Security Theatre

I haven't protested being patted down every time I enter the Target Center or the Metrodome for the last several years. I have protested the women who carry their wallets in a suitcase under their arm and stop the line for several minutes as security inspects the three hairbrushes, entire make-up case, change of clothes and Winnie the Pooh blanket they thought they might need in case of extra innings. Ironically the many women I know who are actually serious people who do things on their own and actually pay for stuff don't carry a duffel bag for a purse, the ones who do don't even need ID since buying drinks is kind of a Honeydew thing. Or shoes, but I digress. I take terrorism in the modern world seriously, and never more so than at the Metrodome where typical poor Minnesota infrastructure design creates ripe conditions for mass panic and I believe that even a small event could lead to many people being trampled to death or falling over railings, and a stadium disaster worse than Heysel or Hillsborough. I have also noted before that when going to Twins games, my general anxiety is not centered around Osama bin Laden but rather the prospect of meeting that guy who rides the #14 bus with a machete. So after making it through security to last night's game, I sit down in my seat and start filling in the line-ups on my scorecard, when two things strike me as odd. One is that Kent Hrbek has been called out of retirement to bat clean-up for the ailing Twins, and the other is that the guy in front of me is shaving with a knife. The Hrbek thing was down to filling in the numbers from the wrong line-up and not realizing #14 was batting clean-up for the Black Sox, not the Twins. But bang-up #@&$'ing job to the security guys and ushers who hassle me all the time, but let this guy shave and pick his teeth with a knife in the seat in front of me. Did nobody besides me see Robert de Niro's knife-throwing, shaving his legs with a hunting knife antics in The Fan? Okay, I actually know the answer to that question. It was only a little knife, and I try not to treat tools as totems (hence my defense of the 2nd amendment), and really, even if this 65 year old man went on a killing spree, with A.J. Pierzynsk 50 feet away I wasn't going to be his first target, but I still wanted him to put it away, because it's bizarre behavior to shave and pick your teeth with a knife in public, and invites speculation on what other abnormal, antisocial behavior he's capable of.

The other piece of security theater that I came across after the game was a story on how the Mooninite Crisis in Boston has sparked federal legislation aimed at terror hoaxes. As any sensible person would expect, this is already illegal, so now the Senate is making it... more illegal I guess, with longer jail terms, but also allowing the government to file civil suits to recover the costs of dealing with hoaxes. Which sounds reasonable, because as I said about the Metrodome, creating a panic could be more dangerous than the predicate event. The odd thing is, especially if this is really in response to the Mooninite event, the government already showed they have the power to do that by getting twin $1m settlements for the city of Boston and Homeland Security, and just wants to broaden their powers to sue people for their own mistaken overreactions. To explain the Mooninite Crisis, first let me give a little perspective: the city of Boston once put down a traffic monitor, a rubber tube leading into a box chained to a lamppost, as seen all the time in major cities, and then another branch of the Boston government blew it up thinking it was a bomb, so they're maybe a little jumpy. Across ten American cities, an advertising firm started a guerrilla marketing campaign putting up blinking LED boards with images of Mooninites giving people the finger (think obscene Lite-Brite) to promote the film Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie for Theaters. In nine cities, nobody cared. In Boston, nobody cared for the first two weeks they were up, then somebody saw a blinking cartoon character giving them the finger from the underside of a bridge and thought Al Quaeda had abandoned secrecy and joined forces with the Cartoon Network. The firm already paid out $2m to reimburse Boston and DHS, and the guys who put these up (and put the footage of them putting the Mooninite LEDs up on Youtube, which to the best of my knowledge bomb-makers rarely do beforehand) are still facing criminal charges for Boston's overreaction, because now, presuming on other people's intelligence and emotional stability is illegal.

There is a line to be drawn, for instance the guys who tried to create a disturbance on a plane by doing everything short of violence to make people believe they were terrorists created a dangerous situation in a confined area, as well as seriously inconveniencing a lot of people and tying up security and airport infrastructure. The guy trying to intimidate me with his machete and tales of racial oppression before asking for money, he's also on the far side of the line, because he engaged with me repeatedly when I tried to brush him off. The guy with the knife at the game last night annoyed the crap out of me, but he and the Mooninite instigators don't deserve anything more than a warning to quit fucking around and scaring people, because when the little grey cells are turned to the problem instead of the tightening cardiac muscles, neither was setting out to cause a panic. If Metrodome security had dived over me without warning to tackle and taser Johnny Pocketknife last night, I'd have considered that more intrusive to my well-being than my solution: I went the passive-aggressive Minnesota way and made comments loud enough for him to hear about security theatre, patting me down but waving through the guy who shaves with a knife in public, and his embarrassed wife made him put his knife away.

Really, when even Saturday Night Live is poking holes in airport security, is it anything more than theatre? As SNL's TSA sketch pointed out, since the last successful suicide attack on an American plane involved multiple people, limiting everyone to three ounces of liquid is kind of pointless, since five people can combine theirs into a whole pint. In a nation founded on the will and principle of the common man to act in his own defense against tyranny, maybe it should be obvious by now that a vigilant, engaged, and rational public, and not DHS or the United States Coast Guard, is what has to protect us from the creeping, machete-wielding darkness. According to our government, we should particularly remain vigilant against the espionage poppy coins an oil-rich foreign power is planting on unsuspecting Americans, to track our people and spy on our way of life, especially when they're just a quick canoe trip across Lake of the Woods from coming to get us here in Minnesota. Just like the Cold War, our enemy comes stealthily clad in red, but this time instead of proffering a little red book this time it's a little red poppy on a coin, and a red maple leaf on a flag. Keep your powder dry and an eye on the North Star.