A Plane Above Manhattan, a Philosophy on Trial

Brian Till
Wed, 29 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700
Opinion

I was somewhere over New Jersey, headed south in seat 7F, when I noticed a news ticker on the small screen in front of me: "Wall Street Journal reports plane trailed by fighters flying over the Hudson River."

When the flight landed, my phone was immediately abuzz with rage-filled e-mails from those I'd just left in lower Manhattan. Their buildings had been evacuated; they were on the southernmost streets of New York, some exasperated and some shaking.

A moron desk jockey, it appeared, had approved a photo op flyover with one of the president's 747s at nearly the same moment that my flight took to the air.
Updated: Tue Apr 28, 2009

I was somewhere over New Jersey, headed south in seat 7F, when I noticed a news ticker on the small screen in front of me: "Wall Street Journal reports plane trailed by fighters flying over the Hudson River."

When the flight landed, my phone was immediately abuzz with rage-filled e-mails from those I'd just left in lower Manhattan. Their buildings had been evacuated; they were on the southernmost streets of New York, some exasperated and some shaking.

A moron desk jockey, it appeared, had approved a photo op flyover with one of the president's 747s at nearly the same moment that my flight took to the air.

The video clips and pictures that emerged in the following hours — showing New Yorkers running for cover as the planes approached — should cement the trauma for those of us who were not on the island.

Ironically, the horrific deja vu comes at the exact moment that America begins to reconcile its post-9/11 psyche and tactics. President Obama has taken us down a wildly divergent course, and public support has followed his shift. We will engage the Taliban, rather than categorize them as ideologically identical to al Qaeda. We will look to engage with nations like Iran, rather than accept the status quo or move immediately to arms, a policy that 67 percent of Americans approve of, according to Gallup.

And the most recent populist surge we hear — perhaps best captured by Fox News host Shepard Smith's on-air outburst, "We are America, we don't (expletive) torture!" — is calling for inquiry and prosecution of Bush officials. It's likely the most important of the re-evaluations.

The legal memoranda, the so-called Bush torture memos, that the president released last week, offered almost no new information about the practices or extent of the torture our past president employed, yet we see an uproar. Republican leaders themselves are conceding the tactics went too far, and Obama feels the pressure to take action, despite the fact we've learned almost nothing new. It speaks to a broad, important shift in the way our country thinks about the adversaries we face, and the abandonment of values the last administration authored.

But for a moment this week, many of us, and nearly everyone in New York, could recall the horror that led us to tacitly approve such an ideology. The world changed very little on that day, but we were all very confident that it had changed forever.

An hour before the flyover, as I went through security at JFK, I couldn't help but ponder the ridiculousness of the pre-flight charade we've all come to expect. Airline security is a joke, a veneer to make passengers feel better. I recalled a USA Today article from the fall of 2007, detailing how TSA agents at Los Angeles' LAX airport missed 75 percent of simulated explosive and bomb parts that security screeners had hidden to test proficiency. At Chicago's O'Hare, the failure rate was 60 percent. Jeffrey Goldberg, writing for the Atlantic in November 2008, documented his attempts to be caught carrying suspicious and dangerous goods aboard planes; the results were shocking. Knives, a Hezbollah flag, a faux beer belly — designed for stadiums — filled with fluids, and fictitious boarding passes produced with basic software all slipped by the TSA seamlessly.

Nonetheless, we remain safe. We have been at war with a failed and corrupted ideology over the past seven years, and, in that battle, we have corrupted our own at times. Walking to my gate, my belt swung over my shoulder, the tongue of my shoe tucked under and my laptop ajar, I couldn't help but laugh at the showmanship of the procedures.

We've come a great distance from the fear and tacit approval that led this nation down the course of the Bush years, but a gaping hole remains in downtown Manhattan. So does a palpable angst and rage that was summoned quite quickly to the hearts and throats of millions this week.

Ironically, it was a plane belonging to the man pulling us away from our fear-centric 9/11 philosophy that dramatically reminded us of the horror of that day. But it ought to also remind us of how quickly we might slip back to that mindset, how quickly we might once again go in search of false security and perceived justice at any cost if we are hit once more. Let it not be so.