Security Theater Is Less Fun Than Real Theater

As Denise has mentioned, my children enjoy watching the YouTube video of the Harry Potter Puppet Pals called “The Mysterious Ticking Noise.” If you’re not familiar with it, take a few minutes to watch it now. Actually, go ahead and watch it even if you’ve already contributed to the video’s more than fifty million views; it’s good to laugh. I’ll wait.

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Welcome back.

My speech capable children all have the lines from this video memorized. Even the fourteen month old boy watches it with rapt attention and flails his arms as Snape and Harry butt heads. The two year old asks to watch it regularly. (Her other favorite is the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah, so maybe we’re not total parental failures.) Last night she finished watching “Harra Potta” for the fourth or fifth consecutive time and toddled off happily chortling, “Isa pipe bomb. Boom! Waa hha haa.” Denise turned to me and said, “We’re going to have to watch her around airport security. She’s liable to get us in trouble.”

It was a quiet evening, so I later had time to think about what would happen if my twenty five pound child were to repeat that line around the crackerjack TSA staff at a US airport. Of course my initial reaction as a mostly rational person is that they would either ignore her or think she was cute. Clearly she is only a threat to national security if people stop suddenly to look at the angel-faced pixie and cause the person behind them to also stop suddenly. Oh, and the second person is Ted Kennedy and the sudden stopping causes cardiac arrest. (Too soon for jokes about Kennedy’s health? Meh.) Denise’s comment must have been a little joke.

Then my realist nature took over and I recognized that it is far more likely in the current environment that she and Denise (because let’s face it, I hardly ever travel with the children) would be detained for questioning, have their names added to all kinds of naughty lists, and be traumatized for life. The comedy, as the line goes, is that it’s serious.

A few years ago, Denise and I flew from London to Geneva for a Swiss getaway. We both carried US passports. Upon landing, I prepared for the expected hour-long process of clearing customs and actually getting into the country. To my surprise when we approached the booth for Non-EU & Non-Swiss citizens, we were told to walk right through. The security staff didn’t even examine our passports. I was so shocked by this that I actually said to a customs official, “Are you sure you don’t need to check anything? We’re foreigners only planning to be here a few days.” He just chuckled and waved us past.

Now think for a moment about what happens when you go through security at a US airport. I’m willing to bet that your heart rate accelerates and your breathing shortens even thinking about it. Are you any safer as a result of all that inconvenience and hassle? Certainly there is a need to try to keep bad people from doing bad things with aircraft, but I don’t believe our current travel security system does anything like this. It’s very good at inconveniencing travelers, may conceivably stop really stupid terrorists, and probably requires legitimate evil doers to add an extra fifteen minutes of thinking into their plotting schedule. There is no way it has actually made mass public travel any safer. I suggest, with no proof at all but a very high level of conviction, that if bad people want to bring down a commercial aircraft and were willing to die in the process they could do it with less hassle than one American family goes through on a round trip domestic flight.

That rant is basically a long introduction for this article, which you should read now. It won’t make you feel any better, but it should make you think. Again, I’ll wait because I’m patient like that.

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Come on America, can’t we do any better than this? Oh wait, the fact that millions of people think Sarah Palin is just a gosh darn fantastic choice for Vice President tells me we can’t.