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Traveling Sheep
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The Transportation Security Administration has changed the rules of its airport-security system just in time to create extra hassle for the millions of busy holiday travelers. More travelers will be subjected to random pat-downs. Screeners will routinely grope the thighs of attractive women. Security officers, now trained in "behavior recognition," will identify travelers who seem nervous (imagine that, somebody running the airport-security gauntlet and appearing nervous) and pull them aside for bonus hassling....

... Which is to say, the system remains much as it was before: a degrading, obnoxious, contemptible, outrageous farce. It's also a blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, although the government's lap-dog judges say otherwise. I know that I am not the only person in America who looks at this thuggery as I do. So what's going on?

Two years ago, in an assessment of the new federal airport-security arrangements published in the San Francisco Chronicle, I noted that it "routinely abases and humiliates the entire population, rendering us docile and compliant and thereby preparing us to play our assigned role in the Police State that the Bush administration has been building relentlessly." In the light of what I have observed since making that observation, I cannot help but believe now that I was barking up the right tree then.

Strange as it might seem, most people get used to being treated as criminals or inmates in a concentration camp. Americans are no exception. Keep beating them down, and eventually you will produce a thoroughly cowed and compliant herd, a mass of pliant raw material in the hands of their political masters, perfectly willing to sacrifice their dignity rather than irritate an airport-security thug and be made to miss a flight. And heaven forbid that they write their congressional representative to complain. Such impudence might get them placed on some black list at the TSA or even at the FBI. Best to keep quiet, stay in line, act as they are ordered to act. Even making jokes, an airport sign I saw in Houston warned, might result in your arrest; so nobody jokes.

Our rulers may not be alchemists, able to turn base metal into gold, but they know how to turn humans into sheep. Well might we ask about this remarkable trick; cui bono?