My bloviations on TSA...

A commenter left a note on my TSA post earlier today. To be fair I don't think she was defending the TSA, but rather the right of government employees to collective bargaining. But since I can't abide anything that even sounds like a defense of TSA, it got me all het up anyway. I'm just prejudiced like that.

In my non-accredited opinion, the success of the 9/11 hijackings that caused the TSA, among other outrages, was the direct result of policies arising from that incredible string of airliners being hijacked to Cuba in the late '60's. It became almost routine to fly from New Orleans to Atlanta via Havana, and hardly anybody got hurt. Government (and airline) instruction to passengers was "Sit back, don't resist, and enjoy your all-expense paid trip to Cuba. You'll be fine." That's exactly the advice most passengers followed on September 11, 2001. Only they all ended up in the middle of buildings. That advice didn't work so good that time.

A sensible revision of the policy might have been, "If you see someone savaging a stewardess with a box cutter, you might want to consider doing something about it. Please use frangible ammo." But no, clearly more of the same is called for here - deeper, harder. To ensure that we all get to play Kitty Genovese during the next murderous hijacking, our Beloved Leaders have hired 40,000 mouth-breathers to relieve us of anything that could remotely, even ridiculously, be construed as a weapon before permitting us on board any commercial aircraft.

This is incredibly insulting. Submission to this absurdity is ... well, it's infantile. I despise it, I despise the people who inflicted it on us, and I despise myself on the rare occasions when I am forced to endure it. Because what I want to do is stomp that fat swine who's patting me down into gooey paste on the floor - but I don't. I raise my arms and turn around like a good citizen.

It's just...so...wrong.

Thank you. Tantrum managed.