The plane truth about airport security screening
JOE BENNETT
Lo, the undead. See how we shuffle. We don’t know whether it is day or night. We just inch forward, following the one in front of us, leading the one behind us. We do not know each other’s names. We are zombies, shorn of self.
A woman in uniform shouts at us. It may be English. It may be instructions. It is hard to tell. We pay no attention. We have been shouted at before. We were shouted at at the last place, half a day ago. Let them shout.
The woman in front of me reaches the machine. I had thought she was hunched from exhaustion. She is hunched from age. She must be close to eighty. She hands over her knitted bag, lays it on a plastic tray. ‘‘Leaky labbo,’’ says a man in uniform, ‘‘Leaky labbo.’’
She looks bewildered. ‘‘Liquids or laptop,’’ I say, ‘‘he wants to know if you’ve got liquids or a laptop.’’
‘‘Oh for crying out loud,’’ says the woman. ‘‘Didn’t we do all this in ...’’
We did. Some 14 hours ago we went though exactly the same security screening. Since then we have been either on an aeroplane or in the secured transit area of an airport. How we are supposed to have acquired or built a bomb is not explained.
‘‘Shoes,’’ and the old woman sighs and steps out of her travelling shoes and as she bends to pick them up she gasps with the exertion. And thus the authorities thwart yet another elderly female bomber.
Belt, shoes, glasses, phone, I’ve put the lot in the tray. But as I am shuffling towards the scanning gate in my socks I am beckoned to a futuristic perspex cylinder.
I have to hold my hands above my head as if surrendering. My beltless trousers lodge, just, on the ledge of my buttocks. The machine whirrs suddenly around me, giving off light like an open photocopier. It’s the sort of light to halve a sperm count.
There’s something on your hip, says the woman in charge of the machine, and she points at a screen to prove it. ‘‘It’s fat,’’ I say and she doesn’t smile. She has to find a man to pat my fat down. He takes his time arriving. He looks bored.
I want to ask him if he’s ever intercepted a bomb, or beheld on his screen a gelignite vest. But it’s a pointless question. The argument is that the bombers know he’s there and go elsewhere.
But I’m not so sure. The murderers of 9/11 all went through airport security. And security can only ever react after the event. Hence the liquids ban, the shoe removal. And besides, what’s so special about planes? There are no security checks on buses or on the London Underground where bombs a decade back killed scores of people and brought awful claustrophobic panic.
The plain fact is that if you want to kill and terrify there are limitless opportunities. All you need is a gun and a crowd. Guns are easy to find, crowds easier. And even a gun is needless. The brute in Nice used a truck. The brute in London used a car and a knife. We’ve all got a car and a knife. What we haven’t all got is the urge to kill strangers in pursuit of some religious delusion. Very few of us have got that. But the problem is that as a species we are terrible judges of risk.
The average American is more likely to be killed by a bicycle pump than by a terrorist. If Trump were serious about making America safe he’d outlaw lawnmowers, or pyjama trousers, or peanuts. But by banging on about terrorists he generates the nightmare fantasy, the lurking bogey man and gets himself elected. And at the same time he achieves the terrorists’ purpose for them.
Because the aim of terrorism is to disrupt our ease of life and peace of mind. So every time we talk about them, and every time we submit to the indignity of security searches, they win.
It is time for the world to make a brave stand. And New Zealand should lead the way. Already half the flights in this country have no security screening and people board them without a second thought. Let’s go the whole way and abandon all screening. There are other ways to be vigilant, and besides, nothing will happen. And the world will watch and see that it is good and grow a spine and follow our example. And the undead of tomorrow will be forever in our debt.