The Angry Czeck

I’ve begun this post about three different times, and every time I do, it sounds phony.

There’s nothing original here. We all liked The Catcher in the Rye. We more than liked it. We loved it; made it a Bible. When we were stupid and horny teenagers, Salinger gave voice to an anger we didn’t even realize we had. Only Jack Kerouac had a similar impact – the ability to transmogrify gentle English majors into insufferable blowhards.

Such was Salinger’s power. He could magically transform a teenage conformist into a pretentious cynic in just one reading. That’s exactly what happened to me. After finishing Catcher in the Rye, I was goddamn Holden Caulfield, and I could spot a phony from a mile away. It was easy enough. Everybody was a phony. Quite frankly, it took me half a dozen years to recover from Catcher in the Rye. I’m lucky. Some of us never get better.

Last time I read Catcher in the Rye, a little less than a year ago, it confirmed what I had already long suspected: Holden is a depressed and melodramatic teenager who needs professional help. Holden never had any magical insight into the human condition. He just failed to get over his little brother’s sad demise. If Holden were my kid, he’d get on my nerves.

Maybe that’s why Salinger embraced his seclusion. Maybe he understood that Holden wasn’t the super-genius his deranged acolytes had mistakenly christened him. Maybe he was a little embarrassed for us.

In his short story collection Nine Stories, Salinger seems to be warning us that Holden wasn’t the role model his admirers had made him. In “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” the brilliant malcontent, Seymour, commits suicide. In “Teddy,” the emotionally detached clairvoyant Teddy is murdered by his own sister. The pretentious protagonist in “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period” manages to survive, but only because he suddenly realizes what a blowhard he had become.

It was like Salinger was saying, “Look, you knuckleheads! These are screwed up fictional characters. Avoid in real life!”

We didn’t, though. We admired the precocious intellect of the Glass Family’s children, secretly wishing that we could be adopted into the brood. We “borrowed” Holden Caulfield’s vocabulary, sprinkling a liberal dose of “goddamns” in every painful short story we wrote. We drank way too many rum and cokes. And if you’re me, you adopted a random bit of Salinger’s writing and ingrained it into your own less-than worthy blog.

“Brief but penetrating” comes from a letter written by the narrator’s sister in the story “Raise High the Roof Beams, Carpenter,” my favorite Salinger story. The succinct phrase stuck with me the moment I read it. Didn’t that describe anything Salinger wrote? Brief but penetrating? You can reasonably read Catcher in the Rye in one day. If only I could be so penetrating in my briefness.

I spent six college semesters thinking I was J.D. Salinger until I realized that my campus was bursting with similar phonies. They were, as Holden said, falling out of the windows. We weren’t cool! We were nerds! Dorks! And not the good kind nerd and dork, either. We had chosen a life-path that would lead us to our parent’s basement, forever typing and being rejected by the establishment we swore to hate.

I’d have to find my own goddamned voice.

J.D. Salinger is dead, and at 91 years of age it’s hardly a tragedy. The man hadn’t given us new material in decades, yet we venerated him as a sage of our generation. His observations had become ours, even mine for a time, though I was born long after he had published his last word. Salinger was smart. He went out on top.

May we never see The Catcher in the Rye 2: Beyond Thunderdome.

The summer after my first year of college, my angry mom demanded that my brother and I get jobs.

“You’re not sitting on your ass wasting my electricity all summer,” is how she might have put it. I was not unaccustomed to summer labors. I started working for my own cash by the age of ten. My brother and I sold the Titlists and Top Flights we pilfered from the woods surrounding the golf course. Later, I’d mow grass or serve as lifeguard at the swimming pool.

But damn! I had just finished my first year of college finals! I needed to convalesce! My brain was fried! Come on, woman!

“Start filling out job applications,” said Angry Mom. She didn’t care about my brain.

My goal was to create the appearance of looking for a job without actually getting a job. This appearance had to be convincing, because Angry Mom had a kind of sixth sense for exposing bogus theatrics. So off I went, with brother in tow, pseudo-searching for employment.

