Security, Language, and the Security of Language

"It's not the men in my life that counts," Mae West once said famously (and chiastically), "it's the life in my men." We've come as a nation to something of a corollary, wherein the public has chosen to believe the life, in whatever reality is more important than the reality in life. Either out of commercial and/or governmental propagandist-directed behavior alteration and control or shear stupidity due our ill-attended and maintained public education system, the gift of language has become reality in order to protect us from the same.

It's even more chiastic than that. So convolute has the situation become in the linguistic wilderness of mirrors being created by the agency ominously known as the House of Mirrors, that little security remains except that to be found in figures of speech. The recent story of the youngster who walked through the nation and Department of Homeland Security's vaunted airport security systems is a case in point.

Semaj Booker is nine years old, four-feet, nine inches tall, and a fourth-grader. So how did he outsmart our wondrous government, those stalwart and ever-alert guardians, the people we are to trust with of our security (and our freedom)? Well, they don't know:

"S. Rep. Norm Dicks has asked the Transportation Security Administration to determine how a 9-year-old Lakewood boy used another passenger’s name to board a Southwest Airlines flight and run away to Texas this week, his spokesman said Thursday.

“If there are opportunities to exploit the system like this, and they’re so obvious to a 9-year-old, then that’s something we should look into,” said George Behan, spokesman for Dicks, D-Belfair."

NO! No kidding. You're saying that because a nine-year old beat the system, it may need some "tweaking?" AND YOU HAVE TO LOOK INTO IT, to make one of those famously federal, ten dollars on the dime investigations?! A congressional subcommittee, no doubt.

Incredible!

But not as incredible as the fact that you keep these stumbling, spastic morons in office. As Colonel David Hunt says, "Nobody gets fired." Kinder, gentler nation, you know. Mustn't take anybody's job. Maybe he's got a family. Hell, maybe his wife is the "high maintenance" kind. Besides, it just isn't the effeminate, metrosexual male thing to do.

And not incredible to me, not at all. Hell, no. I not only went through your heralded security like water paper towel, I left my calling card everywhere I infiltrated, and reported having done it to U.S. Senators and Congressmen, to Army Intelligence, to two U.S. Attorney Generals (left my card on her desk, too), to Soldier of Fortune Magazine, Sixty Minutes, Geraldo Rivera, and more (so many, I can't remember them all as I type this). Guess what happened?

Right. Nada. Zip, Zilch, Bupkis.

Incredible? Well, okay - but I did. And that's why Semaj and I were able to do it. It's so incredible that you refuse to believe it. And since you don't believe it, it can't be. Didn't happen. O-o-o-o-kay . . . .!

And, by the way, you don't see any parallel between this and the way our border with Mexico remains as compromise-able as Mae West's virtue? My turn: incredible! And, while I'm in that vein, you don't see a don't see a parallel between Mae's "Come on up and see me some time" morals and a U.S. Congress' relationship with 35,000 lobbyists?

Then I'll bet you don't see any relationship between the holes in your airport security and a military and national defense run by George W. Bush and his bungling Bush League, DO you?! A FEMA who STILL is standing and looking at New Orleans and the Gulf Coast with its collective mouth agape? Then you probably won't see why I prefer to do my own security. I sure as hell don't want YOU standing guard outside my door while I sleep.

But I've got to concede you this much - it's hard to tell whether the sleaze of politicians we have in power were put there by the military industrial complex because they're evil and corruptible or because they're stupid and inept. It's tempting to believe that we're throwing away the lives of decent young people who only wanted three square meals a day and a chance at a college education because our intelligence services - at the cost of billions and billions for those Keyhole satellites - were too incompetent to read the satellite photos or because they lied.

It's just too damned incredible. Uh-uh. Even when it comes to a nine-year old making a monkey of airport security - and our Homeland Security Agency - I smell a rat. I keep thinking about an Arab cuckoo-bird named Mohamed Atta, and the way he somehow walked - supposedly miraculously - through airport security, too (and nobody got fired, remember? - not even the National Security Adviser who didn't know that a knife with a four-inch blade was a weapon, but is now Secretary of State).

"Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?"