I was (yet again) recently having to disrobe while dragging my stuff through the airport as part of the ongoing TSA line-management Counter-Turr’rism (!) kabuki theater.1 I don’t particularly hate the TSA... okay, real talk, that’s not true. I do hate the TSA - because of things like this. Or this, written by the same author, a former TSA screener for six years.

Amid all the jokes in comment sections, it’s easy to forget that the groping of these dozen or more male passengers by two conspiring TSA screeners is sexual assault, plain and simple. And while it’s easy to focus all the blame on the two unsavory screeners who are now no longer with the agency, perhaps the bigger issue here is a systemic one: There are far too many federal hands on people’s private parts in airports.

I used to follow his blog here about the full panoply of stupidity by “the mighty TSA.” I figure when even the comedians are pointing out just how glaringly idiotic the batch of travel regulations are, it might be time to take a second look at what we’re doing. For just one example of how stupid and pointless it all is, here’s a question never answered, and I don’t recall it even being asked by the American public: “Why can I take multiple 3 oz. bottles of liquid through without a problem, but a single container of more than 3 oz. is absolutely verboeten? I mean… uh…. I don’t want to pull anything like basic math on the feds, but, couldn’t the terrorists just spread 12 oz of whatever liquid-kaboom the TSA is worried about into 4 bottles of 3 oz each?? Hello?”

Let’s set that aside for the moment.

As I watched an overly officious (natch), overweight, (of course) BIPOC woman (lol) shuffle people around in line at the airport, a voice in the background encouraged me to snitch on my fellow citizens (“IF YOU SEE SOMETHING; SAY SOMETHING”). It all felt like I had woken up in a dystopian future of a Philip K. Dick short story. A half-formed thought coalesced in my head:

Whoa! Whoa! That seems harsh, you’re thinking. Well, hold on to your hat and let me tell you what I really think.

First, I should be clear that when I say “we,” I’m not talking about me or my friends.2 For most of my life, we were the people the rest of the Nation called when it wanted disputes settled by violence – i.e. when either diplomacy failed, or Hillary’s State Department decided it’s okay to use force, including killing other human beings, as a problem-solving methodology.3 

Now just a cotton-picking minute!4 you’re thinking. And at this point, I should also define the “you” I’m talking about. Here’s an easy test: if you’re wondering if this “you” might be you, or if it might apply to you…? and if you are offended by the above, then yes, it probably does. In short, if you haven’t served, are afraid of violence, have never been in a fight, and/or think guns are icky, and the TSA is a good idea - then you’re probably exactly who I’m talking about when I say pants-shitting coward.

But please, don’t take it the wrong way: I’m going to explain why the TSA is pointless as a security measure in all regards, but works wonderfully well as a societal conditioning and control mechanism. It’s not an accident; it’s intended to turn you, and all of society, into compliant cowards.

Standing alone, the talk about “my friends and I using violence” sounds unnecessarily belligerent and provocative, like some kind of tough guy bravado. Here’s the reality, though: we have been trending toward being a nation of pussies for a while now, since the end of the Vietnam war. Abolishing the draft was the first step in the domestication of the previously untamed species known as Homo Americanus. The TSA is the culmination of that domestication process by our government. Before we can dig in, I need to provide a little primer on recent American history.

A Brief Lesson on 1970’s Culture in these United States

First point - Cowardice as Policy

My dad5 is very much a Boomer - born in 1947 and conceived not long after my grandfather returned from his time carrying a bazooka into Fortress Europe. Pops graduated high school in 1965 - the perfect age for the Vietnam War. He didn’t protest or burn his draft card; instead, he married my mother and joined the Air Force. For some context, I think the modern reader needs to understand that all of the protests, violence, and chaos that characterized the 1960s - over Civil Rights for blacks, over not wanting to go to War - constantly depicted as being representative of the era, is largely myth. I’m not saying protests and draft card burning didn’t happen; I’m just saying that it wasn’t as widespread as is often portrayed. For example, here is a census report from 1966 on “Educational Attainment” in the US.

