This is the image produced by a body scanner at an airport, from the German magazine Der Spiegel. Pretty revealing huh.
This is what some minimum-wage rent-a-cop will be leering at as thousands of people go through airport security in the coming holiday season, in spring, and next summer. Here's another one:
The name of the game is security, but as the last seven years of post-9/11 hysteria have taught us, it's no more than security theatre. Members of the public are being forced to submit to increasingly intrusive, increasingly insulting and increasingly stupid procedures, designed to combat a threat that hardly exists, in the name of preventing a problem which requires a completely different solution.
How much longer? What other indignities do they have in mind for us?
And why has nobody yet read 1984, despite my calling for it to be compulsory reading?
My own solution: don't travel by air. I don't need to. I'm due to go to Madrid in March, and I'll be taking the train. Other than that, no plans. My American friends? I won't be seeing anyone any time soon.
