The TSA Theme Song

posted at 1:19 pm on November 18, 2010 by J.E. Dyer
[ Homeland Security ]   

The Serious Stuff

We’re doing two things wrong, and that’s why we’ve got this epidemic of junk-touching breaking out.

First, our airline security approach is to look for the bomb, when it should be to look for the terrorist.  Du-uh.  We’re not looking for the terrorist.  We’re looking for the bomb.  Stupid, stupid, stupid.  Any fool can hide the bomb.  If we start doing colorectal exams on airline passengers, the terrorists will just put the bombs in their stomachs.  The day’s not far off when just a pinch between your cheek and gum will be enough to blow an airliner out of the sky.  Hairspray applied two hours before the flight will be sufficient.  We can never keep up with the ingenuity of the terrorist.

That’s why we need to look for him or her, and that means profiling.  Profile early and often.  Profile, profile, profile ‘til we just can’t profile no more.  Granny heading for Christmas with the kids in Shreveport isn’t a threat.  25-year-old Mohammed from Yemen?  Give him the works.  How stupid can we be?

The other thing we’re doing wrong is thinking that we have to absorb all the pain of combating airline terrorism.  This attitude is flawed in general.  It’s easy to adopt, but a junk-touching epidemic is exactly what it leads to.  Maybe we’re finding out that there are things we’d rather do than endure increasingly intrusive personal inspections before we board airplanes.  Profiling is one, but staying on the offensive against terrorism and its sponsors overseas is another.

People have forgotten the extended debate, in the period 2001 to 2003, over how much to fight terror abroad so that we wouldn’t have to change our way of life to fight it at home.  For George W. Bush, the answer was to fight it abroad where feasible and necessary.  As little as we have the appetite for that, the impending junk-touching epidemic is about to set us a prioritization problem that we have postponed facing up to now.  It is going to change our way of life:  if we sit still for it, let our government treat us this way, we will have signed on to a precedent of serious government overreach that it will be very hard to reverse.  Government isn’t, in fact, our mother.  If we let it treat us like its children – like kindergartners being dressed by the teacher to go out on the playground, or supervised going to the potty – we will have only ourselves to blame.

The Semi-Serious Stuff

I would propose the following prioritized list of remedies for the situation we find ourselves in:

1.  Profile airline passengers and focus security inspection/investigation on those who meet more criteria than not.

2.  Maintain momentum in fighting both terrorism and Islamist extremism overseas.  Do not flag, do not lose steam, offer no “peace” to terrorists, and don’t give up on our fellow men.  None of them is fated by his nature or culture to live a short, miserable life hating “infidels” and then either blow himself up or be blown up.  Don’t give up on Iraqis.  Don’t give up on Afghans or Pakistanis.

3.  Do give up on the idea that there is any hope in accommodating sharia in our culture.  We can’t live side by side with it.  You can do as much sharia living as our law allows – but our law requires the public identification and equality before it of women, it excludes wife-beating and genital mutilation, it guarantees religious freedom, including the freedom to proselytize and to be agnostic or atheist, it tolerates homosexuality, it tolerates dissent, and it will not enforce your offense at dogs and pigs on your fellow citizens.  You come here, you live by our laws, and so do we.  We don’t accommodate your sharia requirements, period.  Note:  this measure and #2 require a moral confidence a lot of people in the West lack today.  Don’t lack it.  Figure out how to not lack it, because your life depends on it.  This is actually the most important priority of all, but its long-term effect, while very real and practical, is less direct on airline travel than the concrete measure of profiling.

4.  Change air travel/security fundamentally. Have the airlines handle the routine, non-zapping/junk-touching security.  Assign them civil liability and let them decide who flies and who doesn’t.  Schedule separate flights for people who are eager, for security purposes, to be zapped or junk-touched every time they fly.  Naturally, it will cost less for the flights on which the passengers have not been zapped or junk-touched, because there will be less TSA screening involved.  The non-zapping/junk-touching flights will not be open to passengers meeting the criteria of measure #5 below.

5.  Exclude all Muslims and anyone who’s been in one or more of a list of terror-plagued countries (Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, etc) – except on US government business – from flying internationally or in the US on commercial airlines.  Hey, they can still use charter services.

6.  …which people would be likely to do more and more.  Use charter services or learn to fly themselves.  Cease traveling by commercial air en masse. 

The TSA Theme Song

Most of you have heard the 1970s hit “Give up the Funk (Tear the Roof off the Sucker)” by the group Parliament.  How could you not have heard it?  Apparently Glee has recorded it. Some of us heard it in its original incarnation, and used to play it on an old-timey turntable on 45rpm vinyl.

There’s never been much point in really “knowing the lyrics” to this iconic single. That works out nicely for the TSA theme song.  Get a picture in your mind, now:  uniformed TSA employees, hanging around the scanning machines, supervisor with his or her little walkie-talkie, the Hollering TSA Announcer calling out rote instructions to long lines of travelers in their socks, slinging shoes and laptops into plastic bins.

Suddenly the TSA employees all break out in full boogie.

“Owww, WE touch your junk!  We gotta touch that junk!

Ooww-ww, WE touch your junk!  Gotta touch that junk!

Lala la la la la LA la

Doo oo oo doo doo doo doo doo…”

J.E. Dyer blogs at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions” and as The Optimistic Conservative.  She writes a weekly column for Patheos.

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