Va pensiero, sull'ali dorate

So the plan to prevent terrorists from using planes to attack one of Europe's most densely populated urban areas is to shoot down planes over one of Europe's most densely populated urban areas.  Actually, the plan is to employ snipers to shoot the pilots of planes over one of Europe's most densely populated urban areas,  precisely the sort of antic triaging of potentially disastrous consequences that only a dedicated security bureaucracy could dream up, a plan to get the patient onto the operating table faster by crashing the ambulance through the doors into the waiting room.

This is the logical conclusion of our ever-escalating investment in security theater; the opera ends and Nabucco, still wielding his sword, jumps into the audience and starts beheading dowagers.  When returning from Spain recently, as I was herded along with a thousand other weary, creaking travelers through Philadelphia's Minoan-era labyrinth of an international arrivals gate, it occurred to me that we now have to pass through security in order to get to security, and I imagined a Kafka pastiche, an infinite regression of security wherein some poor Herr waits indefinitely in series of security lines that lead only to the next layer of security.

The Olympics, or the airlines, or the G20, or whatever--all of the essential and inessential functions and events of our society have come to serve a singular purpose, which is to justify an elaborate system of gates and human backflow preventers.  The whole thing is strangely religious, really, all things on this earth, however small or large, important or irrelevant, testifying if viewed by the righteous and devout to the eternal and ubiquitous glory of a god . . . only in this case the god is not a cloud-borne old man or graceful Shiva tapping out the passage of universal time on his drum, but rather a malfunctioning scatter X-ray machine; in this universe, Pilgrims don't so much journey to Jerusalem or the Holy See as await a travel visa that will never be issued because none exist; there is a metal detector at the entrance to the symbolic maze on its cathedral floor.

Having seen from the safe distance of an involved non-participant the planning that went into shutting down Pittsburgh for the G20 a while back, I can report firsthand the positive joy the people charged with erecting security take in it.  I am not stretching the religious metaphor.  These are fundamentally ecstatics, transported by temporary barriers, enraptured by color-coded credentials.  Everyone likes to blame this on terrorism, or let's say instead on an "overreaction" to terrorism, but terrorism, like, I don't know, the Virgin Birth, is just a neat bit of retconning added to make a garbled backstory both more coherent and more poetic.  It would be a comfort if these people were merely evil; instead, they're all quite mad.