Views from Crestmont Drive

• Passing through airport security is an example of how the terrorists won, and maybe what led to MAGA and Trump;
• Jonathan V. Last on how terrorism sometimes works;
• (And how terrorists are motivated by religion);
• The reflecting pool contractor admits mistakes; no vandals were involved;
• Trump will never send those $5000 checks, as he hasn’t sent other checks before;
• Everything Trump does causes inflation, but he doesn’t understand, or care;
• Bruckner #7, Marie Jacquot.

Not many say this, but a few always have, especially when passing through the airport security checks involving magnetometers, physical carry-on bag searches, removal of belts and shoes. “The terrorists won.” Look what they’ve made us do. Look how they’ve degraded our society.

It’s not so much the inconvenience and tedium of these procedures; it’s the entire air of suspicion and paranoia, the feeling that at any moment some new evildoer (to use Bush’s simplistic term) is waiting in the wings to set off a bomb or hijack a plane, and the need therefore for eternal vigilance and mistrust of everyone not in your immediate circle. You can cite any number of statistics about the ineffectiveness of terrorism — e.g. how the number of people they kill is actually a tiny fraction of deaths by violence in any given year, and how terrorist movements generally dissolve without achieving any of their goals (Pinker makes these points) — but that doesn’t remove the social impact of their terrorists attacks.

It occurs to me that this was likely a key issue in the rise of conservative paranoia in the 21st century, and to the rise of MAGA and Trump, with their deep hatred of immigrants and Islam, quite exceeding any rational calculation of costs and risks, or self-awareness (about their own religious goals).

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