British Bombings, Russian Wrecks, and the TSAby
Becky Akers
In my ongoing effort to protect myself from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), I'm trying to guess which part of our anatomy the agency will choose to paw following the terrorist attacks in London. After all, these are the bureaucrats who transformed the crash of Russian airliners into carte blanche for molesting airline passengers last fall. Women wishing to board flights had first to run a gauntlet of screeners required to cop a feel. Puerile parlance, I know, and I apologize, but how else to describe the duties of our public perverts – ah, servants? The Great Grope became official TSA policy on September 22, 2004, about a month after a couple of Chechen women had allegedly blown up two Russian airliners. Actually, no one knows how the planes exploded because little evidence survived: one suspect's remains were scattered so widely that nothing could be determined from them. CNN thus reported on August 30, 2004, that "Russian authorities are taking great care not to assign blame in the crashes." That's because commie-pinko bureaucrats aren't as imaginative as red-blooded American ones. From half a world away and with absolutely no evidence, the TSA determined that the women smuggled explosives aboard the aircraft by strapping them to their bodies – in fact, to their bosoms. Unfortunately, no one at the TSA bothered to research the sartorial preferences of Chechen suicide bombers. If they had, they would have discovered that the ladies wear "martyr's belts," not martyr's bustiers. Neither the facts nor the lack of copycat incidents swayed the titillated TSA. Instead, it decreed that groping women was vital for national security. The protests and pleas of its humiliated victims availed nothing: women were denied boarding unless they submitted to what one passenger termed "a public breast exam." An attorney named Rhonda Gaynier recalled her ordeal at the TSA's literal hands: "They touched me between my breasts and I stopped them. When I refused to allow them to continue, they refused my boarding." She complained to a male supervisor who was watching – yep, I'm wondering where the TSA recruits these yahoos, too – and was told the search was mandatory. Ms. Gaynier replied, "That's ridiculous, you're treating me like a criminal." A second screener then "came around to [the] front of my breasts and touched them with her fingertips. That's when I said, 'Whoa, what are you doing? I don't think that's appropriate.'" When Ms. Gaynier called such treatment "offensive," the leering supervisor said, "'Ma'am, that's not offensive.'" Entertainer Patti Lupone was forced on November 5, 2004, to strip to her camisole at one airport, despite vehement protests. "I took off my belt, I took off my clogs, I took off my leather jacket," she said. "But when the screener said, 'Now take off your shirt,' I hesitated. I said, 'But I'll be exposed!"' Anxious to make her flight, she finally complied, and the screener "was all over me with her hands." Imagine the screener's report to her friends that evening: "Guess who I screened today! Some big-shot actress that thinks she's so hot. Ha! Guess what I did to her!" The TSA persisted in this harassment for three months, until public outrage forced it to desist. On December 23, 2004, it announced that screeners would henceforth grope only the "chest perimeter," defined as "a line below the chest area to the waist and... the individual's entire back." Mark Hatfield, the TSA’s chief spokesman, sounded like a panting prom date as he tried to explain why the molestation which had been essential to national security one day could be "modified" the next: "We can still get at the threat with this modified pat-down procedure." Threat? Come now, Mark, isn't that a tad harsh? We're talking a part of the female physique here generally considered either comfortingly maternal or pleasurably erotic. Trust the bureaucrats to see a "threat" where the rest of humanity sees a blessing – and vice versa. Trust them too, to capitalize on tragedy. Folks have been brutally, senselessly murdered across the Atlantic – so in post-Constitutional America, women must fear they will be molested in bus and train stations as they were in airports. Further concerns arise: will men be manhandled, too? What about dogs and the occasional pet snake twined about its owner’s neck on the subway? To be considered patriotic Americans, should we coordinate our outfits over the next days with the colors of the heightened terrorism alerts? Will that spare us a groping by transit cops? Why are "officials" nationwide insisting there's no reason to fear a terrorist strike here but in the next breath offering such advice as this gem from New York City's mayor, Michael Bloomberg: "Go about your life, and when you see something suspicious turn it over to the professionals" [emphasis added]? Good to know the "professionals" are there, especially because a herd of disarmed sheeple can't do much against deadly terrorists. Just remind me again how to tell the "professionals" from the terrorists. July 12, 2005 Becky Akers [send her mail] writes primarily about the American Revolution. |