Sometimes, life is more like Fox News than the Daily Show. Yesterday was a prime example of that, perhaps more evidence that my poor country is collectively going bat-shit crazy. What happened? A woman on a flight from London to Washington appears to have been unable to control her claustrophobia. I know a lot of people with that fear, and it’s not funny. It’s also not terrorism. It’s pretty easy to lose complete control of yourself and just panic. I have a raging fear of heights, something that kicks in very easily when I feel the sway of a bridge or lookout tower beneath my feet (but never on planes, owing to the illusion of “solid ground” the plane offers).
What followed was the kind of circus that you’d expect the Daily Show to just eat right up. The plane was escorted by fighters into Boston, having been rerouted to land earlier (and away from Washington). When it landed, officials took control of the flight, deplaned and interviewed passengers, searched ALL passenger luggage, and basically demonstrated the kind of knee-jerk abandonment of reason that characterizes this nation every time the hint of something bad occurs.
Here’s where we depart from comedy to tragedy. An airport official made a quote in the media that would be funny, if it weren’t serious. We all laugh at fake news programs that pick on a press conference being held for something like a drunk driving arrest, where the police chief goes and says something like, “I want to stress that Mr. Smith is in no way connected to NAMBLA, the Irish Republican Army, or Nazi war criminal support organizations that are rumored to exist all over the globe. He is charged with drunk driving. I’ll take questions.” The point of saying those three things about the man is never clear, except to make him sound more evil than he is – an innocent drunk, implicated by a negative statement in loving little boys, bombing British locales, or helping ferry Nazi war criminals. But, believe it or not, here is the statement the airport spokesperson made about this claustrophobic woman:
“I don’t know what she had on board with her, but we have been told she did not have a screw driver, she did not have any liquids such as Vaseline, and any notebook she may have had, it did not contain an al-Qaeda reference,” Naccara said. He said he had no information about matches.
WTF. WTF.