While my battle plan was to simply appear mentally retarded at job interviews, my brother had hatched a more sophisticated scheme.

“I’m going to get a job at a radio station!” he announced. Such designs were congruent to his college major at the time, so the quest seemed genuine even if chances of gaining such a position was somewhere deep in the negative. What a brilliant strategy! My brother had laid the perfect foundation for a Summer of Sloth.

Me, I was relying solely on my incompetence, which on the surface seemed like sound strategy except that my incompetence was such that even my incompetence was incompetent. Still, I had successfully managed to avoid even a moment of paid labor right up to the ill-fated day when I strolled into the local Burger King.

“Taking Applications Now” read the bold black letters that clung beneath the enormous Burger King logo. I had tried to ignore it, of course, but Angry Mom was too sharp to allow such an opportunity to pass.

“They’re hiring at Burger King. Get in there a fill out an application,” she demanded. “Or I’m going to start charging you for hot water.”

My brother the genius decided to visit the area radio station while I obtained an application. He’d pick me up just as soon as Burger King realized I wasn’t fast food material.

The most disinterested teenager in the entire world handed me the double-sided application, and I retreated to a greasy booth to fill out the boxes. I wasted a golden opportunity by failing to lie about my criminal record (although, in retrospect, I’m not sure if serving a stretch for murder would have mattered much to Burger King). When I was done, I walked up to the counter and handed the application to somebody who looked like a manager, who immediately went to reading it. She had the look of a woman reading the assembly instructions for her new Ikea bookcase.

“Come with me,” she said. So, they wanted to reject me in person, eh? We assumed seats in the same booth I used to fill out the application.

“Says here you’re in college now,” the manager said.

“Yep.”

“Do you have any experience in the fast food industry.”

“Nope.”

“Have you ever run a cash register?”

“Nope.”

“You’re hired.”

All the warmth of a living soul left my body. “What?”

“When can you start? Can you start now? How about now?“

“You’re starting now?” said my brother incredulously.

I nodded miserably. “How did it go at the radio station?”

“They don’t need anybody. Have fun at Burger King.”

He rolled up the car window and sped away.

*

Nobody works at Burger King for the fun.

In the arena of fast food, McDonald’s is king. A distant second is the misleadingly monikered Burger King. They both serve hamburgers, french fries, and some kind of dubious fish sandwich. What separates the two companies are its operational philosophies.

I’m paid the lowest possible amount to serve you.

McDonald’s believes in employee retention. After all, it costs money to constantly train new employees. So they spend a little extra on pay increases and incentives to keep their good employees building Big Macs.

Burger King, on the other hand, believes that employees are as interchangeable as a sesame seed. Pay is kept low and there are no bonuses to be had. When the employee quits, just hire another sucker. How hard is it to make a Whopper anyway?

Not very hard at all. The television commercials make it appear that the meat of a Whopper is sizzled on some kind of grill manned by cowboys. The truth is that a low-functioning teenager simply loads a pile of frozen beef pucks onto a conveyor belt. The belt carries the pucks into a box that broils the burger for two minutes and twenty seconds. What comes out at the other end are dripping circles of cow.

After the burger is broiled, you place one meat circle on the bottom half of a bun, add two twirls of ketchup, one twirl of mustard (inside the ketchup swirl: IMPORTANT!) and finally add the stingiest pinches of lettuce, tomatoes and onions your fingers can afford. Presto! You have a Whopper.

This is not the type of work the engages the mind or fosters creativity. In fact, Burger King would rather that you set yourself on fire than offer anything to the table. You are there to make it their way.

That’s another operational point of difference that Burger King claims over McDonald’s: Have it your way™. It’s true. You can have it your way at Burger King. Once, a man with a great deal of his jaw missing ordered a “RuwWOMeper,” and I made it for him.

It still haunts my dreams.