In March 1966, 50% of all Americans who were 25 years old and over had completed at least 4 years of high school, and [only] 10 percent had completed 4 years of college or more.

I added the [only] above as a point of comparison to the following: in 2021, 27.9% of all Americans had at least 4 years of high school, while 14.9% had some college (no degree), another 10.5% had an Associates, 23.5% had a bachelor’s, and 14.4% had an advanced degree.6 That’s over 63% of the same-age cohort in “higher” education.

So what? Well, the “protests on campus” in the ‘60s that get so much run in modern culture - and frequently are used to explain and justify our switch from “the Draft” to the All Volunteer Force - represented less than 10% of the population, significantly less when you factor in students who didn’t protest, those who volunteered, were drafted and went, etc.

You see, the switch to the AVF wasn’t, as popular history tells us, because the “country was split” over the Vietnam War or even because the “Country viewed the draft as unfair” - it was because those who were possibly going to get drafted and turned into Southeast Asian jungle fertilizer included affluent Boomer college-age kids who were the offspring of affluent Greatest Generation parents. I know, I know, some are going to say that Nixon ran on that issue in 1968, or that the wealthy in college got deferments, but keep in mind, if ~10% of college age kids were going to college, it means 90% weren’t. More importantly, what was the actual result of abolishing the Draft in favor of the AVF? Did it somehow make service in the Armed Forces more fairly distributed among the upper and lower classes of society? After we abolished the Draft in 1973, did we suddenly have more kids joining the military out of high school from Marin County, CA or Greenwich, CT? Did the classes at Andover and Exeter, or the Concord Academy and Yale suddenly lose enrollment because of the AVF? Asking the question is sufficient enough without answer. Thus, when

Secretary Melvin R. Laird announced on January 27, 1973, that “after receiving a report from the Secretary of the Army that he foresees no need for further inductions, I wish to inform you that the armed forces henceforth will depend exclusively on volunteer soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines. Use of the draft has ended.”

he wasn’t distributing the burdens of military service “more fairly” across the strata of the country. In fact, it had the exact opposite effect. The All-Volunteer Force protected the scions of the wealthy from even being bothered about getting a draft notice. Even if there were lower-class members agitating about the draft, the resultant “fix” wasn’t a solution to the problem: the rich got all of the noblesse and none of the oblige. The oblige got pushed down onto the suckers and proles who would be subjected to non-stop propagandizing about patriotism and duty, etc. from the late 1970’s on.

It made cowardice official, if silent and unacknowledged, public policy of the United States.7

Second Point - Violence and Social Boundaries

Dad might have been a standard deviation to the right in his comfort using violence, but he was by no means outside the norm in the 1970s - of that I am certain.8 He was very much a product of an era in this country when corporal punishment was still widely used by teachers in public school, acceptable because it was also so prevalent in society as a whole.

Even as a young boy of 12 in the early-’80s, it was well understood that if a guy came into a pizza place with his hot girlfriend/wife/daughter, you could get away with one look - and that one should not be a leer - or you could be certain you were going to have to step outside and fight. Hell, you might not even make it out the door before it hit the fan. I can remember multiple occasions where my father told guys at a nearby table that he would appreciate it if they would stop swearing around his kids. He never asked more than once; the next time it happened, people were pushing their chairs back.

Some will view this all as horrible and regard our current politeness as a considerable upgrade, but that’s not what really happened. People just gave up on individual enforcement of social mores by threat of being called out. We gradually became a society of pushovers. Another great example of this is how we began to treat cigarette smokers in the 90s - those holdouts of cool from yesteryear. The Marlboro Man had to sell his horse to a glue factory, buy an EV, and be confined to smoking in a small area behind the building.

What Does That Have to do with the TSA?

