America's Finest at Work

As of ten days ago, the nation has weathered six years without another major terrorist attack. We owe those years of safety to the work of law enforcement on every level, whether it's local police, Homeland Security or the TSA.

And in recognition of their fine work, let's review what the nation's men and women working in law enforcement and national security have accomplished lately:

A) Men who use the restrooms at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport can now relieve themselves without fear of foot tappers. This is important, people. After all, it's not like there could be anything else to worry about in an airport with a 100,000 passengers moving through it every day.

On a personal note, I don't feel that threatened by foot tapping. It kind of pales compared to the time I was one of the first people seated on a flight and the aisle filled up with a slow moving line of passengers, one of whom pressed his erect penis against my shoulder (and his pants were polyester. Ewww.) But if you haven't had that happen to you, I can understand how foot tapping might be traumatic.

Yes, Virginia, if Americans can ask each other for sex, the terrorists win.

B) We all know that the September 11 attack could have been prevented if only we had known what Mohamed Atta was reading. When he first tried to enter the US, he probably never would have made it out of the airport if baggage screeners had known he was carrying the pamphlet So, You Want to Destroy the World Trade Center. Now when you enter the United States--whether you're citizen, tourist or resident alien--airport screeners are collecting data on what reading material you're carrying. Don't you feel safer knowing that Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder Ron Gilmore has been reading Drugs and Your Rights? I do.

I can think of dozens of ways this information can be used to improve the quality of American life. As a start, I've written to the Department of Homeland Security asking them to keep track of the people who read Nicholas Sparks and keep them the Hell away from me (I haven't heard back yet).


C) This is the Homeland Security coup of the year: British musicologists can no longer enter the U.S. with impunity. The residency visa of Nalini Ghuman has been revoked. It's obvious: the undergrad years studying music at Oxford, the Ph.D. at Berkeley, the scholarly articles on Elgar--all cover. She was just lying low and keeping dark until the day she could walk into a seminar on harmony and counterpoint with bombs strapped to her chest and take out a roomful of music majors.

Keep it up guys, I'm feeling safer every day.