Ruminations and Cogitations, continued

Some interesting and scary things in the paper today. I guess, since I’m an American, what I find scary might not be what other people find scary, and it could be that I find these things scary because I don’t want to think of the things that really are scary. Say what you will about John Ashcroft – and I don’t like him, not at all – he probably has to think about scary things every day that would leave me shuddering under the bed.

So I’ll stick to the things that scare me but aren’t in that league. Ashcroft comes to mind because of two articles in today’s Washington Post. In one, a guy says that while he was flying, and doing a crossword puzzle, he jotted a piece of dialogue for a book that he’s writing. He wrote this line on the edge of the paper where the crossword was: “I guess this is the bomb.” Another passenger saw the note, alerted the flight attendant, and this guy got to spend extensive quality time with cops and feds, none of whom seemed all that interested in the possibility that they were wrong about him, and it ended up that he was told he would now be on a ‘watch list’.

Its easy to make fun of this, just like its easy to make fun of that guy who wanted to blow up the airliner by using a bomb in his shoe. Wouldn’t have been so funny had he succeeded. Thinking that a person is a threat to an airliner because of something he jotted down on the side of a crossword puzzle seems ludicrous and dumb – but ludicrous and dumb people do pose a threat, and we pay humorless people to deal with that threat. Including people like Ashcroft. And including people like the unnamed person who scrambled a fighter jet in Washington to check out the light aircraft that was carrying a traffic reporter, just like it always does, where it always does, in touch with air traffic control all the time. It ended well, but mysteriously, as apparently no one could be found to say that they asked for the fighter to be scrambled, or even to say that they thought scrambling it was a bad idea. If that plane had been carrying explosives, flying under the cover of its normal mission, would the fighter have been able to stop it, or even get close to it? What about locking on for a missile attack? The light plane, remember, cruises at around 70MPH, and the fighter, around 400MPH. I’m thinking of the fighter to helicopter missile attacks in Blue Thunder, which as you may recall didn’t turn out all that well.

So when humorless people do things like stop and interrogate other people who jot down threatening phrases in public places, or check out apparently normal planes that could be a threat, they’re not doing something wrong. But since that also infringes on our traditional view of how Americans act, it feels wrong.

I don’t know about other people, but I haven’t figured out which it is, yet.