Reason Magazine - Staff

Fool's Gold Medals

jamesmorrow123@aol.com (James Morrow) — Thu, 07 Nov 2002 00:00:00 EST

With a massive budget deficit, a year-old hole in the ground where once $100 billion worth of office building stood and 3,000 lives were lost, with a mayor whose biggest concern is whether or not his citizens escape to Marlboro country when they drown their sorrows at the corner saloon, New York City clearly doesn't have enough problems. That's why it was such great news that the United States Olympic Committee announced last week that the Big Apple would be America's nominee to host the 2012 Olympics.

It's not only that there are so many reasons to hate the Olympics on an abstract level. The c'mon-people-now-smile-on-your-sibling athletic transnational progressivism is enough to turn the stomach of anyone with more commitment to national sovereignty than Strobe Talbott. The athletes aren't even supposed to get paid, which is just somehow un-American. On a practical level, the games have no place in New York. The Olympics are more for cities like Salt Lake City, which hosted the games earlier this year amid spectacular scandal. Leaders in countries like China or Turkey hope that a hugely expensive international media spectacle will help out their reputations in the "international community"—sort of the way building a giant stadium for the Rumble In the Jungle forever enshrined Mobutu Sese Seko as a beacon of human rights and enlightened governance.

But New York? Just about everyone on the planet knows about New York, and every one of them has an opinion on it. The city doesn't need to stage a spectacle like hosting the games to make its bones on the world stage.

Yet officials and other grandstanders have been falling all over themselves first to get the nomination, and now to hope for the final nod. No less a luminary than track-suit cleric Al Sharpton has declared his hope that the Olympics would provide "a revival of the spirit of the city," presumably in the wake of the September 11 attacks. But while that day will live in infamy, it's a fair bet that a decade from now, New York will be well and truly on its feet again. Hell, even those unfortunate enough to have a birthday on the 11th may even be able to get away with having a few friends over for cake and beer.

One has to wonder what planet these Olympic advocates are living on—one where invitations to cocktail receptions for foreign dignitaries are used as currency, presumably. New York is a nightmare of traffic and crowds on a good day; the idea of hundreds of thousands of spectators, athletes, media types, and dignitaries taking over the city in the middle of summer would be enough to make even the most die-hard Manhattanite write a check for a share in the Hamptons. (Not surprisingly, very few of the officials enthused about the games have to take the subway to and from work in the middle of August.)

Yet everyone involved seems to be taking a holiday from reality, imagining that because New York's infrastructure already performs at 110%, there's no reason it can't work at 150% for a few weeks. Again, to quote Sharpton, "As a city that is probably the capital of gridlock, I don't think that would be a major problem." This is a statement nearly as stunning as Mayor Mike Bloomberg's recent premonition that bar patrons will drink more if they aren't allowed to smoke. And where the games will actually happen is yet another question; while there is talk of building a stadium over the rail yards on Manhattan's West Side, politics and geography will surely conspire to spread events through every hack's constituency within fifty miles.

Right now I live in Sydney, a city that was "fortunate" enough to have hosted the Olympics two years ago. The idea was to give Sydney and Australia some serious face-time on the world stage. Presumably, Paul Hogan, the Croc Hunter and several decades of Qantas ads (to say nothing of world-famous attractions like koalas and the Sydney Opera House) had failed to clue the world in about the existence of Terra Australis. Sydneysiders, a wonderfully friendly bunch, apparently had a great time during the games, but today the city is stuck with a massive complex of former Olympic venues that have become little more than a venue for school field days. My wife recently had to go to the "Olympic Park" (a good 45 minutes out of downtown) to register for some university courses recently, which shows just how desperately officials want to find some use for the site. The only people she encountered were a busload of Japanese tourists, who were more interested in having their pictures taken with our 9-month-old baby than in looking at countless rows of empty bleacher seats.

New York is already a world capital of everything from finance to fashion. Does it really need a billion-dollar boondoggle like the Olympics blowing through town, leaving its architectural detritus around the five boroughs and beyond? I doubt it. And considering that they already have to endure the United Nations, with its scofflaw diplomatic-plate parkers and corrupt feel-good internationalism, it's pretty clear that New Yorkers are already doing enough for global understanding.

