When the dollars spent on airport security start to rival the number of burgers sold by McDonalds while the lines at passenger checkpoints are longer than the premiere of a new Star Wars flick, then I gotta believe the planets just aren't lining up for the American public.
And if the Red States start losing faith in astrology, well, I just don’t even want to go there.
We’re three years past 9/11 and yet it seems that every time the Department of Homeland Security coughs up another couple of billion for airport security the biggest payoff taxpayers get is a cleverly written monologue by Jay Leno or a snappy Top Ten list from Letterman.
The latest plan to protect the flying public is the “pat down” procedure. It’s government sanctioned assault; federal screeners allowed to touch, prod and poke passengers in every nook and cranny of their person, just short of a full proctology exam.
I mean, seriously, a couple of crazed Chechen women, with C4 welded into their underwire bras sneak on to Russian airliners and blow them to bits and suddenly U.S. airport security checkpoints are turned into scenes from B-grade softcore porn that only Quentin Tarantino could love.
But no one ever promised that a secure America was going to be convenient. And in fact, experts will tell you there is one immutable fact about security: the more secure you make something, the more expensive and inconvenient it becomes. That’s just a brutal truth, like death or taxes or the fact that The Knack and “My Sharona” ever existed. Deal with it.
Being inconvenienced is a small price to pay in today’s world. Because do we really want to just play slap and tickle with every crazed Islamic fundamentalist with a corrupt notion of the Quran, a tattoo of Osama on his tush and an unholy jones for pork chops just so we can slide through airport security without risking getting felt up by some ex-prison guard? I don’t think so.