Category: Uncategorized

Like many people across the nation today, I’m thrilled as can be that last night, New York became the sixth state in the nation to allow folk who are homosexual to get married. I mean, there is that horrible, cynical side of me that is irked that only six states have done this so far, that goes, “Oh gee, you’re going to let them get married, just like real people? That’s mighty big of you,” but even I can set that crotchety old-manness aside to be genuinely grateful for the brotherhood of man today.

How do I even begin to explain Billy Joel?

Billy Joel is flawless. He has two Fendi purses and a silver Lexus.

I hear his hair’s insured for ten-thousand dollars.

I hear he does car commercials. In Japan.

His favorite movie is Varsity blues.

One time, he met John Stamos on a plane. And he told him he was pretty.

I’m just too damned mad about the whole thing, and any post I write about it will just end up filled with curse words.

My friend Scott and I discuss the Ayn Rand dating site. I used the KALI MAAAAAA! guy from Indiana Jones to represent him, because that’s how I roll.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxsbfv4NwwI&w=560&h=349]

And when I got up this morning, it looked like this:

So I felt this was something I couldn’t let slip idly past without comment.

You’ve probably heard by now about the video burning up the internet of a six-year-old being patted down by a TSA officer. If you haven’t, I’ll provide the video here, so you can get an idea of what people are so furious about. I will warn you that it’s disturbing; I was surprised at how uncomfortable I was when watching it.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3sH1GaO_nw&w=480&h=390]

Before I say what I want to say, I have to make it very clear that I do not blame the TSA agent in the video. She was doing her job, and she did it with respect for the parents and the child and made sure to reassure the girl. At no point does the girl appear distressed or uncomfortable, and I give credit to the agent doing the pat down. In fact, I give a lot of credit to TSA agents as a whole. I’ve only very rarely encountered a TSA agent who seemed gruff or unprofessional. When I flew out of Newark, NJ last September, the TSA agent who patiently went through my bag and explained to me what could and couldn’t go through the checkpoint was very friendly and smiled the whole time, and never once tried to intimidate or threaten me.

But this is absurd. There is a widely quoted statement attributed to Benjamin Franklin that is often cited when speaking about the current state of airport security: “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” Apparently, there are people in my country who feel they are smarter than Benjamin Franklin and more important than the Constitution.

I’m a fan of the fourth amendment, which reads: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” When you read this, and you think about our current airport security policies, you have to kind of wonder at what point “wants to use an airplane to reach a destination” began to fall under “probable cause”. This six-year-old, if we’re to assume that TSA is not violating the Constitution of The United States, somehow gave the agents at the security checkpoint probable cause to assume that she had contraband of some kind hidden on her person.

At this point, I think it’s fair to say that we as a people are not looking to TSA to stop drug runners and mules the way we expected airport security to do pre-9/11. We’re looking to TSA to stop hijackings and bombings, and that does seem to be their sole focus. We’re also expecting them to do this, and it is a rightful expectation, without profiling passengers. So, in keeping with their mission, this search of a six-year-old girl was completely reasonable. The question should not be “Why are we searching six-year-old girls,” but “Why are we allowing these searches in the first place.”

Many people will attest to the need for heightened security in airports based on the fact that 9/11 occurred at all. But 9/11 was an inevitability. The World Trade Center was a complex of seven buildings housing some of the most financially powerful companies in the United States, as well as offices that worked in close conjunction with the infrastructure of the United States. The towers themselves had been targeted for terrorist attack before, as had the other buildings the 9/11 terrorists had chosen for destruction in the attack. Airport security was not responsible for these attacks, nor could increased security in airports have stopped the events from occurring if the terrorists had chosen some other method of attack.

Somehow, though, we continue to see “averting another 9/11” as a perfectly logical reason to subject travelers to unlawful search in airports. “It hasn’t happened again!” proponents of these measures will state with pride, which is absurd. If we were to base the fact that 9/11 hasn’t happened again in the ten years since the attack and attribute this victory to our security measures, then our security measures lose purely on the basis that before 9/11, 9/11 hadn’t happened at all. The first commercial flight in the United States flew in 1914, and 9/11 happened in 2001. That’s a pretty impressive track record, in my opinion, for our old security measures. The problem with this method of accounting is that you can’t prove a negative. We can’t prove that our current measures have diverted terrorist plots.

At this point, someone reading might be saying, “Fine, Jen, if you don’t like it, don’t fly. There’s no right to fly in this country!” Absolutely, there is no “right to fly”. But pre-9/11, it was an accepted risk, albeit a very, very small one, that someone might hijack or blow up your plane. The scale of 9/11 seems to have thrown us all out of whack, to the point that we are willing to give up our freedom for safety. Not real safety, but the illusion of safety. The comfortable feeling when we get on that plane that no one will be planning to blow it up or drive it into a building, because there are security measures in place to prevent it. But no one on those planes that were destroyed in 9/11 thought, as they got on that plane, that someone would be killing them on that flight, because all the passengers had been through security. When the planes actually were hijacked, no one fought back, because there was a certain expectation of how hijackings are conducted. None of those passengers or pilots or security check point workers could predict the future, any more than TSA is able to predict the future now. It’s not a fault on anyone’s part, it’s just how the world is.