Let’s review: on 9-11-01, allegedly some very bad people - muh turr’rists - flew planes into buildings (allegedly) and killed over 3,000 American men, women, and children. In response, we got (inter alia) the TSA. The TSA is pointless for a very simple reason: it doesn’t “stop” anything. Anyone who was sufficiently committed to could walk into an airport tomorrow and kill far more people than are on any individual plane, with much more devastating effects on transportation security. Think it through: if a person finally smuggled a bomb on a plane and managed to kill all 300 or so people on board, it would be a tragedy, for certain. But from both a strategic and tactical perspective, it would affect only one flight of one airline - and that well after the plane was already in the air and away from the airport. On the other hand, with all of the security theater going on, we have vastly larger lines and bigger crowds of people gathered, long before they ever hit the fairly pointless screening. If someone really wanted to do some damage, they could simply take a suitcase filled with Semtex, C4, TNT, or whatever, in a roll-aboard, leave it right near one of those giant lines, then walk away and detonate it. The devastation would rival any takedown of a plane AND - more importantly - it would shut down the entire airport, not just ruin the fortunes of one particular flight. It would also push security even farther out away from the airport. All of the “bomb-looking” nonsense has just moved the traffic into one large chokepoint prior to the planes.

That no one wants to acknowledge this strikes me as fundamentally more dangerous than exposing the flaws because the kabuki dance going on right now at these miserable TSA mock-security checkpoints provides simply the illusion of security, not actual security. And here’s the truly ironic part about all of it: the 9-11 hijackers didn’t even take down planes with bombs, yet we’re primarily protecting against that threat as if that's what happened on 9-11. And, as a bonus, neither Richard Reid (the shoe bomber) nor Umar Farouk Abdulmuttallab (the underwear bomber) were caught in airport security screening (to be fair, both men came from overseas: Reid from Paris to Miami in December 2001 and Farouk from Amsterdam to Detroit in 2009. On the other hand, I’ve been through security in both of those countries, including both Paris airports right around the time Farouk did; their security struck me at the time as being very similar to ours). In both cases it was passengers who subdued the men immediately upon any sign that something was out of the ordinary. Farouk also had tipped himself off about as much as anyone could and the massive security apparatus we built after 9-11 fucked it up once again and completely missed him. Janet Napolitano openly admitted that the entire system had failed, but only after she had first tried to tell the public that the security system had worked in the immediate aftermath. The President had to make a statement about it and questions were raised later about whether Napolitano had actually been following White House talking points on the incident.

What got exploited on 9-11 was a paradigm, a mindset that had started in the 1970’s when political hijackings of planes were not all that uncommon. Let me rephrase that - they were certainly uncommon as a per capita occurrence, but they happened with more frequency than anything like 9-11. They were common enough that the FAA even developed a special transponder code for pilots to squawk if they were hijacked. The general guidance was to go along because the typical highjacker in the ‘70s wasn’t suicidal. THAT is what the 9-11 hijackers exploited. For God’s sake, they only had boxcutters; they didn’t even have guns. A final proof: Flight 93 had already been taken over and everyone was just ‘going along’ until they found out what had happened with the other flights. Once they did, to their eternal credit, they launched a coordinated counterattack to take back control of the plane.

The fact is that no one is ever going to be able to exploit that mental paradigm “gap” again. Again, if you want proof, notice how many attempts have been foiled by TSA (note their 97% failure rate at detecting weapons above), as opposed to how many times passengers have now kicked the ever-living shit out of anyone who even pretends they’re going to do something. THAT’S who has actually foiled subsequent attempts, not the idiot TSA.

Now let me reintroduce the points I barked about up top: the lines of people disrobing by order of bored government officials, citizens being herded, taking off their shoes and belts, and then being “looked at” through their clothes, and then felt up, all at the discretion of these government agents...

