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vincentML -> RE: The Airline Security System Works; It Really Does! (12/28/2009 1:36:23 PM)
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Here is an excellent blog on the event essentially saying that the shoe bomber and the undie bomber (the most recent) show evidence that Al-Quaeda is losing its effectiveness through picking incompetent agents, poor planning, and inept execution. But the writer castigates Homeland Security for overreaction after the fact.
A more telling commentary on our state of mind—a commentary, in truth, on the extent to which we have become inured to threats of terrorism—is the swiftness with which our popular culture has made light of the episode. “Fruit of the Loon,” blared the front page of the New York Daily News, in a play on the name of an underwear brand (owned, it turns out, by Warren Buffett). Twitter and Facebook chat has dwelt on how the inconvenient anatomical location of the bomber’s burns would make his eventual tryst with 72 virgins a forlorn affair. People are asking when the last time it was that a Dutchman tackled a Nigerian outside a soccer field, and making quips about an Islamist “boxer rebellion,” a terrorist “brotherhood of the traveling pants,” a “jock-strap jihad,” and a “new Y-front in the war on terror.”
Of course, there has been a homeland reaction. The Transportation Security Administration went predictably into Pavlovian overdrive, announcing a series of new security measures that would take immediate effect. This is the other, less reassuring, side of the episodic nature of the terrorist threats against us. We seem always to react, never to anticipate—and in this form of hasty reaction, with its flavor of humiliation, and of having been outwitted by a wearer of dangerous underwear (or shoes), there lurk always the seeds of over-reaction. No one can move from his seat for an hour before landing. No electronics. No coats on laps.
Some suggestions are given at the end of the blog by the writer. Good reading I think.
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