The problem with Have It Your Way is that a customized order destroys the flow of the kitchen. “No ketchup! How will I know where to put the mustard without the ketchup!?” You can hear an audible groan from the burger assembly station as soon as somebody demands “no tomato.” That leaves the cashier – the poor sonuvabitch who faces the hungry mob – to shout nervously at the kitchen, “Whopper, no tomato! Need it now!”

A cashier who makes that request one too many times might receive a quick-but-efficient beating by the garbage bin after his shift if he’s not careful.

At least the kitchen crew works in anonymity. The cashier is the defacto face of Burger King. If I learned one thing from ringing up sales at Burger King, it is this: If you just got out of prison for buggering children, you are still higher on the totem pole than the schmuck taking your Burger King order. Go ahead and flip out like a dangerous maniac because you didn’t get a straw in your bag. The guy behind the counter earning the minimum wage deserves your rancor. Scream it your way.

One day, a very dusty man wearing a dirty softball uniform walked in with his son and ordered a burger and a drink. “And I want that Last Action Hero cup, too,” he said. He referred to the promotion Burger King had launched that year. If you ordered a value meal, you got a special plastic cup featuring a character played by Arnold Schwarzenegger in a movie that was the summer’s biggest bomb.

“I’m sorry, sir, but you have to order the value meal to get the cup.”

“I don’t want a value meal.”

“Then I can’t give you the cup,” I said, because I was a dedicated company man.

What followed was five minutes of some of the saltiest cursing you’ll find this side of the Navy. The man’s son was driven close to tears as I was tied to the pillory of his father’s terrible verbal abuse. I guess I could have given the man his cup. It wasn’t like we had a short supply. In fact, if I were still employed by the King of Burgers, I would have given him the cup. But at that time, I was 19 and the rules said No Value Meal, No Last Action Hero Cup.

**

The co-manager of Burger King didn’t like me.

Believe it or not, I want people to like me. It’s hard to work with somebody who hates your guts. But the co-manager was having none of it. She once called me into her office just to call me “a pretty boy.”

Truthfully, she was kind of right about me being a pretty boy. I’m not a male model, but the guys I worked with were a rough bunch. One colleague kept a number of live snakes in his truck. Another maintained a day job as a custodian of a trailer park.

“Why do you work here?” I asked.

“I need to get away from my wife!” he replied.

Just about everybody who worked the Burger King night shift really needed the money. Me, I needed some spending cash for the family trip to Florida. These guys, on the other hand, were a paycheck short of an eviction notice. The co-manager who hired me – and didn’t hate me – toiled long hours. She needed to make the job work because her husband was dying of cancer. Medicine was expensive.

Transfats and these guys are the source of your heart attack.

None of them were bad guys. Eventually, they even came to like me (excluding a certain co-manager). But it took most of the summer before I earned their respect, and maybe even then they had simply gotten used to me. A guy who returned home each evening shining in burger grease can’t be all bad.

“You smile too much,” grunted the co-manager.

One can easily mistake a grimace for a smile. Still, I tried to maintain a low-grade level of cheer at my post behind the cashier station. The co-manager thought me less-than-genuine and so did many of the kitchen grunts.

“Why don’t you just lay off the ‘charm’ a little?” the co-manager suggested.

One lady went totally ape-shit on me because we didn’t serve ice cream. “What kind of a Burger King doesn’t serve ice cream?” she screamed. She really couldn’t believe that she lived in a world in which a Burger King failed to serve ice cream. She was really jonsing for ice cream. I shrugged. I could make her a milkshake, or she could visit the TCBY across the parking lot. No dice. It was better to scream at the kid making minimum wage.

Maybe that’s how I won over the kitchen grunts. They liked that it was me and not them facing the brute squad every evening. They also liked that I eventually stopped panicking when the BK Whaler without tarter sauce was slow to coming. You want it your way chief, then you gotta wait.

***

If you want to work at Burger King, you had to buy your own pants.

“Black pants,” said the co-manager who hired me. “And black tennis shoes, too.”