So, if you don’t like it, don’t fly? How about we do this, instead: rather than subject everyone in the country to degrading public search without just cause, rather than ask passengers to show strangers images of their naked bodies, rather than have our children groped by strangers in public, rather than hand over our rights to our own bodies to our government, we accept that airline travel has inherent risk. We accept that our country has enemies, and that those enemies may attack us. We accept that for all the freedom we have, there comes a cost, and at times that cost is very, very high.

I’m not advocating a return to the days of getting on an airplane with a sword as carryon, which, no kidding at all, I did in 1996 on a flight from Malaga to New York. I’m advocating a return to our senses. Right now, we’re trying to outthink the terrorists, to the point that our suspicion will begin to hamper us. “A guy put a bomb in his shoe! Check everybody’s shoes!” only works until the terrorists know that we’re checking shoes, and then they move on to the next plan, or the next venue. Terrorist plots that the United States have thwarted since 9/11 have been predominately focused on fuel lines and public utilities, not airlines. That’s not to say, “They’re done, let’s completely drop our guard,” but “Perhaps we need to shift our focus slightly.” There has to be a happy medium on the spectrum that is, on the low end, “Get on a plane with a sword,” and on the high end, “Stick our fingers in a six-year-old’s underpants.”

I love my country. I love being an American. But I also love sanity. “If you don’t like it, don’t fly,” to me, smacks of misplaced faith that our government can protect us from every inevitability, and that is not what our government was intended to do. So, I say to to everyone with a “don’t like it, don’t fly,” attitude, if you don’t like the reality that air travel carries an incredibly slight risk, don’t fly, and allow the rest of us to travel with our rights in tact. And as for protecting the people on the ground, let’s all accept that as long as our country has enemies, we are all potential targets with, again, a very, very slight risk of our lives being ended by terrorism, just like every other citizen of every other country in the world.

Our founding fathers were very cognizant of the fact that should their revolution fail, they would be put to death for their cause. We owe it to them to preserve the ideals they stood for, even if it means feeling slightly less safe when seated across the aisle from an obviously deranged and death hungry kindergartener on an airplane.

Just a few moments ago– literally, moments– I was in the bathtub, listening to my Pandora Radio “Allman Brothers/Willie Nelson” combo station (if you really let that sink in, I won’t have to explain that this is another “Jen gets high” stories”) when “Jessica” by The Allman Brothers came on.

So, this afternoon, while I hid upstairs while my husband told the visiting Mormons that no, his wife wasn’t at home (I have a weakness for the religious and I usually invite them in, which invites return visits. I’ve been in the process of becoming a Jehovah’s Witness for the past three years and I don’t even want to, this is the depths of my inability to say no to religious folk), I decided I would sit on the floor of my bedroom and go through my big ole’ trunk of memories from my younger days.

Doesn’t everybody have one of those?

I found some amusing pictures of my recently-deceased grandfather, a series of snapshots I took whenever I caught him sleeping on family vacation ’97. I vaguely recall that it went from, a “Ha ha, I’m going to take a picture of grandpa sleeping!” joke to a full blown, “If I casually turn on golf and hide behind that chair, I can get him again!” sniper attack.

Also in the rubble of my high school days? A very sweet letter from my first boyfriend in which he apologized for not breaking up with me well, and expressing a hope that we could be friends. I feel real guilt over the fact that I don’t think I ever saw him once after my last day of high school. Whoops. Hope he’s still alive somewhere. Wonder what he thinks about the recent decline of funny on The Simpsons.

There were programs from shows I saw during high school, and shows I was in during high school. Tickets from Alanis Morrisette, Rusted Root, The Verve Pipe, The Cranberries, REM, Patti Smith, and Radiohead concerts. An 8mm video cassette that I would literally pay a hundred bucks to know what’s on it. Horrid poetry about how no one would ever love me.

As I started to look over the dreams I’d had as a teenager, and thought about how different my life has turned out in comparison to what I’d thought I’d be doing now, I got a little sad. Maybe I knew more than I thought I did back then. Maybe my life might have turned out differently, and I could be sitting in an apartment overlooking central park, polishing my Tonys and chatting on the phone to my BFF Kristen Chenoweth.

And then I found two things that pretty much convinced me that, no, I am in the life I was destined to live, for better or worse. One was a folder full of Forever Knight fanfic zines. Another was a journal entry from my senior English class. The teacher used to write quotes on the board and make us journal about them. I found my entries, which, helpfully, don’t have the quotes copied on to them.

