Flight Risk
I’m flying this Sunday, to Milwaukee again, of course. My worry in recent days was due to a threatened CHAOS strike by Northwest Airlines flight attendants, who had rejected a contract from the bankrupt airline. The strike was to have involved walkouts by individual crews on random flights, and I’m scheduled for enough connections in the next month to run a pretty good chance. It probably was also going to involve onboard disgruntlement, although the crews on the flights leading up to the contract rejection have been generally professional. I keep flying Northwest because there are benefits to maintaining “elite” status, like first-class upgrades and enhanced availability of award seats when you actually try to use your frequent-flyer miles. And, really, there’s no other airline that seems worth jumping to - everyone who flies domestically gets treated like Greyhound stowaways.
Then Tuesday happened: the Lieberman defeat, and the nearly simultaneous announcement of the contravened terror plot. It was so depressing to see and read about the security screening lines snaking through SeaTac’s terminal and out into the parking garage, ferchrissake, and it made me a little angry. I mean, if Chapstick and motel shampoo bottles are enough of a threat to national security that a ramshackle group of 20-something terrorists have been planning for months to use them to blow up planes, why was TSA just yesterday implementing procedures against them? TSA and Homeland Security have had 5 years to perfect their techniques. Why were they so roundly blindsided by the Chapstick and lipliner threat?
And, yeah, I’m more than a little cynical about the timing of the “terrorist plot” announcement. They’ve been following it for months. I suspect in the darkest corners of my fetid cranium that Bush/Blair & co were incubating the announcment for an October Surprise, but the Lieberman defeat got them spooked enough to jerk poodle-boy’s chain and bust the story now. And, as it turns out, the GOP had several days’ advance notice of the announcement, allowing them to orchestrate a now-predictable attack on Democrats and any others (including an increasing number of Republicans tangentially in contact with reality) who question the failed policies of this chicken-hawk administration.
And that’s a sad statement. The alleged plot may in fact have been the real deal. We’ll never know for sure, of course, but my eyes and ears are simply not conditioned to hear truth from any level of this federal government, and they have so much to gain from orchestrating fear. As someone who flies a lot, I’d like to feel some gratitude to the Brits for doing their job well, but doing so requires wading upstream against the firehose torrent of lies and misrepresentation that has been trained on us since 2001.
Whatever the political machinations, I’ll be flying Sunday regardless, because I have to. It sounds like the TSA lines are much shorter today, as most folks got the message about liquids, pastes and gels. Also on the plus side, the Northwest flight attendants have postponed any strike actions for 10 days (to 8/25).
Still, a human body is almost entirely liquid. If TSA were to get ahead of the game, they would be requiring enemas 12 hours prior to departure. Because you can be sure that their scanners won’t catch that guy just ahead of you in line with the fuse coming out of his ass.
