Frisked in Munich
Epstein, Joseph
Frisked in Munich A better approach to airport security. BY JOSEPH EPSTEIN THEY ORDER, said I, this I matter better in France," -1- began Laurence Sterne in his eighteenth-century travel book, A...
...All this was done with reasonable haste, by young men and women who seemed to have at least three languages at their disposal and went about their work in an impressively thorough yet cheerful way...
...From the look of high competence among them, my guess is that it is more than we pay ours...
...The element of irritation is not entirely removed—it never will be— but at least a touch of inefficient arbitrariness is not added to the proceedings, and in the long run security itself is increased...
...They order these things, as I began by saying, better in Germany, where everyone is asked to go through the full drill and chance is largely removed from the operation...
...Above all, the Germans went at their irksome—for travelers, for themselves—job without any of the sense of spiritless perfunctoriness that Americans working at the same task seem almost uniformly to achieve...
...In American airports, after the original security check, there is, as everyone who has flown since last year knows, generally another selective check just before boarding one's plane...
...Which is supposed to be the point, right...
...At the same time the check seemed serious...
...sixteenth?— traveler for closer scrutiny...
...let's get it over with quickly...
...one gets the feeling that the people hired to do the work have been instructed to single out every twelfth—ninth...
...What gives them their cheerful look while doing an obviously boring task, I also do not know...
...We were also all asked to deposit our coats and metal objects in a plastic container...
...A staff aide had better make certain that the secretary wears clean socks with no holes in them...
...Because the inspectors cannot do more than one such search at a time, you will pass into the plane without further delay...
...A spirit among them prevailed of we don't like this any better than you, so Joseph Epstein, a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, is the author most recently of Snobbery: The American Version...
...American airports that is all the more dispiriting for its not being, somehow, convincing...
...But Secretary Mineta would do well to fly into Munich to look into how they manage things so impressively there...
...But if a security check has to be done, then, dammit, it ought to be done right...
...The entire operation seems arbitrary, mechanical, and unreal...
...I had just debarked a flight from Prague to Munich and was headed for one thence to Chicago, when stopped by the security queue that is now part of the way of life of all travelers...
...BY JOSEPH EPSTEIN THEY ORDER, said I, this I matter better in France," -1- began Laurence Sterne in his eighteenth-century travel book, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy...
...one also feels that someone who joins a bit of cleverness with real malevolence would have a fairly good shot at getting through an American security check without being detected with a carefully hidden weapon...
...Plainly, it is unfair to be forced to undergo extra investigation because of one's Middle-Eastern and now Indonesian or Filipino look...
...If one wants to avoid this irritating bit of extra scrutiny, the best way to do so, I have discovered, is not to get in the boarding line until someone is chosen for this additional search...
...Yet neither should one's having the name Mohammed or Mustafa give one a free ride owing to a misdirected if utterly well-meant political correctness...
...Every one of us had the metal detectors run along our bodies...
...I thought the German crew in Munich did it right—and it is not easy for me to say this, cognizant as I am that Germany is perhaps the only country in the world that, historically, has been able to give "efficiency" a bad name...
...Certain people are asked to step out of line and their carry-on bags are gone through on a long table at the side of the boarding entrance...
...There is a McDonald's fast-food feeling about the proceedings...
...At the Munich airport all travelers without exception were asked to take off their shoes...
...Although the matter was rather a different one, my shoes in hand, I thought, they don't do at all badly in Germany, either...
...I don't know what the Germans pay their airport security people...
...The way things are currently run in American airports one sometimes sees mildly scarifying young men given a pass at security checkpoints, while tottering great-grandmothers are asked to undergo the full, shoes-off frisking...
...Norman Y. Mineta, the secretary of transportation, has spoken against the prospects of racial profiling during airport security checks...
...A royal pain is the gentlest way I know to describe this newest hitch in air travel—and under my breath I invariably curse the terrorists for putting us through it—but, alas, it is also now inarguably a necessary one...
...Nor was there much in the way of resentment on the part of my fellow travelers, most of whom were Americans...
...There is something about going through a security check in There is something about going through an airport security check that is all the more dispiriting for its not being convincing...
Vol. 8 • January 2003 • No. 19
