Trust Me, This Body Scanner Will Solve Everything, by Paul Shirley

Shortly after the attacks of September 11, I was in Los Angeles visiting my aunt and uncle.  We, of course, discussed the event and its ramifications.  Ours turned into a heated argument, mostly because I took the contrarian line, which I am often wont to do.

That line is a confusing one.  It’s one that appears at first blush to be callous and cold.  But it’s one that turns out to be heart-bleedingly pacifist.

And, as we wrestle with questions about security and terrorism after a man tried to blow up an airplane on Christmas Day, it is a line that I think becomes more appropriate with each passing day.

Eight and a half years ago, I made the following argument:

Some 4,000 people died in the World Trade Center attacks.  That’s terrible news for them, for their families, and for people who knew them.  But 4,000 people is not very many people.  In fact, it is .0013 % of the US population.  By contrast, and to use a tired example, around 40,000 Americans die each year in car accidents. Or 10 times as many.

The response was this:

But the fear, Paul!  The fear!  Attacks like those on the World Trade Center cause collateral damage in the minds of people not directly affected, thus wreaking more havoc on the United States.

Unfazed, I continued.  I said:

While I understand the basic fear attached to having the airplane in which one is riding sent spiraling to the ground by a backpack full of plastic explosive, logic dictates that that person should be much more concerned with getting in a car and going to the grocery store than they should riding an elevator to the top of a high rise because they’re afraid a crazed jihadist is going to miraculously replicate a once-in-a-lifetime terrorist attack.

Our argument continued when we discussed what the appropriate reaction should be.  My stance was that it was important to figure out why people were so pissed off that they were willing to explode themselves in order to express that pissed-offedness.  The stance taken by my aunt and uncle was less tolerant and involved guns, bombs, and dudes who signed up for the GI Bill. They claimed that I was too young and naïve to understand.  They said that, sometimes, you have to fight fire with fire.  At the end of our talk, it would have been clear to any passersby that I’d been thoroughly chastised and that I would not have been the gold-medal winner if  debate had been introduced as an Olympic sport.

My pacifist cries, tiny as they were, were also ignored by the then-President of the United States.  Not surprising, considering that I lost access to the White House hot line after that misguided proposal to reunifiy the Carolinas.  Thus, instead of taking my Vulcan-like approach, Bush and his cronies entrenched our country in a two-front war for the purposes of “nation-building”.  The result: $950,000,000,000 spent on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. (That’s $950 billion, or $50 billion short of $1 trillion.)

Which is just money, you might say.  Maybe the war has been good for the American economy, you postulate.  The industrial-military complex and all that, you note.

Okay, then, try this on for size:

Between 100,000 (if you believe the Associated Press) and 600,000 (if you believe a Lancet study) civilians – CIVILIANS – have died in Iraq alone since the commencement of hostilities in 2003.*

That military strategy is getting along famously.

Around Christmas, a man tried, rather halfheartedly, to ignite a bomb in his underpants while flying on a plane from Amsterdam to Detroit.  The resulting brouhaha has been predictably reactionary and shockingly childlike.  The general consensus, after all this hand-wringing, finger-pointing, and fear-mongering:

We need better security.

Almost ten years after I made what I was told was a childish argument, I think it’s reasonable to say that attempting to stop terrorism with better security at airports is like a man trying to prevent a pregnancy by not masturbating for eight days, shooting his load into his girlfriend, and then rolling over to put a condom on his flaccid penis.

The problem ain’t the bored black guy at Kansas City International Airport.  The problem is the Iraqi kid who wakes up in a shack, looks out at the Americans and their oil wells and says to himself, “This is fucked up.  I’m going to do something about it.”

So, you say, what’s the solution?

Let’s say that, god forbid, Captain Underoos had succeeded to the greatest of his ambitions.  The two hundred people on that plane would have died.  Of course, that is not good.  In a utopian society, such things would never happen.  But we don’t live in a utopian society.

