In his column in The Washington Post, George Will takes on the TSA inspections by citing an unimpeachable source. “Fifty years ago,” he writes, “William F. Buckley wrote a memorable complaint about the fact that Americans do not complain enough. His point, like most of the points he made during his well-lived life, is, unfortunately, more pertinent than ever. Were he still with us, he would favor awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom to John Tyner, who, when attempting to board a plane in San Diego, was provoked by some Transportation Security Administration personnel.” (See Tyner’s encounter above; I love when Tyner says “I don’t understand how a sexual assault can be made a condition of my flying.”)
Like Buckley, Will wants more Americans to stand up and “rectify irrational vexations.” Will believes that this latest airport inspection regimen is one such a vexation, brought on by excessive political correctness: forcing all passengers to submit to inspection “because democracy – or the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment; anyway, something – requires the amiable nonsense of pretending that no one has the foggiest idea what an actual potential terrorist might look like.”
True enough: as best as we can recall, the terrorists of 9/11 and those who came after them have all been Arabs, and certainly we could just isolate Arab fliers for inspection and allow everyone else to go their merry way. But surely even Will can see how easily this precaution could be circumvented. And surely even Will recalls that many of these security measures were introduced in the late seventies and eighties, when air hijacking first came into vogue and its practitioners were a veritable Rainbow Coalition of perpetrators who would defy profiling.
Will should keep in mind that while Americans may not complain enough, they blame excessively, and particularly the government. Americans do not want to pay for safety and regulation and they hate submitting to it, but when tragedy strikes, they demand to know why the government didn’t prevent it. It is among our more childish features.
I remember visiting London in August 2005, just three weeks after the transportation bombings that killed approximately 60 people. I expected to see a police and military presence in all public areas, like that which I had become accustomed to see in Grand Central Station and in Rockefeller Center in the four years since 9/11. But there wasn’t an obvious presence, just what one would consider the normal retinue of bobbies. Atop the London Eye, I struck up a conversation with a Londoner, and remarked upon this observation. She had no expectation of extra police, but thought that these attacks were just something that happened, and that after what Londoners had gone through during the blitz and during years of IRA terrorist combings, she thought it was incumbent upon her to just carry on. And that is what most people were doing–without blaming the government.
Tucker Carlson once offered the view that he would happily take his chances and fly an airline that got rid of all forms of security inspection. That might be the best solution. Give people a choice. Carlson and Will can fly Casino Air, enjoying freedom, saving time, and probably paying more (I think their share of the insurance costs would be enormous); I’ll probably be over in the line waiting to board Play It Safe Airlines, removing my shoes and getting scanned and throwing away perfectly good shampoo. But hopefully all of us would be out the complaining and blaming business.