Magnanimously, the corporation of Burger King does supply you with one blue shirt to wear. (Want a second shirt? Pay!) Everything else came out of your pocket. So for the first week, it cost you money to work at Burger King.

“Before you get out there,” the co-manager was saying, “you gotta watch these videos.”

Burger King spent top dollar to produce a series of nifty training videos designed to teach the lowest common denominator how to to whip up a bunch of fries without hot-greasing yourself all the way to the emergency room. The best part about the videos was the magical plot.

Each video opened on a deserted island, where two pals find themselves shipwrecked. They sit on the beach, watching beautiful sunset after beautiful sunset, until one finally says, “Hey…tell me again how you guys make those milkshakes at Burger King!” You’ll never write a smoother segue to a 10 minute demonstration of milkshake-making. I’ve tried to top it, but I can’t.

Later, I was given a tour of the freezer and the kitchen facilities. No matter what your official capacity was at Burger King, you were expected to know how to whip up any sandwich without notice. If a customer shot the Whopper-making man, then I was prepared to slide the body aside and take his place.

“Guess which fry I stuck up my butt? Have a nice day.”

The pressure position was the drive-thru. You had to man a register, hand out bags of food, and communicate to customers through arcane speaker technology all at the same time. Because Burger King loves its employees, a digital clock times your performance. If the customer wants to check his/her bag to make sure the apple pie is there, tough. That’s time added to your record.

What you may not know about the drive-thru is that everything you say is clearly audible. When you mutter, “God, that guy is an asshole!” the drive-thru cashier can hear you. This is the guy handling your order. Something to think about.

****

For the first two months of my servitude with Burger King, I overcharged every customer who ordered a value meal.

This was not my clandestine means of screwing people. I simply rang up the order incorrectly. The cashier pad contained a Value Meal code that I was not made aware of. As a result, when somebody ordered a Whopper Meal, I’d just ring up a Whopper, medium fries, and a medium coke.

Of course, it wasn’t management that questioned this unexpected windfall, but an irate customer with enough brain cells to do the math.

“This ain’t no value!” he shouted.

He was right about that. My register always recorded a surplus of cash as a result, which mildly puzzled my managers with every inspection of the ledgers. Had it come up short, I would have absorbed anywhere between 40 to 1000 lashes with a cat-o-nine tails. Finally, somebody let me in on the secret Value Meal cashier combination.

By the end of my tour, I had become a cashier wizard. If I took your order, you could rest assured that you were receiving correct change my friend. Better yet, I was finally beginning to feel some camaraderie with my colleagues.

The all-stars of Burger King work the morning shift. After all, it’s far more inviting to open a fast food joint than to close one down. Plus, aside from the occasional bag of breakfast sandwiches for the office, the orders are much smaller in the morning. If you didn’t have any facial deformities, greeted customers without a death threat, and was never caught spitting in the fry basket, then you were a candidate for the morning crew.

Meanwhile, the night shift is comprised of the anti-social and the physically unappealing. Our customers were the angry, the unruly, and often the inebriated. There was one man who came in around seven every evening. He wore tan pants and a very crisp, white button down shirt. All he ever wanted was coffee.

“I’ll handle this,” said the co-manager. She’d accept his money, then proceed to pour his coffee. But not in a coffee cup. She poured it in a large soft drink cup. He’d wordlessly take the coffee, sit in a corner booth, and drink it in unsettling silence.

“Why does he get such a big cup of coffee,” I asked.

“Somebody once gave him a small cup, and he tossed it in her face,” answered the co-manager.

Also receiving large cups for the price of a small were cops. The night crew liked the police dropping by on a regular basis. The final few customers who arrived before closing time were always the creepiest.

“Why don’t you just gimme all the fries you got in the bin?”

Thing is, we ended up eating a lot of fries ourselves. We weren’t supposed to. An employee discount was something like 30%. But unless you were one of those Burger King managers who enjoyed frequent mutinies, it was wise to simply turn a blind eye to an employee who tossed an occasional BK Big Fish into the grease. I ate a record number of BK Big Fishes that summer.

