• • • low end theory

Via TR:

Go here to read the myths and facts on the TSA blog (“OMG! They aren’t just gay, they blog too?!?”) But in the meantime, here are five things I like less than the idea being patted down by a hot young TSA employee and having her wonder whether I was born into the world with that “junk” or not:

Being blown up in-flight;

Having my Middle Eastern, South Asian and black friends being racially profiled;

Being blown up on the runway;

Being taken hostage and flown into a building;

Being morally responsible for the estimated 500 civilians in Pakistan who have been killed in unmanned drone strikes by the Obama administration. For every two terrorists that are killed, one civilian is killed, which is a lot higher number than the estimated 3% of American travelers who are body searched in airports on any given day. In addition, it should be noted that most people survive a body search, whereas surviving a drone strike is a tougher proposition.

As travelers flounder about in their homophobic panic and American narcissism, has it occurred to them that we have brought this foolishness on ourselves by fighting a prolonged war that has produced an escalated counterinsurgency, metastasizing Al-Qaeda to more countries than it ever had bases in prior to the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq?

Okay. Shit like this is why I can’t fuck with Tenured Apologist—I mean, Radical—anymore. The real, legitimate need for bodily integrity—and the real, legitimate charge of its systematic violation—gets collapsed into, equated with the homophobia of Rush Limbaugh. The state gets displaced onto the body of the TSA worker. TR seems to be doing a lot of explaining that she’s not supporting these procedures, but that she is against “outrage about this issue isolated from the violence the US does around the globe that has created this problem.”

Okay, outrage from whom? Many of the folks I’m reading who are opposing this, from antiwar folks to activists of color to trans activists—so many, in fact, that I don’t even feel like I need to link to them here—are doing so precisely by linking it with the US’s geopolitical reign of terror. Why lump everyone who’s responding to these procedures together? In the end, all you’ve got is a series of amorphous, poorly argued points that pretend to oppose the state but really show how much of the state’s logic you’ve internalized. The sense that the procedures are necessary is still logically linked to the threat of “getting blown up in flight,” “getting blown up on the runway,” “being taken hostage and flown into a building.” However much she qualifies her position as one that opposes the war, and opposes racial profiling, these latter oppositions actually seem to be more of a strategy to take the moral high ground than anything else—a means of protecting herself from criticism. Which is, again, why she has to keep explaining to her commenters what she’s not doing, what she’s not saying. This post is a fucking disaster.

And what the fuck is up with the jokey transphobia?