Regrets: Too Many to Mention

jamesmorrow123@aol.com (James Morrow) — Fri, 11 Oct 2002 00:00:00 EDT

Yesterday's City Council testimony by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg—part of the mayor's "Smoke-Free Workplace" campaign, which would impose a a California-style ban on smoking in both restaurants and bars—may have raised emotions on all sides of the issue. But for one New York voter, the strongest emotion of all was remorse.

I'm not really sure what I expected when I pulled the lever for Mike Bloomberg in the New York City mayoral elections nearly a year ago. Looking back on it, I'm not even sure I expected him to win, considering his 16-point deficit in the polls just a week before the election.

More than anything else, I wanted to at least register my distaste for the opportunistic, weasely Mark Green, whose desperation to live in Gracie Mansion was even more off-putting than Al Gore's lust for the White House.

But Bloomberg did win, thanks in no small part to a last-minute push made possible by his $50 million campaign war chest. Following in the footsteps of a man notorious for his much-maligned quality-of-life campaigns, Bloomberg—an alleged Republican in a Democrat town—was set to run the country's biggest city, and try to turn it into a nanny state more tightly controlled than anything his predecessor, or his state's U.S. Senator, Hillary Clinton, could ever imagine.

Ultimately, Mike Bloomberg's problem is that he hasn't spent enough time in the real world. Even though, or perhaps because, he is fantastically wealthy (ranking 29 on the 2002 Forbes 400 list of richest Americans) Bloomberg is able to entertain a worldview not dissimilar to that of an "earnest young person" who sets out to change the world by hanging out at subway stations collecting signature to save the snail-darter or traveling the world with papier-mache puppets to protest capitalism. When he talks about smoking, "Mayor Mike" sounds like a 7th-grader who's just gotten his first in-school lecture about the dangers of tobacco and decided to rush home and warn his Pall Mall-sucking mom.

"I think anyone who smokes is crazy," Bloomberg has been heard to declare. He essentially accuses City Council members who vote against him of murder—or something pretty damn close. Indeed, his morals are so outraged by the thought of anyone smoking tobacco that it's even clouded the business sense that made him wealthy. (Bloomberg's thoughts on marijuana, though, are a different story.) Testifying yesterday before the City Council, Bloomberg actually said, "If I owned a bar I would love to have this legislation passed because I would be making money based on how much alcohol is consumed, and if people are not smoking they will probably be drinking more."

Well, yes, people would be drinking more. At home, where they can fire up a Camel without being hassled.

But it's not just his ludicrous campaign to ban smoking in bars and restaurants that makes me regret my vote. Time after time, Bloomberg seems determined to out-Rudy Rudy, a man who took an out-of-control city and made it a beacon of urban management.

Bloomberg, on the other hand, just wants to make New York a beacon of micro-management.

Take his noise crusade. Almost any civilized human being will agree that the inventor of car alarms should be run over by an ice cream truck. But just as Bloomberg's desire to stamp out smoking in bars misses one of the fundamental natures of the business, so too does his so-called Operation Silent Night (which could theoretically let cops ticket people for talking too loudly) fail to grasp part of the charm of New York City—namely, that it's a loud place. This when the city's subways regularly blast through what the strap-hanging mayor considers acceptable noise levels.

And it's not just the infringement of personal liberty issues, like the right to smoke in a bar or hoot a little too loudly upon exiting it, that make Bloomberg's management of the city disturbing. Bloomberg has made clear his intention to use taxpayer money not only to finance abortions but also to force doctors in public hospitals to learn the procedure even if they are ethically opposed to it. This plan would "make pro-life taxpayers finance what they believe to be the slaughter of innocents," as feminist writer Wendy McElroy noted, and even more disurbingly, would violate doctors' long-recognized rights to their own ethical positions on the matter.

I guess I was a fool to believe that Bloomberg—a former Democrat who changed party affiliations to run for office—would become anything but what he is today. After all, the signs were there; The New Republic reported long before election day on the future mayor's penchant for micromanagement, and employees at his media empire have long had to cope with filtering software more sensitive and politically correct than a Smith College undergrad. I can't take back my vote, and I sure as hell (er, heck, as the Bloomberg computers would make me put it) wouldn't want to have given it to Green. But considering that he is in charge of a city that took a hit of 3,000 lives and $100 billion last September, doesn't Bloomberg have more important things to worry about than how his city's citizens choose to blow off steam?