For most of the crew that worked with me that summer, stolen fries and a leftover Whopper Jr. comprised a significant portion of an unbalanced diet. It wasn’t very healthy, but these weren’t very healthy guys anyway. They lived from one twelve pack of beer to the next. They were good people, but many of their friends were not. My goal was to graduate from college and get a cushy job in an air conditioned office building. There’s was to avoid the repo man for a record number of months.

My last day at Burger King came and went without fanfare. I low-fived some of the guys and promised that I’d keep in touch. I didn’t. But I think of them, like the guy with the snakes. And the man who worked to avoid his wife. Or the big coffee creep. I especially think of the co-manager who couldn’t stand me. What was her problem.

I’m a great looking guy. Deal with it.

If this article as a familiar ring to it, it’s because I wrote it like five years ago. Back then it was entitled Have It The Angry Czeck’s Way, You Hungry Assholes. But back then, The Angry Czeck was a bit loose with its standards, and looking back, well, quite frankly the writing sucks. So I rewrote the damned thing. But if you’re a big fan of HITACWYHA, then be my guest and read it.  – AC

I gleaned some of the McDonald’s/Burger King operational information from The Bathroom Readers Institute, a solid repository of fact.

“I wish I had never touched steroids. It was foolish and it was a mistake. I truly apologize. Looking back, I wish I had never played during the steroid era.”

Mark McGwire, in the end, had to talk about the past.

He didn’t want to. He raised his right hand and told a pile of Senators that he didn’t want to. But as Faulkner said, The past is not even past. It follows you around like a drunken hobo.

Mark McGwire abused steroids. He said he did it to recover from injury and to live up to his contract (a message he could have plucked from any steroids apologist on the Internet). He claimed he had good years on steroids and good years when he wasn’t on steroids. He said he took steroids in 1998, the year he clubbed 70 home runs. The same year a reporter found a bottle of andro (a steroid catalyst) in plain view on his locker.

That always intrigued me, that carelessly placed bottle of androstenedione . It was almost like McGwire was reaching out; like he wanted to be caught. Like he was saying, “You know…I’m breaking Maris’ record by using steroids. You do know that, right?”

We knew. Of course we knew! You didn’t have to be Encyclopedia Brown to piece it together.

I remember watching your Oakland Athletics take on the Cincinnati Reds in 1990 World Series. Jesus Christ! You looked huge! You all looked huge – Jose Canseco, Dave Parker, Dave Henderson, even Terry Steinbeck and yes, Rickey Henderson. You all had forearms the size of Geo Prisms. Eric Davis, the biggest slugger on the Reds, looked like an Oompa-Loompa compared to the smallest of you.

And yet, we knew nothing, right? The Oakland Athletics looked more like the Oakland Raiders, and that seemed normal to us. With a straight face, we talked about training, diet, and natural supplements. We lied as easily to ourselves as McGwire would lie to Congress  a decade and a half later.

When McGwire was summoned to Washington D.C. to respond to Jose Canseco’s charges of PED abuse, we were pulling for Mark to come clean. We wanted him to say, “Yes, I took steroids. At the time, it was legal, if frowned upon. But a ton of cash was at stake. A ton! Without it, I’m barely better than Ray Lankford, and quite frankly I didn’t want to make Lankford bucks.”

We would have pretended to be outraged, but really we would have been relieved. Finally, we would no longer have to maintain our counterfeit ignorance. McGwire’s admission might have created a culture of forgiveness in which all the creatures of steroids could find acceptance. Best of all, we would cease all our phony righteous indignation.

Instead, Mark didn’t want to talk about the past. Sosa pretended that he couldn’t speak English. Palmeiro wagged his finger at a panel of Congressman. Even the loudmouthed Curt Schilling was suddenly at a loss for words. Only Jose Canseco, the human cartoon, had the shrunken testicles to talk.

