I’ll admit it. I’ve read every one of Dav Pilkey’s epic novels featuring Captain Underpants (the defender of all things pre-shrunk and cottony) and the rest of the crew from Jerome Horwitz Elementary. So when the Christmas underwear bomber incident hit the news, well it was just too easy to adopt the sobriquet for the hapless wannabe suicide bomber. While I’d like to take credit for the idea, I saw it first in tweet from @sectorprivate. But once again I digress.
When Captain Underpants attempted his incredibly inept act of terrorism and lit his privates on fire (that had to smart!) it was followed immediately by the requisite hand-wringing, blameshifting and calls for resignation of leading bureaucrats and political appointees from the opposing political party. In other words, same circus different clowns. The one actionable item that came out of this little in-flight weenie roast was a truly choice bit of expensive security theater. Full-body scanners. Yep, now we’re going to add that to the list of indignities heaped upon air travelers. This has raised privacy concerns within the air traveling public world wide. Witness the German “fleshmob” protesting against the use of full body scanners.
The underwear bomber’s Christmas Day attack has prompted calls for the increased use of full-body scanners at airports that would strip-search passengers down to their naked bodies.
So to protest the use of the so-called Nacktscanner (naked scanner), members of the Pirate Party in Germany organized a “fleshmob” of people who stripped down to their skivvies last Sunday and converged on the Berlin-Tegel airport.
It seems like everyone is worried about some TSA voyeur leering at naked images of them. But having spent a ridiculous amount of time in airports this last week I have several observations to make.
Observation the first – For every air traveling babe there are at least 50 bovines.
Observation the second – A similar ratio of hunks to heifers exists.
Therefore I posit that the real victims of the Nacktscanner are the TSA employees who will be forced to monitor them. I don’t know about you, but I think that it would take less than an hour of closely watching images of the air traveling public in the altogether before I was ready to poke out my own eyes. So if the public doesn’t like them and I can’t imagine anyone on the front lines of the TSA who is waiting breathlessly for them, then what exactly is the point?
Perhaps this is a new TSA plan to develop Super TSA Agents, figuring that if you can withstand a rotation of staring at a full-body scanner then you can handle anything – a real dead-eyed killer. Or maybe they can use them as a diciplinary device – “Jenkins, if you don’t pat down those passengers faster it’s the naked scanner for you!”. Or maybe even an HR screening mechanism – “So Mr. Smith, you would really enjoy being a full-body scan monitor? Sorry, pervert! Try politics or management”.
Being a “circle of life” kind of guy, I could really appreciate the symmetry of making Nacktscanner monitoring part of the punishment for Captain Underpants. Real biblical in a “reaping what you sow” kind of way. He should be forced to monitor high resolution scans of airline passengers in the buff all day every day for the rest of his life. While strapped to a chair so he can’t prematurely end the sentence. But that would truly be cruel and unusual punishment.
The naked truth is that we should just bag the whole lame idea of full-body scanners. But that wouldn’t make for very good theater now would it.