Banned in Brisbane

jamesmorrow123@aol.com (James Morrow) — Thu, 01 Aug 2002 00:00:00 EDT

"You can't raise a child in Australia," a justifiably horrified friend told me when I announced that my wife and I would be moving to her hometown of Sydney. "They've banned Grand Theft Auto 3!" -- a wildly popular video game notorious for its gore, crime, and sex. Aussie regulators had worried that the game would be a bad influence on the youth of a country whose national hero is the outlaw Ned Kelly. (Faced with the prospect of being shut out of an entire continent, the manufacturer ended up making a sanitized version just for Oz dwellers.)

As far as its officials are concerned, the nation whose ecosystem has more creative ways to kill you than any other on the planet can't handle a little R-rated electronica. In a country that produces the world's 10 most poisonous snakes, whose chief cultural export is crocodile wrestlers, and where a prime minister once went swimming and vanished without a trace (there's a municipal pool named after him), the locals are literally not to be left to their own devices.

It's not just PlayStations and GameCubes that are now considered potential corruptors in the homeland of the rock band AC/DC. In recent months, Australian legislators, pundits, and academics have become so enamored with trying to forbid anything they find upsetting that some of them would be more at home in an Oberlin College sensitivity workshop than in the country that coined the phrase, "No worries, mate."

Australia -- the rugged land of the Outback, famously shark-infested waters, and an inscrutable version of football whose basic point seems to be inflicting physical punishment -- is now threatening to become the free world's leader in restricting anything that smacks of fun.

Today, school kids aren't even allowed out at recess unless their heads are covered, lest they become future skin cancer cases, as part of the education establishment's suggestive-sounding "no hat, no play" campaign.

Many nations, including Australia, have banned cigarette advertising, and there are people everywhere, including the Land Downunder, who would like to see fast food companies get the same treatment. But Australia is hell-bent on taking things even further.

The most ludicrous of these proposals -- and one that has developed a surprising amount of traction, so to speak -- is a ban on ads in which automobiles are shown being operated unsafely (that is to say, at all). Even the kid who says "zoom, zoom" in the Mazda ads would be hauled off to Botany Bay if some state legislators have their way.

"I think our road safety message is being undermined in these ads," said Peter Batchelor, the transportation minister for the state of Victoria. After all, who knows how many rainy day fender-benders could be prevented if only drivers were barred from seeing images of their cars being driven at speeds approaching the legal limit? While the ban on car advertising has not yet been made law, automakers are considering a regime of "self-regulation."

This sort of ban is threatening to have a detrimental effect on Australian culture, which has never prided itself on restraint. "It's becoming a very bland world," one advertising executive lamented recently.

If this trend continues, it's only a matter of time before a great country that birthed the trigger-happy apocalyptic antihero Mad Max becomes a place where no one is allowed to possess anything sharper than safety scissors.

Worse yet is the likelihood that Americans will glom onto the Australian model just like it fell, however fleetingly, for Olivia Newton-John, the Bee Gees, and Paul Hogan. All it will take is one U.S. activist to declare Australia the most enlightened country in the world on the grounds that you can drive for 1,000 miles without seeing a billboard for Marlboro or McDonald's and then turn on the hotel TV without seeing a single car being operated unsafely.

And if that "zoom, zoom" kid does show up on screen, he damned well better be wearing a hat.

Bye-Bye, Jury

jamesmorrow123@aol.com (James Morrow) — Fri, 01 Mar 2002 00:00:00 EST

Britain is poised to eliminate almost two-thirds of all jury trials, according to a report in the New Statesman. New rules would allow a wide range of offenses (including any crime with a maximum sentence of less than two years) to be tried solely by a judge employed by the crown. To make the situation scarier, much of this change is being implemented by bureaucratic stealth and with as little public comment as possible. As the New Statesman's Nick Cohen put it, "In America, Australia or any other common-law democracy, it would need a coup d'etat to implement the government's programme."

Part of the reason Tony Blair's Labour government has been able to get away with its scheme is the British public's outrage at a crime wave that has had shocked citizens gasping, as one did in a CBS News report last May, that "London is more dangerous these days than New York."

French Miss

jamesmorrow123@aol.com (James Morrow) — Fri, 01 Mar 2002 00:00:00 EST

p>There's a certain type of American sophisticate who rhapsodizes about howwonderful and civilized Europe is in comparison with his own land of the free. Like high school French Club presidents who pompously describe the day's cafeteria offerings as lacking "a certain je ne sais quoi," such people can't stop talking about how magnifique it would be if the United States got in line with the Continent on everything from government-mandated maternity leave to long, wine-soaked lunches.

