Mark Morford's Scenes from a Sad Airport

Scenes From A Sad Airport
Welcome to America. Please give us the finger. Smile for the camera. Now please get the hell out
By Mark Morford

Look at those eyes. Perturbed and bemused and just a little furious.

Look at those eyes as the baffled woman from east Texas stares down at the table as the security agent rifles through her luggage and pulls out the contents for all to see.

And out pops the skimpy latex thong and the anal beads and the Astroglide and the smallish travel dildo that isn't really a dildo at all but is really a "sexual-education device," because, as everyone knows, dildos are completely illegal in Texas. But not guns. Guns are mandatory.

Note how she notes the irony. Note how she considers suing for embarrassment and humiliation and for the sheer idiocy of it all. Note how the security agent mumbles something snide and derogatory.

Note how we, as a paranoid nation, are just confused and sad and how our airports have become these comical circus sideshows, invasive and racist and draconian and pornographic all in the name of, what was it again? Protection? For our own good? Is that it?

And look there, look how that conservative Christian U.S. congressman is just so red faced and enraged when they search through his manly black Samsonite carry-on and find, well, not just a nice new Bible and clean white Jockey underwear and assorted envelopes of cash from the director of Destroy Gay Marriage Now! of Colorado Springs, Colo.

Look there, just under the argyle sweaters and the signed head shot from Pat Robertson, at the stash of sticky Honcho magazines and some Hello Kitty Speedos and, lo and behold, the metal in the congressman's boots induces an unfortunate backroom strip search, where what do we see but the assorted bright red welts of spankdom as incurred from Mistress Carlita's Pleasure Bunker in downtown Phoenix, from the night before. Oh, Congressman.

Do you hear that? That screaming? Of course you do. Just another outraged mother of three, her appalled shouts echoing all the way to the food court as LAX security gropes the living hell out of her stunned 2-year-old daughter after the tot's teddy bear appeared to have some odd-looking wiring in its cute fuzzy little arms.

And the mother up and slaps the scowling groping security agent and alarms are sounded and guns are drawn and children are screaming and Spongebob backpacks tumble to the ground and spill their bright happy contents all over the stained tiles in terrible slow motion, like a bad Tarantino outtake.

And thus were lines held up and 16 flights from Dulles and O'Hare and JFK delayed for nine hours, causing a domino-effect 27-hour backup systemwide and thusly pumping yet another enormous and savage dose of frustrated rage and angst and sighing ennui into another artery of the cultural bloodstream.

Look. Look there. See the hobbled, 86-year-old man forced to put down his cane and remove his threadbare belt to pass through the metal detector. Terrorists are everywhere! Bush said so! We can't be too sure! Do you have metal pins in your hip, sir? Can you please remove them or something?

Let us watch in humiliated shame as he struggles to keep his pants from falling down as it looks, to all appearances, like he's being led though a scanner to some horrific prison cell where he will be fed old oatmeal and dangerous drugs in harsh fluorescent concrete rooms, when all he's trying to do is fly to Poughkeepsie for his granddaughter's third wedding.

Because God knows you just can't tell who might be a terrorist these days, and you can't be too careful, because they could indeed be anyone at all from anywhere at all, including but not at all limited to white Lutheran octogenarians from the Shady Pines retirement-condo complex in Butte, Mont. Not to mention them dang furriners.

Let us now welcome the overwhelmed visitor from China, or Latvia, or Johannesburg, or Brazil, or India, or (heaven forefend) Turkey. It's OK, come on out of that plane. Ignore the stun guns and the growling dogs. America loves you.

Let us now note how our fair visitor walks into the American security miasma feeling like she is entering one big draconian maze of weird overlit American racism and paranoia, as all visitors from all "suspicious" countries have their photos taken and their fingers imprinted and their self-respect jolted and their identities filed for 20 years by the FBI, just in case.

Welcome to America, foreign traveler. Please hold still and place your finger here and smile for the camera and enjoy your first taste of our trademark, wickedly ironic and hypocritical joke about America being the land of the free. Is that weird necklace a religious symbol or something? Are those beads filled with white-hot hate for our glorious freedoms and our 24-hour Safeways and our love of low-rise jeans on teenage girls? Are you in some sort of cult?

Repeat after us: Bring us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to have their spirits snapped like chicken bones and be made to feel as if they are all, by default, criminals and thieves and Bush's "gol-dang guilty durty heathen furriners." Thank you. Please proceed like mad cow-infested cattle to the next airport screening agent.

Just a couple questions at this point. Do you have any nasty homemade bombs or lethal biotoxic intentions or rampant simmering hatreds of George W. Bush on your person at this time? Damn right you don't. Now please proceed to the painful urine-sample room to have your dignity forcibly removed. Souvenir?

Look closer. Look domestic. See how so many Americans standing in all the various airport lines for 2.7 hours seem to just sigh and suck it up.

See how they all cast their eyes down and tolerate the multiple driver's-license checks and the general insanity and the obvious government-sponsored invasions of privacy and the happy perky assaults on our civil liberties because, well, it's for our own good, right?

All in the name of inducing a bogus feeling of protection and safety and never you mind America's hilarious gaping arcade of exploitable opportunities for terrorism, from our huge wide-open shipping ports to the intricately distributed unprotected food supply to our antiquated water systems to a thousand other ridiculously obvious apertures.

And never mind that even tiny raging splinter-cell terrorists aren't so stupid as to try the same vile hijack stunt twice. And never you mind that none of this would've stopped any of the 9/11 thugs. But oh yes, let's fingerprint old ladies from Latvia. That oughta do it.

...

Welcome to the all-American fear of the Other, coupled with a sad acceptance that this is the way it is and the way it will be for years and years to come. Please remove your shoes. And your belt. And your watch. And your self-respect. Bush forever. More war in '04. Enjoy your flight.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.