AIRPORT INSECURITY

By Barbara Ehrenreich

Socially responsible travelers are delighted to spend up to 45 minutes wending their way through airport security. At least that's what they say when they're interviewed at the ticket counter for the 6 o'clock news: Search me! Strip me! Empty my bags out all over the floor! Hey, I could be the crazed terrorist of the week and not even know it!

But any passenger of spirit is bound to be insulted by the rituals required for air travel. "Did you pack your own bags?" they demand to know at the ticket counter. Well, who do they think packed them--some courier for Hamas who moonlights as my lady-in-waiting?

Then there's that wistful inquiry as to whether one is carrying anyone else's bags--a question that can be of no possible relevance except to the skycaps' union. For, alas, altruism is not yet so endemic that every baggage-encumbered traveler should be suspected of shouldering the burdens of maniacal terrorists disguised as little old ladies with back problems.

It would be different if the indignities of airport security served a self-evident lifesaving purpose. But the first thing the inquisitive traveler learns is that the X-ray machines that constitute the principal barrier between parking lot and planes can detect only teaspoons and hairpins and are utterly indifferent to the plastic devices favored by modern mass murderers. Why not buy machines that can actually detect bombs? Too expensive, the airlines say, as if airplanes were cheap. And of course nothing reveals the purely ceremonial nature of airport security like the long-standing rule against telling bomb-related jokes in the vicinity of an X-ray machine. Has anyone ever been killed by a bomb-related joke, or even injured by one?

Or consider the ritual required of the owners of laptop computers. You must turn on the computer and, all too often, attempt to explain the concept of a C prompt to someone who seems to think it's a nice name for a speedboat. Last time I was well into the theory of dos before it struck me that the real question is why anyone should be reassured by seeing a computer screen light up at the flick of a switch. Surely the same geniuses who manufacture laptop-shaped bombs can design one that's programmed to flash GOOD MORNING, BARBARA. THIS IS YOUR TOSHIBA!

And how many crashes are the product of terrorism anyway? I have been in airplanes where the overhead bins open with gay abandon at the slightest bump, where the reading lights flicker with a hypnotic frequency and where the food, insofar as it can be detected on the plate, is seldom warmed above the temperature of the ambient stratosphere. One can only pray in these circumstances that the subcontractor in charge of the cabin was not also entrusted with engine maintenance. As for the crucial issue of when to go up and when to go down: we read of air-traffic-control computers so antique that they still run on vacuum tubes, and monitored, in most cases, by underpaid caffeine addicts working double shifts to pay off their therapists and divorce lawyers.

Most planes fall short of their destinations for mundane reasons like un-deiced wings, "equipment failure" or exploding oxygen canisters--which says more about the fecklessness of the airline executives and their regulators than the malice of the flying public. It is the former groups that should be hustled into slow-moving lines and interrogated as to whether they were able to get themselves dressed in the morning without help.

The mystery is why a proud people, descended from revolutionaries, is willing to submit, with such good humor, to the intrusion of corporate and governmental authorities. We don't complain when our phone conversations with various bureaucracies are monitored "to improve service." We expect to be frisked as we enter the temples of democracy, the Senate and the House of Representatives. We applaud a drug war that features random searches and urination on demand.

And things may be about to get a lot more totalitarian: the White House Commission on Airline Safety and Security has just recommended that the airlines study passengers for terrorist-like traits--such as paying for a ticket with cash--and scan them with X rays capable of seeing through clothes. The average citizen--who has never desired to blow up an airplane, even a very small one bound for an innocuous place like Nantucket--is being made to feel like the prime suspect in a serial-killing case.

If I were as paranoid as the culture I live in, I would probably conclude that the entire purpose of airport security is to deflect suspicion away from the truly culpable parties--the FAA, for example, and those airline executives who seem to be more interested in keeping their stock prices aloft than their airplanes. At least, before we have to go around with bar codes stamped on our foreheads, we ought to reflect on the true function of our so-called security measures. Because they're beginning to look like some sick ritual of submission, where the trade-off for getting to fly in the sky is having to grovel on earth.