Since September 11, members of the Beret of the Month Club have discovered a new fault in the American way of doing things. The country's airports, they complain, have been guarded all these years by poorly skilled workers employed by private companies. When Europhiles head over to Paris or Rome for their annual vacations, one of the first things they notice on the ground is the number of armed police swaggering around the airport with automatic weapons.

"America's airport security is shockingly lax," Gregg Easterbrook declared in The New Republic shortly after the attacks. In contrast, he wrote, "Within sight of security checkpoints in most European airports are police with assault rifles, wearing armor vests....Once, in France, I was asked to turn on my sniper-bullet-shaped pocket flashlight to demonstrate that it really was a flashlight." A nice story, but it's hard to believe that even before September 11 the most illiterate minimum-wage screener in the U.S. wouldn't have raised an eyebrow if you had thrown faux ammo in the dish with your change.

Easterbrook's widely echoed feeling that he is safer in Europe is only a feeling, one that is demonstrably misguided. In Europe, governments set standards for aviation security (just as in America). And private companies actually do the work of screening passengers (just as in America -- at least until recently). It's worth noting that French cops -- public employees, every man Jacques of them -- allowed would-be shoe bomber Richard C. Reid to board an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami in December. What's more, the French police's OK came after the private employees of American Airlines demanded further scrutiny of their oddly acting passenger (who paid for his ticket in cash and checked no bags).

In any case, Reid's conning of French cops came after Congress passed a law nationalizing airport security. In November, the House and Senate came to terms on an aviation security bill that made baggage screeners federal employees and set new minimum standards for such workers. The standards required that all screeners possess a high school diploma or its equivalent. Realizing that such a stringent requirement would have resulted in an immediate canning of a quarter of the workforce, regulators decreed that a year of experience staring at an X-ray machine screen was the equivalent of a GED.

In other words, those who said the legislation would do nothing for security -- those who were accused of, as Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) put it, "putting...a private profit ahead of public protection" -- turned out to be right. The only outcome is a fatter government payroll, not a fitter work force.

Ultimately, though, it may not matter who pays the checkers or whether they went to high school. The U.S. civil aviation system is an awesomely big affair that moves far too many passengers every day for it to be possible to plug every leak without imposing crippling costs and delays on a prime mover of the country and the world. What that means is that we must all continue to take our exceedingly good chances, and as passengers we must all be en garde.

Richard Reid's shoe bomb probably would have made it past a battalion of Ph.D. civil servants confiscating nail clippers. It was attentive airline employees who first realized he needed scrutiny, and it was vigilant passengers and crew who kept him from detonating his bomb. Just as passengers did their duty on United Flight 93 and prevented it from hitting terrorist targets, in what is today properly remembered as a stunning act of American private enterprise.

Good Enough for Government Work

jamesmorrow123@aol.com (James Morrow) — Thu, 03 Jan 2002 00:00:00 EST

There is a certain type of wannabe sophisticate in America who rhapsodizes about how wonderful and civilized Europe is in comparison with his own land of the free. Like high school French Club presidents who pompously describe the day's cafeteria offerings as having "a certain je ne sais quoi," these people can't stop talking about how wonderful it would be if the United States got in line with "the Continent" on everything from giving women scads of government-mandated maternity leave to making it once again acceptable to leave the office in the middle of the day for a long and boozy lunch.

But since September 11, members of the Beret of the Month Club have discovered a new fault in the American way of doing things: The country's airports, they complain, have been guarded all these years by poorly skilled workers working for (sacre bleu!) private companies. When Europhiles head over to Paris for their annual vacations (complaining bitterly the whole way over, "Can you believe we only get two weeks off?"), one of the first things they notice on the ground is the number of heavily armed gendarmes swaggering around the airport with automatic weapons.

Wouldn't it make sense, they say, for America to follow Mother Europe's lead and put federal employees on the job instead of the "burger-flippers" currently employed by private companies to check bags? "America's airport security is shockingly lax," declared Gregg Easterbrook in the New Republic shortly after the attacks. In contrast, Easterbrook writes, "Within sight of security checkpoints in most European airports are police with assault rifles, wearing armor vests....Once, in France, I was asked to turn on my sniper-bullet-shaped pocket flashlight to demonstrate that it really was a flashlight."

