I think the hug lacked dignity. It did not send a message of American power and forcefulness. So I fret about the reaction around the world to this kind of fraternity-like emotionalism in full public view.
Why not just a dignified, stand-up, serious handshake? That’s what Reagan would have done. A strong handshake shows friendship, respect, and even affection. But a big fat hug seems to go over the line.
Despite fearful rhetoric to the contrary, terrorism is not a transcendent threat. A terrorist attack cannot possibly destroy a country’s way of life; it’s only our reaction to that attack that can do that kind of damage. The more we undermine our own laws, the more we convert our buildings into fortresses, the more we reduce the freedoms and liberties at the foundation of our societies, the more we’re doing the terrorists’ job for them.
Follow up on this post: It’s just remarkable that, in the midst of a largely “fortified bunker” style reaction to 9/11, people’s notion of crime has become utterly unmoored from reality. If you constantly confront people with the seeming need for Fort Knox security at every moment, they’ll begin to think that things are far worse than they are. And that opinion has real consequences. None of which are very productive…
Matt Yglesias notes that we ‘Mericans have to pass through magnetometers to visit a museum or enter City Hall…and wonders:
It really strikes me as worth wondering exactly how much time and resources we’re wasting on all this. Just think about all the completely soft targets that exist even in the United States of America. If you assume the existence of a person with a functioning explosive device and a desire to massacre innocent people, there’s nothing stopping that person from detonating it on a crowded Chinatown bus or a packed subway platform. […] That indicates that the money and time spent doing security screening is basically 100 percent wasted. Even if you could just walk through the door at the State Department and blow up a bomb, it wouldn’t happen any more often than people walk into the Gallery Place Metro Station and blow up bombs.
It is 100% wasted. It’s 100% wasted at airports too. The attackers on 9/11 strolled right on through these same checks. Teams that specifically attempt to defeat checkpoints by smuggling weapons of various kinds through inevitably succeeded, so they just stopped trying rather than make everyone nervous. If a determined hijacker makes it to the checkpoint: game over. This is why we secured cockpit doors. The checkpoint isn’t there to stop anybody.
But then, Yglesias (seemingly inadvertently) gets at the real point of all this:
Having all the metal detectors everywhere, however, makes it seem as if there’s some vast quantity of terrorists at the gate being held back by our X-Ray machines.
Indeed it does. That is precisely the point. The program was initiated to instill fear in the general population, and is maintained because of institutional inertia. Full stop.
Lemkin 