WANT TO pose for a nude drawing? Can't get Leonardo DiCaprio to sketch you? Now there's a solution: Just fly to Arizona. If you're lucky, the federal government will give you the chance to pose on your way home. The "backscatter" X-ray screening system the Transportation Security Administration is now offering as an alternative to a pat-down for travelers with bad results on the metal detector can produce "something like a line drawing" of your naked body, The Associated Press reported last month. You don't even have to take off your clothes.Sadly, The AP reported that the equipment is not set up to keep a record of the image, and you don't get to meet the officer who sees it. That's got to put a damper on the fun.
Of course, for some of us, Uncle Sam's nude-photo booth wasn't our idea of a good time in the first place. Nor was being felt up, nor having to take off our shoes. But these are just the ordinary degradations of air travel today -- then there are the extraordinary outrages. Lara Hayhurst tells my favorite airport-security horror story:
In fall 2003, Hayhurst was experiencing her first year as a college student in New York. A Betta fish, MJ, and her boyfriend (now fiance) Trey Compton kept her company. But when they went to take MJ home for Christmas, the TSA told her to dispose of her pet -- dispose of him in an airport toilet, apparently, since the supervisor said it was not his problem that Hayhurst had no one with whom she could leave her fish. So Hayhurst and Compton did the one thing they had been warned not to do: They risked the fish in the X-ray machine, smuggling it among pairs of pants and distracting the screeners with a laptop. The fish survived.
TSA spokesman Greg Soule called this an "isolated incident." He said the TSA takes "customer service" seriously, and that live fish were, and are, permitted aboard airplanes.
On its website, the TSA boasts about another isolated incident: It says a security screener, following the rules, reduced a cancer patient to tears by not letting her get on her airplane with the bottle of lotion she had been given by a loved one, but then bought her smaller bottles of lotion.
Airport security achieves little. Flying airplanes into buildings was possible on 9/11 because passengers assumed that it was safer to go along with hijackers than to resist them; once the first three planes proved the contrary, the passengers on the fourth prevented it from being flown into a building. Airport security may make it harder for evildoers to kill people on planes, but perhaps not, since it disarms law-abiding travelers.
Terrorism depends on drama, and blowing up an airplane would no longer be very dramatic -- except as a demonstration of the futility of seeking absolute security, which sensible people already know can never be achieved.
What little airport security achieves, it achieves at a high cost. The fish story and the lotion story are both isolated incidents -- one of cruelty, one of generosity. But they are connected by a system that demands submission to the scarcely checked whims of government functionaries, from Washington bureaucrats nearly blind to human dignity to front-line workers who see all too much and, sometimes, demand the surrender of our precious possessions.
As Aristotle pointed out, what we repeatedly do makes us the kind of people we are. If we repeatedly do courageous things, for example, we become courageous. And if we repeatedly do submissive things, he might have added, we become submissive.
Airport security -- like similar operations elsewhere -- requires us to do submissive things. We must, to get on an airplane, submit to searches that vary from moderately to extraordinarily intrusive. We must obey the orders of the TSA, however pointless and arbitrary they may be, and whatever they may cost us. We must worry about whether we have been placed on a no-fly or special-screening list for some unknowable reason. All this develops a submissive character, the very opposite of the character of a free man. And since it keeps us focused on our fears, it inculcates cowardice as well.
One submissive, fearful act does not ruin our character, so we can afford to fly on rare occasion, but we should choose alternatives whenever it is reasonable _ and be prepared to exercise our right to leave the airport for the bus station if we encounter an outrage at security. In traveling, and in voting, patriotic Americans should remember the values of freedom and courage.
Alexander R. Cohen is a Cavalier Daily Viewpoint Writer. He is a doctoral student in the philosophy department.
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