A nice story, but it's hard to believe that even the most illiterate guard in America would not have raised an eyebrow if you had thrown look-alike ammo in the dish with your change, even before September 11. (Easterbrook also stands up for the working class in the proud tradition of the leftish New Republic: "Pass through security at most American airports...and you will be inspected by phlegmatic, minimum-wage workers, often recently arrived immigrants with low job motivation and a limited grasp of English." Gosh, Gregg, if you can see phlegmatic non-English-speaking foreigners at home, why bother going to Paris?)

Easterbrook's feeling (echoed by many, from Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to travelers pulled aside in airports by TV camera crews in "what do you think about security?" interviews) that he is safer in Europe because there are a bunch of guys with guns hanging around the gates is fine, except for one thing: It is only a feeling, one that is in this case demonstrably wrong. In Europe, while government sets the standards for aviation security (just as in America), private companies actually do the work of screening passengers (again, just as in America--until recently).

And while it is a scary way to prove the fallaciousness of the argument, it must be noted that French cops allowed would-be shoe bomber Richard C. Reid to board an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami recently, even though he checked no luggage, paid for his ticket in cash, carried little more with him than a Koran and a pair of explosive sneakers, and as it turns out attended the same mosque as Zacarias Moussaoui, believed to be the "20^th hijacker" of September 11. This after the private employees of American Airlines demanded further scrutiny by local authorities of their oddly acting passenger.

Still, a few inconvenient facts have never been able to stand in the way of a good piece of government-expanding legislation. Anyway, Reid's conning of French cops--government employees, every man Jacques of them--did not come in time for Congress to take it into account. Just before Thanksgiving the House and Senate came to terms on an aviation security bill that federalized baggage screeners and set minimum standards for such workers, including a high school diploma--standards that were quickly weakened once regulators panicked at the thought of laying off a quarter of the work force. They decided instead that a year's worth of experience staring at an x-ray machine screen was as good as holding a G.E.D.

In other words, those who said that the legislation would do nothing for security but much to swell federal payrolls (and who were accused of, as Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) put it, "putting...private profit ahead of public protection") turned out to be right after all. The oft-maligned "burger flippers" get to keep their jobs, but they've now got Uncle Sam signing their paychecks.

Ultimately, though, it doesn't matter who pays the baggage checkers, or even whether or not they went to high school. The U.S. civil aviation system is an awesomely big affair that moves far too many passengers every day to guarantee that every leak can be plugged (by, say, imposing an El Al-style security regime) without imposing crippling costs and delays on a prime mover of the country and the world.

What that means is that we must all continue to take our exceedingly good chances, and as passengers we must all be vigilant. Richard Reid's shoe bomb would have made it past a battalion of post-graduate civil servants confiscating nail clippers and inspecting laptops. Ultimately it was his appearance that tipped off airline employees, and vigilant passengers and crew who kept him from detonating his clumsily engineered but potentially deadly shoe bomb--just as passengers did their duty on United Flight 93 after learning the true nature of their fate in what is today remembered as an ultimate act of American private enterprise.

Goo-Goo Dolls

jamesmorrow123@aol.com (James Morrow) — Mon, 17 Dec 2001 00:00:00 EST

If you are reading this, then it is a pretty safe bet that you don't consider John D. Donahue the sort of guy you would enjoy getting cornered by at a cocktail party. After all, Donahue is the co-editor of a book called Governance Amid Bigger, Better Markets -- the sort of work that suggests the instructor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government might discreetly whip out a pocket caliper to make sure the store-bought canapés don't present a choking hazard to small children.

However, Donahue is just the sort of thinker story editors at places like the New York Times and New Yorker have embraced over the past three months, where it has been decided that (to borrow a phrase from current parlance) if government doesn't get a good deal bigger in the wake of September 11, and that if Americans don't start feeling real positive about trips to the DMV real fast, then the terrorists will have won. "After 50 years of market ascendancy, government may be poised to reclaim its role as an integral and admirable part of American life," wrote Donahue on the op-ed page of The New York Times this past Thursday. "Whether it does so depends as much on how we view our public servants as on how we finance our public institutions and the work they do." The article continues in this vein for several hundred words, saying that government has been "undervalued" for decades by Americans young and old and hoping that a cultural shift is taking place in which public service gets more respect and citizens start to see "solid protectors" in place of "feckless bureaucrats."

