This is The Nooner, a short daily (Monday - Saturday) newsletter slash podcast that has its very own section within Dispatches from Inner Space.
Every Sunday, I publish the Dispatches Weekly Digest (DWD), which lets you binge all the Nooners from the previous week. It also includes a meaningful song recommendation, and a short segment I call TMI, where I go off script to bring you backstage, so to speak.
Two more things about the DWD:
It goes on on the main Dispatches channel, so if you’re looking to spare your inbox from the daily emails without missing out on anything, you can specifically unsubscribe from The Nooner section, and still get the Digest on Sunday.
It’s only available to paid subscribers.
The Dispatches Weekly Digest is a labor of love, and I’m really proud of it, and if you want to hear it, I want you to hear it. So, if you can afford it…
And if you can’t, but you still think of yourself as one of my true fans, let me know and we’ll work something out.
Egregious and intractable
Fifteen years ago, I forgot a very small pocket knife in my carry-on. It was a gift my dad had given me when I was a kid. Of all the things I’ve had confiscated at the airport, that’s the only one I remember.
By now, the TSA has become a deeply integrated part of our lives. We’ve all experienced the simmering frustration and normalized humiliation of removing belts, shoes, and jackets, gutting carry-ons, and pouring out water bottles.
We’ve all had stuff we cared about taken away.
And we all know that none of it is necessary. All the security theatre we’ve installed since 2001. None of it works, none of it matters. It costs a fortune and does nothing except disincentivize flying by making it less convenient and more expensive.
We’ve known this for more than a decade. It’s been on public record since at least 2013, reported on by pretty much every major news organization.
And yet, this year, the TSA asked for more money. The annual budget had already been close to eight billion, and now they want ten. For all you math nerds out there, that’s a 25% increase.
For what?!
More of the thing that everyone knows is worse than useless.
It’s like if the government started a road safety program that involved strategically distributing rocks on the freeways to slow down traffic. You’d need a lot of manpower to get those rocks on the roads. And then you’d need more manpower to continually rearrange them according to new and ever-changing “safety protocols.”
Once a program like this gets going, you can never shut it down, because not one single politician is willing to fire that many people, and make everyone less “safe.”
What really darkens my heart, though, is that if we can’t shut down the TSA, a program that everyone, literally everyone knows is useless and wasteful and a misery for all parties, then how in the world can we hope to shut down programs that are less notoriously terrible?
Because if you really go down the rabbit hole of government waste, it’s not long before you find things that make the TSA look downright virtuous.
I don’t like to get all Negative Nancy, but sometimes it’s worth pointing out how bad things are, especially if we’ve gotten so used to it that we don’t notice it anymore.
So let’s not sleep on how bad the TSA is. Let’s stay mad. And let’s start asking, more and more often, and more and more loudly, if maybe there really is a way to put a stop to it.
Otherwise, it’ll just keep going on forever.
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