The fact that we - or “you” to reinforce my earlier point - have outsourced our personal security to others, either in the form of the TSA, the military, or even the cops is not only a complete repudiation of the values upon which this country was founded, it’s yet more reification of cowardice. It trains people not to make a fuss. If that seems like hyperbole, let me provide an “anecdote.” I was traveling with a friend and his very attractive (and loud) latina girlfriend. We were doing the whole TSA theater and (natch) she got “identified” for “additional screening.” When the TSA guy put this hands on her, she loudly proclaimed that she was being “felt up”. Both my friend and I started to react, but the moment passed and there wasn’t much we could do with the sea of humanity between her and us. Regardless, I remember silently fuming because I knew that if we did something to the groper what would happen is that he would scream “help!” into a radio and then the actual dudes who dispense violence with guns and truncheons would come beat the dogshit out of us (for starters). As I looked around for some help, I noted a family with a couple of young - maybe 6-7 year old - boys who were watching all of this and that’s when it hit me: we’re training these kids not to do anything, to be cowards, not to speak up when government agents are manhandling women. What did that episode teach those future young men?

Let me close by reminding the reader that during the birth of our nation, we were occupied by the greatest military the world had ever known, the Army and Navy of Great Britain. The British occupied this country, had troops quartered in our very houses, were backed by the Royal Navy - for which we had absolutely no match - and yet we defeated both. Yes, we had support from allies who saw an opportunity to stick it to the Brits, but the impetus to do so came because Americans – the colonists as a whole - refused to back down to the British military.

The Royal Governor of Massachusetts, General Thomas Gage, had forbidden town meetings from taking place more than once a year. When he dispatched the Redcoats to break up an illegal town meeting in Salem, 3000 armed Americans appeared in response, and the British retreated. Gage’s aide John Andrews explained that everyone in the area aged 16 years or older owned a gun and plenty of gunpowder.

Dave Kopel, Administrative and Regulatory Law News (American Bar Association). Vol. 37, no. 4, Summer 2012.

This is just one example, but there are legions more. There was the “Powder Alarm,” in which a small British force of 260 sneaked up the Mystic River and seized hundreds of barrels of powder stored in the Charlestown Powder House. In response, Twenty-Thousand - (yes, I put that in caps for a reason) - 20,000 colonists/militiamen began to march on Boston, in part because they had heard erroneous reports the British had fired on their fellow colonists. Once that information was corrected while they were en route, they stood down and the war did not begin right then in September of 1774. It would take until April of the next year during the attempted seizure of hidden arms in Lexington and Concord before the war would finally start.

Derived from political and legal philosophers such as John Locke, Hugo Grotius, and Edward Coke, the ideology underlying all forms of American resistance was explicitly premised on the right of self-defense of all inalienable rights; from the self-defense foundation was constructed a political theory in which the people were the masters and government the servant, so that the people have the right to remove a disobedient servant.

The British government was not, in a purely formal sense, attempting to abolish the Americans’ common law right of self-defense. Yet in practice, that was precisely what the British were attempting. First, by disarming the Americans, the British were attempting to make the practical exercise of the right of personal self-defense much more difficult. Second, and more fundamentally, the Americans made no distinction between self-defense against a lone criminal or against a criminal government. To the Americans, and to their British Whig ancestors, the right of self-defense necessarily implied the right of armed self-defense against tyranny.

Id., (emphasis added).

I have already railed about the education system, but in all of the arguments about common core, how to teach math, or whether we ought to be emphasizing the sciences, no one has ever mentioned the most important goal - nay, moral requirement of education – and that is graduating students who are fully independent, self-sufficient adults. It’s hysterical to me, in the “holy-shit-this-can't-be-real” kind of way, to observe that our high schools churn out children – not young adults - ready to be sent to university for their Marxist indoctrination and to be sold into debt-servitude.

It’s almost as if the State wants only more dependency.

