Surrender Your Liquids
for release 08-14-06
Washington D.C.
I can't remember if the last time I was required to give up my liquids was at the sperm bank or for a urine test.
What I want to know is who gets all the gallons of shampoo and mouthwash and hair gel that is being confiscated at our airports in the name of security?
The Poet's Eye saw eighty dollar bottles of Halston and premium tequila going into those bins at the airports. Who gets this stuff? Does it go to a toxic land-fill or do they auction it on ebay by the ton?
Every traveler needs his liquids. Whether they are carried in skins or clay jars or barrels or casks or canteens, the traveler has always needed his liquids. Every illegal immigrant you see hiking across the desert in Arizona has his gallon of water. It's a travel necessity.
Alcohol is my liquid of choice. I never travel without it. On the last long bus ride I took, they didn't allow alcoholic beverages. So, I took a big bottle of mouthwash and dumped it out and replaced it with Bombay gin and two drops of blue food coloring. It worked like a charm. I had the freshest breath on the bus. I could probably go on CNN as an expert in clandestine terroristic liquids. I have experience.
As The Poet's Eye sees it, there are two sensible solutions to the problem of airline security. I don't think taking away your eye drops is going to have a big impact on terrorism.
(1,) Make all airline passengers fly nekked. That's right. No Clothes Allowed and no baggage. It would be perfect security. Only pure, naked bodies on airplanes. We would all arrive at our destinations just like we arrived into this world, bare and virginal. Airline travel would become a symbol of rebirth. Christians will love it.
(2.) The second approach would be best handled by the private sector. I'm thinking someone like Richard Branson. It's called Take Yo Chances Airline. The concept is simple. You pay your money and you get on the plane with anything you choose to bring with you--guns, knives, metal detectors, bombs, box cutters, hair gel, anything.
I'm sure it would be an instant commercial success. Cheap fare. No arriving at the airport three hours early. No waiting in lines. No humiliating cavity searches. You could actually use your laptop or your lip-gloss in flight. People would flock to this airline.
I'm sure you would get the odd nut-case who would want to call attention to himself by blowing the plane up, but hey, they could do the same thing in any shopping mall or stadium and get better body count. TYC Airlines would actually be safer because the terrorists wouldn't be the only passengers on board who were armed.
The Poet's Eye sees that travel has always been hazardous and it always will be. You can't walk out the door of your house without exposing yourself to any number of potential calamities. You don't even have to leave your house. More people are injured by slipping in their showers than are killed in airline hijacks. Still, the wise traveller goes well armed.
Allons! through struggles and wars!
The goal that was named cannot be countermanded.
Have the past struggles succeeded?
What has succeeded? yourself? your nation? Nature?
Now understand me well — it is provided in the essence of things that from any fruition of success, no matter what, shall come forth something to make a greater struggle necessary.
My call is the call of battle, I nourish active rebellion,
He going with me must go well arm'd,
He going with me goes often with spare diet, poverty, angry enemies, desertions.
--Walt Whitman from Song of the Open Road
