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"FacebookPinterest\n\nIf you want to see anger and raw emotion in America these days, skip the town-hall meetings and the Glenn Beck crying jags and spend some time at your local airport. Because airports have become our country's emotional dumping zone, the place where all our anxieties and fears, our patience and plans, collide with each other like bruised luggage. Where else do people lose it more in public than at airport security, the very name of which now has a smirking irony to it? Lately, standing in line wondering what everyone will look like in a full-body scanner, I've been seeing tears and tirades, thanks in large part to that Underwear Bomber dude, who, I think it's fair to say, couldn't light his balls on fire if he tried.\n\nAirports\u2014they used to enchant, didn't they? Didn't they? Someone told me they did. All wingy and worldly, they used to carry the exotic thrill of discovery and transport, but what have they done for you lately? Besides moved you through the terminal at a People Mover rate of 1.8 miles per hour. Frankly, I don't like the smell of them anymore. Ever since shoe, underwear, and jockstrap bombers went on the loose, airports emit a distinct, pheromonal whiff of animal fear, mid with the food-court gloom of Auntie Anne's Pretzels.\n\nAh, but nothing beats the gently terrifying experience of spending time in a British airport. Seriously: Have you been there lately? Twenty-first-century Britain has evolved and invented a new society, a kind of highly civilized tyranny, that is probably our future\u2014security cameras everywhere: on the streets, in the Tube, probably in the telly. You want to wave when you're taking a pee. How's it looking, old boy? But at the airports, there is an added oddness to the security procedures, this weird juju that comes from having incredibly polite people probe and dissect you. Everyone's so chipper and bright as they ask you to submit to your third cavity search. \"Go on there now, love. Just step off into that queue over there and we'll have another look inside you, won't we now, love.\"\n\nSometimes I think we're headed in the same, panicked direction. Take the case of poor Mikey Hicks, the 8-year-old New Jersey Cub Scout who travels with his parents a lot but kept getting singled out by TSA agents and constantly, aggressively frisked. \"Up your arms, down your arms, up your crotch,\" his Mommy complained. What was up? What had little Mikey ever done to global security? Turns out the little one had the same name as an international, most wanted terror suspect (wait, there's a terrorist named Mikey?!), and so got placed on a high-security alert list, along with, one presumes, thousands of other extremely dangerous third graders. His mother appealed to the authorities, but, being authorities, they couldn't help.\n\nSee, the government has two lists, including a stricter, harsher \"no fly\" list (the one Scary Mr. Underpants didn't get on, despite his gelatinous injection-kit carry-on). How does that work? Ask The New York Times, which fruitfully explains: \"Both lists are maintained by the Terrorist Screening Center, which includes the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They are given to the Transportation Security Administration, which in turn sends them to the airlines.\"\n\nFirst of all: The words \"which in turn sends them to the airlines\" do not inspire confidence. That's like saying \"which in turn sends them to a vast network of surly, disinterested customer-haters.\"\n\nSecond of all: There's a Terrorist Screening Center? When did it open? It sounds like an AMC Cineplex in Waziristan, but hey, cool! Why don't you bring them\u2014the Terrorist Screening Center guys\u2014to the airport? Because that's kind of the whole idea of an airport these days\u2014a terrorist screening center.\n\nThe more important question is, Is this all a portal-flash to our future? You can just feel that America is about to take an inevitable and ominous leap toward that UK-style security state, that we are, to a degree, demanding it. Or to put it another way, it feels like the country is speaking in two tongues\u2014make us safe! why are you patting my senile grandmother down?\u2014and that this disconnect is driving us, gradually, a little crazy.\n\nIs there anything we can do before the full-on craziness begins? Yes. We can have a serious, unemotional debate. Keep our minds open to what we lose if underwear-bombing anxieties lead to full-body fears. Remember that we are all a little like Mikey Hicks: nothing but minor security threats."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/jim-nelson-march-2010>