This brings me to the final point of this piece, although I suspect I'll be writing about this subject for quite some time, until – God willing – a lot more American come to understand this the way I do. We have entire generations of citizens who are fundamentally incapable of taking care of themselves; who, if dropped far from the niceties and conveniences of civilization, or if their cars break down in a remote area, or their cell-phone runs out of juice, are completely and irrevocably fucked. Or, if something happens to their government subsistence, they are going to be unable to put food on their table for their families.

They have outsourced their own personal security and that of their children, and those they love, to the vagaries and whims of whatever local government official decides to come help – or not. If that petty bureaucrat can be reached. Or bothered. Or get there in time to make one whit of a difference.

Cowardice and Courage are twins, born of the same parent, Fear. People fear failing, being embarrassed, or being judged. We communicate this to our children in a million subtle ways, but how different would it be if we viewed failure as a necessary step on the path to success, including independence and self-sufficiency?

The difference between cowardice and courage is simply one of choice, of free will, of deciding to do something even in the face of overwhelming fear. I learned about this from a 10 year old. No, this isn't some feel good story of some triumphant act by a kid, it's a conversation when I was 9 with my then best-friend John Crowley. John was the toughest kid in my middle school by the time we were in fifth or sixth grade. He was also the best looking and most popular. I was a new kid, one of the smallest in the whole school, in fact, and back then getting your ass kicked as a result of that reality was the norm. Anti-bullying consisted of fighting or continuing to get your ass kicked every week. I also had a terrible, knee-buckling fear of heights. John did not. I finally asked him one day how he did it, climbing buildings and doing all of the things I could not.

“I wish I wasn’t afraid of stuff, like you. How do you do it?”

“What? It’s not that I’m not afraid of stuff. I mean, I’m not afraid of heights like you, but I know I can fall, just like you do. I’m not stupid. I just don’t ever let fear be the reason I do or don’t do something. That’s it.”

Most of my life has been a conscious attempt to live up to that simple and profound truth. It’s not that we all don’t have fear, it’s an important adaptive evolutionary mechanism. You should be afraid of an alligator; if not, your genes would soon be eliminated from the gene pool. BUT circumstances - Life - requires us to face fear and the options are either to freeze and be another predator’s lunch, or to bow up and do what must be done. Learning to conquer fear in controlled scenarios, be it confronting the fear of public speaking by being compelled to give a speech in class, of striking out in baseball in front of one’s family and friends, or of making a mistake in a violin solo, are all hugely important events that have almost nothing to do with the outcome: what is important is the facing of a fear. It is a skill that can be taught and learned and built into the foundation of a society.

At the start of this Nation, the attempt to disarm the populace was a sufficient provocation to cause 20,000 people to gather and march on Boston against the greatest army in the world - including 16 year olds (as noted above). Now we shuffle meekly through lines like sheep, disrobing in front of our neighbors under the watchful eye of corpulent bureaucrats (who, it should be noted, are unarmed themselves), who then grope our women openly, force mothers to remove infants from their car seats, require the aged and infirm to get out of their wheelchairs, all in the name of what? Security? Because what - some fundamentalist nutjob might try to blow up a plane?

We have become a nation of pants-shitting cowards, led by same. Until and unless we make the individual and collective decision to take care of ourselves, we are doomed. We can jump and down and snivel about the failures of the CIA, the FBI, the police, etc. and vote them even more power over us, or we can start to bear the fuck down and act like independent human beings, sovereign entities unto ourselves, responsible for our own well-being and able to help those around us. OR, we can continue to be cowards, crying about why we haven’t been protected, demanding ever more security while giving away the last of our freedom and liberty to underwhelming bureaucrats who herd us like cattle.

Seems absurd? I don’t think so. And I can’t imagine that anyone who’s given the matter much thought would disagree. There is a confidence, a calmness, and a sense of peace that comes from being capable of taking care of one’s self that nothing else provides. I suspect the group that would most disagree is our government. I get the distinct feeling they’re not anxious to see a generation of independent Americans, like the ones who founded this country and stood tall against the world's foremost military. But maybe I’m just being cynical.