And Donahue is not the only one. Almost as soon as pundits found their footing a few weeks after the attacks, the good government -- or "goo-goo," in Washington wonk-speak -- drumbeat began, with the more smarty-pants members of the chattering class suggesting that Americans would, as if coming to their long-dulled and dormant senses, start to respect and value government again in the wake of September 11. The New Yorker, the New York Times' magazine, and the New York Times (to name a few) all threw in their two cents, with R.W. "Johnny" Apple taking a break from his plan to eat his way around the globe on the Sulzbergers' nickel to proclaim in a newsitorial from the White House that "big government is back in style."

It's hardly a new point, but with the spigot of opinion pieces on the subject still flowing, it bears repeating: September 11 didn't happen because there wasn't enough government, but despite too much government. Instead of providing for an effective common defense, the federal bureaucracy spent the last several decades meddling or attempting to meddle in far too many aspects of American life, from the appropriate size of the holes in Swiss cheese to how much water a toilet should use to do the job.

No wonder 19 foreign nationals could waltz into the country and teach themselves how to maintain level flight in a 767 without anyone in charge noticing something was amiss. And as far as September 11 promoting a new respect for government employees, well, it doesn't take a genius to understand that there's a big difference between the officials at the EEOC who make sure office Christmas parties don't get out of hand and the firefighters who charge into burning buildings.

Yet some people don't get this -- or, if they do, choose to ignore it in pursuit of their own agendas. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), in yet another attempt to step out of the shadow of his junior partner, published an op-ed of his own recently in the Washington Post. It's titled (you guessed it) "Big Government Looks Better Now" and suggests that more government spending is the key to national security. After all, there's a lot of public infrastructure out there, and it'll take a lot of federal union members to keep it safe. As a result, says Schumer, waving his magic wand, "The era of the shrinking federal government has come to a close." (Where Schumer gets the idea that government spending, especially when divorced from fluctuating defense spending, has been declining since Reagan was sworn in, as he later claims, is another question.) And in Business Week, Robert Kuttner of the American Prospect wrote a piece titled (brace yourself), " The Economy Needs More Big Government -- Now." Never mind that Americans haven't bought the line -- sure to be pushed hard by Democrats during the mid-term elections next year -- that Bush has mismanaged the economy, even as he has won the war. According to Kuttner, the United States needs a high-speed rail network to take the burden off airports, with an added dose of public health spending to boot, to get things moving again.

There is one heartening thing about those members of the good-government left who use the attacks on America and the need for heightened vigilance during wartime and beyond as an excuse to further their cause. If these editors and policy wonks on the left are so obviously up to their old tricks already, then maybe the terrorists haven't won.

Across the Pond Scum

jamesmorrow123@aol.com (James Morrow) — Tue, 11 Dec 2001 00:00:00 EST

To listen to European papers tell it, the jackbooted thugs long predicted by America's political fringes have finally taken over, Muslims are being rounded up like Japanese in the wake of Pearl Harbor, and anyone who speaks a discouraging word has bought himself a one-way ticket to a gulag in Alaska. Yet the bureaucratic power grabs being made in Washington in the name of terrorism pale in comparison to what's going on both in Britain and the rest of Europe, often with far less justification than the threat of madmen looking to crash planes into office buildings.

England's common law is one of its great gifts to Western civilization, and the traditions of trials by jury set down in the Magna Carta in 1297 have created, wherever installed, some of the fairest and most effective judicial systems in the world. Yet something as fusty and musty as the Magna Carta, with its Old English phrasings and talk of lords, knights, barons and earls just doesn't have a place in Tony Blair's modern "Cool Brittania." According to a report in the New Statesman, Britain is about to throw away much of this proud and important legal heritage by eliminating almost two-thirds of all jury trials, allowing a wide range of offenses (including any crime with a maximum sentence of less than two years) to be tried solely by a judge employed by Her Majesty. To make the situation scarier, much of this change is being implemented by bureaucratic stealth and with as little public comment as possible -- an audacious move that not even Bill Clinton, who never met an executive order he wouldn't sign, would be jealous of. As the New Statesman's Nick Cohen put it, "In America, Australia or any other common-law democracy, it would need a coup d'etat to implement the government's programme."

Part of the reason Blair's government has been able to get away with its scheme is the British public's absolute outrage at a crime wave that has had shocked Britons gasping, as one did in a CBS News report last May, that "London is more dangerous these days than New York." (The fact that the U.K. has embarked on an aggressive campaign to disarm its citizenry -- going so far as to prosecute a farmer for murder after he shot and killed a burglar on his property -- is surely not unrelated to this phenomenon). Add to that the alleged cost-saving aspect, and it's easy to see why bureaucrats in London are willing to sell out 700 years of heritage for a few pieces of Pounds Sterling.

