Casual
Caldwell, Christopher
Casual EMERGENCY EXIT The domestic-front press coverage of our war on terrorism has featured at least i a half dozen stories of knuckle-dragging American provincial lugnuts who have bolted from...
...Aw, shucks," I reply...
...Frightened as Americans are of terrorism, they're more frightened still of political correctness...
...Or how about Richard Gephardt, who a week after September 11 was still fantasizing that "we don't know who did all of this...
...But it's in my hands whether I die of political correctness...
...First they commiserate with me for my embarrassingly uncosmopolitan behavior...
...We don't know what ethnic group they may be part of...
...I've flown a lot since September 11, but, even given wartime conditions, security seemed high that night...
...That doesn't scare me in the slightest...
...For one thing, they weren't...
...So I asked her to walk back to the exit with me, and told her why I was getting off the plane...
...They could have been Persians...
...This is, of course, the first war in which literally any American—not just soldiers—can die in an attack...
...My friends have all reacted identically...
...So . . . , " I said, not knowing quite how to put it...
...Is this some kind of . . . em . . . group tour...
...I'm one of the lugnuts...
...Assuming the country is 2 percent Arab, and that plane seating is wholly random (an improbable assumption, I grant), you just raise .02 to the sixth power and you have your answer: about 1 in 16 billion...
...One soldier peered into a plastic box of tic tacs as he rattled it...
...A table had been set up in the walkway to the flight...
...or even Israelis...
...I don't plan to...
...This is an attitude they share with our politicians, from President Bush on down...
...These stories generally end the same way...
...She turned out to be a perky Midwestern young lady...
...She hadn't a clue what I was getting at...
...For another, do I need to get a graduate degree in anthropology to have the right to protect myself...
...It was nothin...
...I buzzed the stewardess...
...I recalled an excerpt from the terrorist manual seized from one of the September 11 hijackers' cars: "If a Muslim is in a combat or godless area, he is not obligated to have a different appearance from those around him...
...We don't know what religious background they may have...
...Resembling the polytheist in religious appearance is a kind of 'necessi-ty-permits-the-forbidden.'" They were all looking rather blankly in front of them towards the cockpit door—a rather flimsy one, I now noticed...
...There, more soldiers were taking everyone's carry-on luggage to pieces, almost literally: unscrewing lipsticks, disassembling pens, removing batteries from cell phones and computers...
...Five of the twelve passengers in the second and third rows were young Arab men as well...
...Two weeks ago, I walked off an overnight flight from San Francisco because it had too many Arabs on it...
...They were nice-enough looking guys, I must say, but that thought didn't help...
...a fellow editor scolded me...
...I disagree, but then again I would...
...Do you believe the president when he insists that America's radical Islamic leaders "love this country just as much as I do...
...What's the likelihood that all six passengers in the front row of a plane will be Middle Easterners...
...It was one of those planes with three seats on either side of the narrow aisle, and all six seats in the front row were occupied by Arab men in their early 20s, dressed in a kind of shabby-casual way, in either blazers or those car-upholstery leather jackets...
...The second thing my friends say is that they would have wanted to get off that plane, too, but would never have had the "guts...
...That is, when they don't overtly accuse me of being uncouth...
...CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL...
...It's in God's hands whether I die of terrorism...
...I then started totting up ethnicities with the zeal of a college-admissions officer...
...With only two flights remaining to leave from my terminal before the airport closed, the metal detector was manned by a dozen soldiers with machine guns...
...The proper way for red-blooded Americans to react to such incidents, it is strongly implied, is with embarrassment verging on revulsion—at our compatriots' ignorance, intolerance, and cowardice...
...And that is the nub of why I walked off that plane...
...And how did you know they were Arabs...
...After we'd handed over our tickets, there was a second checkpoint...
...Army, by the way— not National Guard...
...The offending Arabs, it always turns out, were doctors heading to a neurological research conference, say, or a banker and his brother on their way to a niece's wedding in Scottsdale...
...Casual EMERGENCY EXIT The domestic-front press coverage of our war on terrorism has featured at least i a half dozen stories of knuckle-dragging American provincial lugnuts who have bolted from commercial flights upon finding a couple of kaffiyeh-wearing gentlemen aboard...
...At least that was part of the reason...
...The general reaction from politicians and the press has been Shame on us...
...I worry that, when push comes to shove, my government will be too polite to protect me...
Vol. 7 • November 2001 • No. 9
