A TSA agent lives on my street.
She was walking home from a shift with that gait of the neighborhood’s version of the 99% of us that are working stiffs – the local permutation is that the remaining 1% are Highly Visible Layabouts, aka hoods, for there are no rich people here – in that purposefully unflattering sweater-and-slacks combo that is designed to be dowdy in a way that dehumanizes its wearer, distills them into sewn shoulder patches and cheap epaulets.
Akin to most uniformed public servants, she’s forming the beginning of one of those truly impressive rear ends appropriate to somebody whose job it is to sit down for ten hours a day. That’s not to say her job is easy: She has to exude a form of malevolence while holding just short of actual aggression, a true front-line soldier of our Security Theater – that paramilitary arm of our Political Theater with all pomp and little to show for it besides the cowing of those obedients who long only to be cowed.
It is a fitting juxtaposition that she herself lives in a neighborhood that has only a tenuous grasp of the rule of law; a ‘hood one step removed from the base tribalism that the city aldermen keep tabs on through an occupying police army. They do so, of course, from their offices downtown; “may the lord bless and keep the czar… far away from us!” She is, however, necessarily separate from such an army: When those cops are off-duty, they decamp to their own cop-friendly neighborhoods – the kind with POW/MIA flags and VFW clubs. They drink in cop bars. They don’t cease being cops on a cultural level. She, on the other hand, appears to hang one hat at shift’s end and put on another. It’s just as well: Without the uniform, her skin color would probably mark her for random search anyway.
To think such agencies require working stiffs such as these! It’s clearly just a job, and a much needed one at that, for even the President has realized the inherent rot in our current jobless economic recovery, but it requires a compartmentalization of one’s public life. What goes on in uniform becomes unreal, like manning a phone-sex hotline: Furtive and anonymous and just a little illicit, under the guise of an authority that has it on good, well, authority that such roles are needed, but rather unconvincing in their explanation of just how they are needed.
Her Security Theater is not comforting to the locals, but then it isn’t meant for the locals. It’s meant for the folks downtown and their constituents. Were the political lines drawn up a bit different, it’d be like working as a border guard under the employ of your neighbor. Uptown, that foreign nation, full of malcontents looking to steal good downtown jobs from the correct folks. Why, they should require passports past 96th Street! And who would check them?