But there's another aspect, even more worrisome, behind the proposal: the Blair administration's long love affair with the European continent and the Prime Minister's desire to drag his recalcitrant, unreconstructed populace into the supra-national organization. Over on the other side of the Channel, in Brussels, EU legislators are pushing a definition of terrorism (which would have to be incorporated into all member states' law books) which includes "offenses intentionally committed by an individual or a group against one or more countries, their institutions or people, with the aim of intimidating them and seriously altering or destroying the political, economic, or social structures of a country." While any thinking human being is rightfully outraged by terrorism, whether at the World Trade Center, on a Belfast shopping street, or in an Israeli nightclub, it's plain to see how this definition goes too far. No one particularly likes having their city shut down by patchouli-reeking globalization protesters for a few days, but it's also probably not a good idea to include the majority of them in terrorist databases, as the EU proposal would do.

It is interesting to look at the European definition of terrorism in the context of the Blair government's attempt to toss out history. After all, by getting rid of jury trials and tossing aside the Magna Carta -- which guarantees freedom and accountability that much of the world's citizens would happily risk their lives to live under -- the Home Office is not just putting its citizens in jeopardy, it is blowing up England's cultural heritage. Or, as they might put it in Brussels, "seriously altering or destroying the political, economic, or social structures of a country." It may not be as dramatic as, say, the Taliban destroying the giant Buddha at Bamiyan, but the impulse is the same: powerful people don't always want the past intruding on their power, to say nothing of individual citizens.

I.D.-latry

jamesmorrow123@aol.com (James Morrow) — Fri, 30 Nov 2001 00:00:00 EST

There's something almost touching about the faith some Americans have in identification cards. A few weeks ago I had a meeting in the headquarters of a giant media conglomerate in midtown Manhattan. The place used to have a simple guest policy: Visitors got a "pass" from the reception desk and then showed it to the security guards by the elevator banks. Nothing was very complicated about this, and it was an easy way to control who got into the building.

But on my last visit to the building, all that had changed. Before even being admitted to the lobby, I had to flash an I.D. to a security guard at the front door -- anything with a photo and a name would do -- who had been transformed into a minimum-wage bouncer, and who was doing his best to keep a crowd of visitors and staff filing orderly through his velvet ropes. The same experience was repeated in the reception office, where the staff was dutifully making sure no one was going to screw around with their friends in the building by being announced as "Seymour Butz."

And it wasn't just at this particular office building, where staffers haven't received so much as a postcard from their vacationing coworkers for fear of anthrax in the mail, that I.D.s are now required. Across the country, the act of reaching for one's driver's license is now a ritual. It's worth noting that Mohammed Atta and his cohorts, as passengers on U.S. flights on September 11, were required to show photo I.D.s--if not their foreign passports then driver's licenses, obtained either illicitly or through lax state regulations. Furthermore, they almost certainly told the check-in agents that yes, they packed their bags themselves, and no, nobody had given them anything to carry. Yet they were still able to carry out the worst terrorist attacks in American history.

As anyone who went to college in America knows, it is pathetically easy to get fake identity documents good enough to fool most bouncers and bartenders (perhaps they need to be federalized, too). All that is required is an enterprising friend with a scanner, a color printer, and a laminating machine available at any Office Depot. Just think what sort of equipment terrorists, financed by the prodigal son of a Saudi construction fortune, can get their hands on.

Yet the delusion that putting a name -- any name -- to a face in a day and age when America's enemies are willing to take the controls of a jetliner and slam themselves into an office building persists. In fact, some (most famously Oracle CEO Larry Ellison) have been pushing the notion that a "national I.D." card is the answer to America's security woes, and that making citizens reach for a piece of plastic linked to databases laden with personal information is the solution. Yet it's hard to see how this would do much more than let airlines know how many bad credit risks they have in the air at any given time.

Why? Much has been made of the terrorists' use of a sort of ju-jitsu against America: They took the country's strengths--prominent skyscrapers, easy air transportation, freedom of movement--and used them against it. But another weapon of theirs has been ignored and it's one that undermines the national I.D. case: patience.

