The National Security State Cops a Feel
Taking Off the Gloves (and Then Everything Else)
It’s finally coming into focus, and it’s not even a difficult
equation to grasp. It goes like this: take a country in the grips of an
expanding national security state and sooner or later your “safety”
will mean your humiliation, your degradation. And by the way, it will
mean the degradation of your country, too.
Just ask Rolando Negrin, a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) screener who
passed through one of those new “whole body image” scanners last May as part of his training for airport security. His co-workers
claimed
to have gotten a look at his “junk” and mocked him mercilessly,
evidently repeatedly asking, “What size are you?” and referring to him
as “little angry man.” In the end, calling it “psychological torture,”
he insisted that he snapped, which in his case meant that he went after a
co-worker, baton first, demanding an apology.
Consider that a little parable about just how low this country has
sunk, how psychologically insecure we’ve become while supposedly
guarding ourselves against global danger. There is no question that, at
the height of Cold War hysteria, when superpower nuclear arsenals were
out of this world and the planet seemed a hair-trigger from destruction,
big and small penises were in play, symbolically speaking. Only now,
however, facing a ragtag set of fanatics and terrorists -- not a mighty
nation but a puny crew -- are those penises perfectly real and,
potentially, completely humiliating.
