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 omeland
Security Director Tom Ridge recently told Chris Matthews that airplane
security ultimately depends on the passengers, and that we should
all look at ourselves "as potential air marshals."
This statement
is both encouraging and infuriating. Encouraging because it means
that Ridge has a good sense of reality. Infuriating because it raises
a question: Why did the administration ram though an airport-security
bill that is profoundly at odds with this view of reality, a bill
that deserves the adjective "frivolous."
Its heart is
a newly federalized corps of almost 30,000 workers that will perform
the numbingly boring job of screening passengers, taking nail scissors
away from little old ladies because it would be politically incorrect
to pretend that we have any special interest in young men of Middle
Eastern appearance. Thousands of sky marshals will be added, at
huge additional dollars.
Deploying this
force will take time, so passengers will continue interminable waits
in security lines, to the detriment of themselves, the airlines,
and the economy. Road accidents caused by the increase in driving
will also kill some hundreds, a price that will go unnoticed by
press or government leaders.
Putting into
place effective devices for screening luggage will take years, so
while we try to reduce to zero the risk that a business executive
might carry a Swiss army knife onto a plane, the real risk of a
bomb inserted into luggage by a martyr will remain only spottily
addressed.
What makes
the law truly surreal is that in fact it would be easy to stop hijackings
quickly and at trivial cost. Check passengers and carry-on luggage
for guns, as we did before September 11, harden the cockpit, arm
and train the crew, tell them not to turn over control of the aircraft
under any circumstances, and the threat is resolved. For extra protection,
encourage passengers to carry knives so that potential hijackers
will lack their present certainty that they are the only ones on
the flight who are armed.
The only part
of this option getting serious attention is the proposal to arm
the aircrew, and this only because the pilots, who have the largest
stake in rational and effective approaches, are pushing hard. In
the political discourse, this proposal is seen as a minor add-on
to the other measures, not as a centerpiece. Indeed, suggesting
that our current course is frivolous is a quick route to dismissal
as some sort of nut.
An effort to
understand this odd program leads to depressed musings on how little
the national psyche was changed by September 11. Everyone says "everything
has changed," then they set about demonstrating that nothing
at all has changed.
To begin, the
roll-out-the-pork barrel spirit of the past couple of years remains
intact. We are rich, so it would be vulgar to worry about costs
or effectiveness, especially when presented with a chance to add
to the federal payroll. As to any need to think seriously about
how to protect an infinite number of targets — bridges, utilities,
telecommunications centers — against a variety of threats,
or any suggestion that some rational allocation of resources might
be wise - forget it.
A recent letter
to the Washington Times noted that terrorists could easily
decide to inject poison into a food item in the grocery store. Does
this mandate a program to replace all stock boys with federal employees?
Should they be required to have college degrees, so to ensure that
this "vital task" is not performed by "minimum wage
employees"? And fund it with a $2.50 per grocery bag special
tax?
The airport
debacle also exhibits the obsession with zero risk that makes the
environmental movement so hysterical. Whenever our national searchlight
turns to a problem, the only acceptable result is that all possibility
that a risk might exist must be eliminated. If anyone can dream
up a hypothesis under which this blissful state remains unattained,
then still more must be done. While the hysteria lasts, other risks
are totally ignored and alternative uses of the resources assumed
to be inferior. The asbestos debacle remains the prime example.
Billions have been spent to treat a non-risk, and it continues even
after the reality is known to all.
So, when a
metal detector was accidentally unplugged for 15 minutes at Seattle
airport, the terminal was emptied and everyone re-screened, at a
cost of three hours of chaos, even though no hijacker could have
anticipated this or taken advantage of it. Further, passengers on
flights that had departed during the down period were put through
metal detectors upon arrival, despite the fact that, by definition,
their risk of hijacking was now zero.
The collective
national psyche remains unchanged at a deeper level. We retain a
view of public safety that divides the world into the citizenry,
which is supposed to remain passive, and the professional protectors.
If the protectors are unavailable, the ethos requires the citizenry
to do nothing except be good victims, like the doomed passengers
on three of the four hijacked planes. That societal protection would
be enhanced by an armed and aggressively active citizenry —
the ideal embodied in the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
and currently pursued in Israel, where carrying arms is encouraged
— is anathema, not only to the protectors but to most of the
citizenry, which doesn't want the responsibility. Before September
11, gun-control advocates were not muted by factual demonstrations
that states permitting arms have lower crime rates, and they are
not affected by factual argument now.
This point
about attitudes toward public safety segues into a broader one about
the relation between the government and the people. Columnist George
Will talks about "the political class" and economists
write papers on "public choice," both exploring the reality
that those with their hands on government power become a special
interest group with priorities and interests of their own. These
particular terms are modern, but the concept is old. "Like
fire, [government] is a dangerous servant and a fearful master,"
said George Washington.
The 20th century
was an era of expanding government power, to the point where governments
in the United States now directly spend over 35 percent of the GNP
and control a large portion of the rest through regulatory and tax
measures. Maintaining this power is a prime directive for the political
class, especially for its cardinals in Congress and their acolytes
within the Washington beltway.
For this political
class, September 11 was both an opportunity and a threat. An opportunity
because wars always tend to expand government power. A threat because
September 11 was a spectacular and obvious failure of government
to fulfill its most necessary and proper duty of providing for the
common defense, a failure caused in large part because the government
is so distracted doing things it cannot do well, such as trying
to micromanage the economy and foster political correctness on every
possible axis, that it cannot pay adequate attention to its proper
functions.
For the past
20 years, the expansion of government power has been under attack
in places such as the National Review. The response of the
political class has been to stonewall and propagandize, protected
by the rational ignorance of the public — the reality that
most people, busy with their own lives, pay little attention to
the squabblings of policy wonks over issues which the public feels
it cannot much affect anyway.
In the wake
of September 11, ignorance is no longer rational, and people are
paying attention. This makes it doubly important to the political
class that it stand firm. To acknowledge a simple, non-governmental,
inexpensive solution to the hijacking issue might open the floodgates
of examination of the government role in a host of other areas,
ranging from the post office to housing policy to social security.
So, the great hope of the political class is that people will do
what the president asked and fall back into their normal rational
ignorance as quickly as possible.
Encouraging
this requires that there must be no simple solution to airport security
— it must be a complex problem requiring new bureaucracies,
long-term planning, and expensive government involvement. Otherwise,
who knows where it all might end? September 11 might actually change
something.
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