Mark is talking now, and quite frankly, late is better than never. Most of us will accept the apology because forgiving him means forgiving ourselves. Some won’t accept his apology. Some will be pompous blowhards who continue to pretend that they had nothing to do with the steroid era. Here are words from ESPN’s baseball writer, Jayson Stark:

Stark: And to all the folks who got caught up in that special summer (of 1998), let down their guard and basked in one of the most compelling sports stories of our lifetimes.

Does (McGwire) really understand what he did to them? I don’t think he does.

Nobody had their “guard down,” Stark. Nothing was done to us. We knew, we cheered and we didn’t care. We still don’t care. Where are your arrogant words for David Ortiz, Mr. Stark? He made the same denial and then the same confession as McGwire.

Let’s look at the NFL this year, where star wide receive Dwayne Bowe was suspended four games for testing positive for PEDs. Outside from some fantasy football owners, there was no outrage. No demand for explanations or apologies. No accusations that the game of football had been tarnished.

Here are the words of fellow ESPN blowhard, Gene Wojciechowski:

Wojciechowski: McGwire cheated the game, the fans, the memory of Roger Maris and himself. It is admirable that he stepped forward and admitted his wrongdoing, but it does nothing to change the essential facts. His accomplishments are forever scarred by scandal.

If Mr. Bowe should score 50 touchdowns next year, neither Stark nor Wojchiechowski would even remember Bowe’s suspension. Yes, McGwire did cheat the game, Roger Maris, and himself. He did not cheat the fans who screamed for more. He did not cheat the sportswriters who wrote glowingly about his deeds, the owners who paid him handsomely for selling seats and jerseys, or the managers who won games thanks to the 550-ft home runs he artificially muscled out of the ballparks.

We got our money’s worth.

I remember it like it was a couple years ago.

I’m cruising in the Anger Mobile, on my way home, when NPR reports that a Democratic candidate for President just made a damaging racial gaff.

“(Senator Barack Obama) is the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”

Chaos ensued! Clearly, the comment was racist! After all, few describe white people as “bright and clean.” (Although I have heard many white people described as “nice looking.”)  And furthermore, one never should call an African-American “articulate.” Not when approved words and terms are so readily available, like “dignity,” “dignified,” and the always awesome, “quiet dignity.”

Apologies were hastily made. Republicans pretended to be offended. And eventually, the candidate who delivered the careless quote dropped out of the race.

That asshole was Joe Biden, and Obama was so offended by being called articulate, clean and nice-looking that he made Biden vice-president.

Also, he might have made a penis joke.

Now Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada is being judged for his moment of inarticulateness.

In the book Game Change, journalists John Heilemann and Mark Halperin reveal a once private conversation in which Mr. Reid calls Mr. Obama a “light-skinned African American with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”

Negro dialect? Was this conversation recorded in the 60s? Fast as lightening, Mr. Reid dialed Mr. Obama and apologized like a madman, and Mr. Obama, possibly sensing a moment of deja vu, quickly forgave the Senator. This is not enough for the Republicans, who smell blood (Reid is up for election in 2010).

“There is a big double standard here,” said RNC leader Mike Steele, who is black, on NBC’s Meet the Press. “When Democrats get caught saying racist things, you know, an apology is enough.”

You know what? Maybe.

Several years ago, ESPN went completely nuts and hired neo-con Rush Limbaugh to offer commentary during the network’s Sunday morning NFL preview show, Sunday Countdown. It was terrible, of course, because Rush was as articulate on Countdown as Dennis Miller was on Monday Night Football. Then Rush decided to add some of the flavor of his own show to the Countdown mix by injecting his views on African-American quarterback, Donovan McNabb.

“Sorry to say this, I don’t think he’s been that good from the get-go,” Limbaugh said. “I think what we’ve had here is a little social concern in the NFL. The media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well. There is a little hope invested in McNabb, and he got a lot of credit for the performance of this team that he didn’t deserve. The defense carried this team.”