September 25, 1997
When the aliens finally come and get me, I will be pretty cool about it. I’ll let them do their little experiments on me and whatever, and then I would show them around Earth. I think I would take them bowling, cause that would really help them understand our culture, I think. I think I wouldn’t let them see Independence Day, though, cause that might peach them off.
I have seen four UFOs in my life, but none of them have stopped to pick me up.
If I were going to have someone play me in a movie, it would be me, cause I act, or Alex Kingston from Moll Flanders, cause we have the same hair.

I would love to know what she had written on the board that day to encourage such an explosion of verbal diarrhea.

I would be even more interested to find out what she had written on September 29, 1997:

Okay, I think that the quote means that when you are a kid, you look at things a lot differently and you aren’t always trying so hard to figure things out. When you’re a kid and you are thinking about something, you find one answer that seems logical to you and you stick with it, but adults feel like they have to know everything, so they don’t think as much, they try to have it all figured out. I think it all boils down to your imagination, and how much you use it.

Setting aside the fact that I have no idea what I was talking about, I think I was onto something there. When you’re a child, a simple answer does satisfy you more than when you’re an adult. But it’s interesting to look at something like this and think, “What would I think of myself, if seventeen year old Jen could see who she will be at thirty?” I wonder if she had any idea how much she will have to use her imagination as an adult.

Every year at around this time… no, actually, specifically on this very day, I start to get into internet arguments with Irish people, that is, actual Irish people living in Ireland, about St. Patrick’s day.

Their argument usually amounts to some variation on being offended that it’s celebrated by drinking green beer (which they don’t drink in Ireland), eating corned beef brisket (which they don’t eat in Ireland), and talk of stereotypical leprechauns, shamrocks, drunks, etc.

To which I say: It’s not really about you at all.

I guess to an outside observer, St. Patrick’s day in America looks like yet another American tradition cobbled together from ideas stolen from other cultures. And in a way, it is. But if anyone truly thinks that St. Patrick’s day in America has anything to do with present day Ireland, they don’t know the whole story. In fact, it has very little to do with Ireland at all. American St. Patrick’s day is a wholly American celebration.

Some of my ancestors, like the ancestors of many, many people in the United States, came here during the potato famine. Though my name, through marriages and happenstance, is the bastardized German “Armintrout”, you’ll find Loudens, Cahills, and Smiths in my family tree. In the Louden family, especially, they’re proud to be the decendants of Irish immigrants, and most of us describe ourselves as Irish. But we’re not so thoroughly American and thick as to assume that we can just stroll on into Ireland and claim we live there, nor do we feel kinship with the Ireland of today. The Ireland we celebrate on St. Patrick’s day is an Ireland that no longer exists, that never existed in the first place. An Ireland born in our family histories, out of the stories (read: lies) our parents and grandparents tell us about a magical place where everything was super great and magical and full of wonder and pride, but our ancestors left because they just felt like it, okay? Stop asking so many questions and do not, under any circumstances, read any Frank McCourt books.

It’s the same with most decendents of Irish immigrants. Say Sam McIrish immigrates to America in 1875. He marries a Polish girl, but he raises his children telling them constantly that they’re Irish. He tells them stories of Ireland and how wonderful it was, but also stories about the terrible hardships he endured. Those children grow up rolling their eyes at the tales of how horrible life was for their father, because they’re usually told in conjunction with phrases like, “You kids have it sooooo easy,” and “When I was your age.” So, when they have children of their own, they leave those bits out. They raise that third generation with tales of how great Ireland was, how proud they should be to be Irish (Okay, yes, and a little Polish or Italian or whatever got mixed in there, but that’s not as important as IRISH). Somewhere along the line, it becomes vogue to eat corned beef brisket to celebrate ones’ Irishness, though I’m pretty sure corned beef was invented by Jewish people. And out of all of this comes our weird, effed up traditions. The drinking probably arose because, well, let’s face it, when you’re a poor immigrant, you probably want to get good a tore up any opportunity you can get, just to escape the harsh realities of life.

So, if you’re Irish, like, born in Ireland, and St. Patrick’s day is super upsetting to you, please know that we don’t really think you’re all drunken red-headed short people jealously guarding your pots o’ gold, saying things like “wee” and “blarney” all the time. Only the severely ignorant think that, and they probably think equally demeaning things about other countries as well. We’re just over here, celebrating our ancestors the way we have for generations, regardless of whether or not the tradition makes sense. And it’s not like you can get upset at that, Ireland. I mean, come on. Pot, kettle, you know?

And as for the saying, “Everyone is Irish on St. Patrick’s day,” the truth is, nearly everyone in America probably does have some Irish heritage, whether they’re aware of it or not. That’s because Irish immigrants got over here and got their swerve on, big time. If you’re an American with more than four generations in America behind you, chances are you got some Irish in there somewhere.

So, Americans, celebrate your awesome affinity for turning nearly any mundane weekday into an occassion for public intoxication and the wearing of dopey hats. Do it with pride and as much dignity as you can muster while vomiting up green beer and cabbage in the backseat of a cab. Because you’re not celebrating Ireland or being Irish. You’re celebrating being an Irish-American, because we’re pretty much super awesome.