Occasionally, on CNN, one might run across a story about a random bombing in a marketplace in Pakistan.  Sometimes, 200 people die in those bombings.  Do people who see such a story – I’m talking about Americans – stop what they’re doing and fall to the floor in terror?  No they do not.  Because, somehow, they can’t make the connection between a Pakistani shopping for Kohlrabi and themselves.  They think that – because the Pakistanis are far away and because they’re poor – they don’t deserve compassion.

But kill an American and it’s time to pull out all the stops.

On Christmas Day, no one died.  The result, nonetheless, has been similar to the reaction that would have occurred if there had been deaths: retroactive prevention, similar to the reaction after the hapless shoebomber: “Oh, a guy tried to use a shoe bomb.  We can fix that.  Make people take off their shoes.”

I, for one, don’t like taking off my shoes in the airport.  I like it even less when the guy in front of me says, “Yeah, it’s annoying, but I’d rather do this than get blown up.”

At which point, it takes all of my energy to not scream:

IF THEY WANT TO BLOW YOU UP, THEY’RE GOING TO BLOW YOU UP!

Because they are.  Going to blow us up, that is – if they want.  Much like heart disease, cancer, and alien invasion, terrorism is not completely preventable.  There are precautions one can take, but none of them is guaranteed to work.  Unfortunately, we think the right precaution against terrorism is a body scanner at every door.  Just like we think the right precaution against heart disease is Lipitor at 55.

Neither is very effective.  The right precaution against heart disease is to eat the right foods and exercise more than once every season of Mad Men.

And the right precaution against terrorism is to figure out why people are so mad…and then to do something about it.

Keeping in mind that that might not even work.  The United States could have taken that trillion dollars and spent it on schools and roads and medicine and, twenty years from now, some kid from Oman might still blow up the Super Bowl.  Just like the guy who’s eaten right his entire life and who runs three miles a day might drop dead from a heart attack tomorrow.  There are no guarantees.

Americans like to claim that their country is “right” or “noble”.  In arguments, in fights, in battles, it usually turns out that the noble party is the one who – at some point – has a moment of clarity and remembers that he should probably listen to what the other entity is saying.  Sometimes – like in the case of terrorists – what that person is saying might seem baseless and illogical.  But at some point, the person listening has to step back and think, That shit was crazy, but if we’re going to come to a solution here, I’m going to have to figure out some sort of compromise.

In the case of American/Middle Eastern affairs, doing so might take the form of rhetoric.  Conciliatory rhetoric, even.  Something along the lines of:

“We’re sorry that, for 100 years, we’ve treated your backyards like they were our personal playground, where we could steal as much of your oil as we wanted.  We’re sorry that, after World War I, we helped divvy up your formerly great empire like we were a petulant nine-year-old playing Risk.  We’re sorry we’ve spent the last eight years turning what used to be a backyard or a playground (depending on your perspective) into a killing field.  Now what can we do to make this right?”

However, because of our nature, because there are too many blockheads who will say, “We should just nuke the whole damned place” – and mean it – and because our “leaders” are infinitely more interested in public opinion and their own re-election than they are in actually solving problems, we’ll build more security checkpoints, we’ll breed more bomb-sniffing dogs, we’ll approve more funding for wars and, in the end, we’ll piss off more people in countries far, far from ours.

And none of it will work.

The only good news, as far as I can tell: After we fail mightily, time after time, to prevent terrorists from doing terrorist things, I’ll finally be able to win that argument with my aunt and uncle. 

Retroactively, of course.

*A note on civilian deaths.  It’s interesting that the same people who can write or say that they believe in the equality of all mankind – blacks, gays, women – can often very quickly turn a blind eye to civilian deaths in other countries.  As if the Iraqi child who dies in a market-bombing doesn’t count like the gay man who gets dragged to death in Utah.  For those people, let me remind you: The civilians of whom I write are DEAD.  Like dead, dead.  No more trips to the movies, no more satisfying bowel movements, no chance to have children.  None of it.  Fucking dead.

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