Oooooh. Sorry, Rush. Wrong audience. If ESPN had a time machine, they would have traveled to the dawn of man and fired Rush then. They settled for canning him the next day.

But what did Mr. Limbaugh actually say? A reason we cheered for Arthur Ashe and Tiger Woods is that those men excelled in an arena that had been previously exclusive to white people. We pretend that this is not true (“I don’t see color!”), but the pioneering spirit Woods and Ashe displayed is simply part of the cache. And in Tiger’s case especially, he reaped the rewards. Limbaugh implied that the media – perhaps for the sake of simply publishing a better story – was relying on McNabb to become a dominating presence at the quarterback position, and that maybe that reliance was not being brought to fruition.

Wow. Rush wouldn’t even stand next to Jackson or Irvin!

We crucified Limbaugh anyway. He made the mistake of vocalizing what many people think, and for that there is no forgiveness.

Except, oddly, there is forgiveness for Harry Reid. Kansas City Star reporter and FOX News columist, Jason Whitlock (African American) – a man who also forgave Limbaugh in a 2009 column – recently posted this comment about Reid on Twitter:

@WhitlockJason: I don’t get the Harry Reid controversy. I don’t know any black people who wouldn’t agree with Reid’s private comment.

Perhaps with Mr. Obama in the Oval Office, it is time to have an honest dialogue about race. The things that make us uptight now should be reevaluated. A senator should be able to make a candid observation that a black man can win the presidency by simply catering to the dialect styles preferred by the majority of voters. That he uses an antiquated term like “Negro” only exposes Reid as a goober, not a racist.

Just so we’re clear, I still hate Rush Limbaugh.

Set the new airport body-screening machines to “Awesome” because the Angry Czeck is coming through.

Some people are freaking out about a sensible proposal to place full-body scanners in our airports. It’s a violation of privacy! My hoo-ha! My wee-wee! Personally, I’d rather that strangers take a peak at my pecker than have a stranger’s underwear explode on my flight to Dallas. I think it’s a good trade.

The digital body knows if you are “packing” or “stuffing.”

Yeah. I’m surprised too. After all, I’m the one who condemned the Minnesota Airport Police for entrapping Senator Larry Craig in their nifty homo-sex sting. I’m the one who expressed concern about installing cameras on traffic lights. I’m the one who predicted that the drones that are bombing Pakistanis today will be spying on American citizens tomorrow.

But I’m all for a zesty digital body scan.

I’m against a body scan when walking into Target. But at Target, I’m not about take a seat inside a tube hurtling like a comet 30,000 feet in the sky. Despite what Superman says, flying is hazardous. We are countering nature’s intentions. We’re already asking for trouble. By not taking every measure to ensure that nothing goes wonky, we’re simply not being very responsible travelers.

Because of one imbecile with a hair-brained scheme, I have to take my shoes off at the airport. Everyone at the airport looks ridiculous standing around in their socks. Why are we suddenly concerned for our dignity now? Scan me, baby!

Sure, you’ll no longer be assured of getting on the plane with your vibrating anal bead. We all have to pay the price for security. How steep a price is up to us. Already, members of the media are predicting waves of racial and religious profiling in the security lines. We are being urged not to overreact.

Fareed Zakaria: I think the most important thing we should be watching for is the danger of an overreaction. It’s important to remember that the purpose of terrorism is to terrorize the public. In other words, it’s a tactic that’s unique because it depends entirely on the response of the public. The more we overreact, the more we whip ourselves up into a froth of hysteria, and the more we are actually helping this tactic succeed. (From CNN interview)

Mr. Zakaria is correct. We cannot allow the terrorist to pollute what it is to be American. As a result, we as a nation will always flirt with danger. Call it Cowboy Culture. Just as we once took risks in expanding Westward or landing on the moon, today we take chances simply by commuting to Denver. This is America, buddy. If you want to play it safe, I suggest you contact a Realtor in Finland.

Meanwhile, let’s start installing those crazy, Total Recall body scanners! If they make me look slimmer, I might pass through for a second time.

***