The members of Al Qaeda who attacked the United States on September 11 (and other adherents who are almost certainly still here) spent years going about their business and blending in to society as best they could, and there's no reason to expect that they wouldn't have been able to obtain the sort of documents that are now being proposed. Although many Americans would surely feel that they were more secure and that they were "doing their part" by showing their papers even more than they already do, it's hard to see how making a fetish out of I.D. cards makes the country any more secure -- even if it does ease some peoples' insecurities.

Clipper Class

jamesmorrow123@aol.com (James Morrow) — Thu, 08 Nov 2001 00:00:00 EST

Let's get this straight. During the months and years of planning that led up to September 11, the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, the FAA and Lord knows how many other federal alphabet agencies, with their billion-dollar budgets and whiz-bang technology, failed to figure out that 19 men, with the support of dozens of accomplices, were planning on turning commercial jets into flying missiles capable of killing thousands. Yet since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the groups coming under the most fire for allowing the terrorists to board the doomed aircraft have been private security companies working the metal detectors at airports.

To hear many tell it (especially editorial writers and the readers who love them), airport security guards must be transubstantiated into federal employees immediately. "We're from the government and we're here to help" should no longer be a scary thought now that we're at war, the chatterers say, and the surest way to fix airport security in their eyes is with a stack of federal pay stubs and a strong union of the sort that has already given public sector employees a bad name in many other agencies.

Yet there is precisely zero evidence that such a move would do anything to make life safer for the traveling public -- even though it could lead to the abuse and harassment of passengers. Already there have been reports of injustices large and small in airports across the country, from Arab-Americans (including a congressman) being tossed off planes for their appearance to travelers having their manicure kits confiscated, lest they be used to commandeer an aircraft.

One unfortunate fellow was not allowed to fly simply because he carried a book with a picture of a bomb on the cover. It's as if a gang of the worst sort of zero-tolerance public school principals had suddenly taken over the nation's airports, aided and abetted by that segment of the population that will accept any idea if it's pitched as being "for our safety." Despite this hyperactive vigilance, a Nepalese man almost boarded a flight in Chicago Saturday night with a sack full knives and a can of mace, resulting in the immediate sacking of eight workers. Who knows how many labor tribunals would have to be called to achieve similar results if it were government agents who displayed such incompetence?

Meanwhile, for some, those confidence-building National Guard troops now patrolling the nation's airports have become a symbol of everything that can go wrong with giving government badges to security workers. Just ask R.V. Scheide. Scheide, a Sacramento-based photojournalist, was detained, forced to delete photos on his digital camera, had his notebook scrutinized by the FBI, and was pulled off a flight at Los Angeles International Airport he had already boarded on October 12 because he had the temerity to question a soldier who got angry at having his picture taken. "Suspicious behavior," the photographer was told.

Clearly, what is needed here is not more federal employees, but instead some sort of uniform standard to prevent abuses and keep everyone's eye on the real goal: preventing actually dangerous people with actually dangerous items from boarding planes. It is hard to see how federal workers will help further that goal, when in fact they would almost certainly create a hard-to-sack bureaucracy. In Europe and Israel (which has the world's strictest and most effective airport security set-up in the world), the workers staffing the metal detectors and passenger interview stands are private employees who work under the auspices of government regulators who set uniform standards and procedures. This is similar to the system already in place in the U.S. that ensures planes are properly maintained: American commercial aircraft are kept safely flying by privately-employed mechanics working under government supervision and regulation, and so far there haven't been any calls to federalize them. Yet.

There is certainly a role for the FAA or other Washington agencies to play here in terms of setting higher -- and more consistent -- standards for airport security. (Click here for the government's current official "yes" and "no" list of what can be brought on board, and whip out a copy the next time someone tries to take your nail clippers away at the gate).

But so far, it seems as though the government and the airlines have focused entirely on preventing a repeat of the September 11^th attacks, as if the terrorists would attempt to drink from that well again. Meanwhile, there is still little to no extra attention being paid to other, weaker, links in the security chain. Checked baggage is still rarely X-rayed or searched and, except on international flights, isn't even positively matched to passengers. And it's only a matter of time and human nature before security personnel let down their guard a bit and stop looking at every passenger who crosses their path as if they were terrorist versions of G. Gordon Liddy, able to turn the simplest household object into a lethal weapon with which to commandeer a plane.

Once that happens, it won't matter who signs the security screeners' paychecks -- only that they have strong training and consistent standards to follow in ferreting out the bad guys, and let the rest of us travel in peace.