attracts the dramatic.  There was the guy with his shoes full of gunpowder.  And the one with the explosive underwear.  Are these guys credible threats to justify the existence of a system that frisks nine-year-old girls?  No, they're the same kinds of guys that put on costumes and turn themselves in to the police every time there's a serial killer on the loose in a big city.  These loonies are created by the attention the system creates in order to perpetuate itself.

At some point America had had enough of McCarthy's cancerous fearmongering.  Are we done with the TSA yet?  Can we go back to making laws like "don't drive drunk"? 

6 comments:

  1. Good points. At the high school where I work, threatening racial graffiti was found. One parent went to the media. It was widely publicized and a few days later there was more, apparently by different people. There's no situation that television coverage can't make worse.

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  2. Yeah. All basically for attention. And the TV stations will make it out to be some kind of chronic problem, not an isolated incident that they themselves aggravated.

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  3. Here's a good rundown on what we inflicted on ourselves as a reaction to the 9/11 attacks:
    http://www.theagitator.com/2011/05/02/he-won/

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  4. I agree with you here. I would add to the mix that the in fighting in American politics and the American uprising against its own citizens who are Muslin is a disgrace. The fact that Ground Zero is a hole in the ground and not a building says more about who we are as a people than the fact that we finally caught Bin Laden. I have been thinking about how we were taught to hide under our desks in the event of a nuclear attack...cause that is the best defense against radiation?? As long as we have fear and intimidation, then we can be distracted and controlled.

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  5. Yeah, duck and cover. Many years ago I saw the instructional clips in a movie called The Atomic Cafe, as a double feature with Dr. Strangelove - with Ross, as I recall.

    Duck-and-cover is as reasonable a response as anything when you have no clue what to do. But if you have a concrete basis for saying, hey, this response would be constructive and that one wouldn't, then you learn pretty quickly that hiding under your desk (or humiliating nine-year-olds) is not helpful. It's theater.

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  6. At best duck and cover protects you from some falling debris. But if you're in the zone where ceilings are coming out of buildings from the blast you're pretty much hosed long term.

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