Pat-down party

TSA stole my shaving cream.

Maybe that elicits chuckles from the more travel-tested veterans of the airways, and maybe I deserve it. I was, after all, foolishly trying to sneak a canister of Edge Pro Gel onto my flight, which violates the first rule of air travel: No fluids, no almost-fluids, and nothing that hangs out with fluids on the playground. Fluids are a bad influence. That’s why coffee beans are such shiftless punks.

It was something I tossed into my suitcase without thinking, and I’ll take credit for the mental lapse; the list if items you can take on a plane has been whittled down to pillowcases and those foam bats they give to anger management patients. That makes it difficult to condense your life into a collection of appropriate travel items, since even the most innocuous products can be used to cause a terrorist-related kerfuffle. You never know when an al Quaida operative will hijack a plane and start shaving everyone.

Oh, I’m sure that shaving cream components can be used to make some sort of bomb or something. That’s why I didn’t complain when the TSA dude came over and told me that I should either check my carry-on bag (for an additional 30 clams, of course), or just chuck the shaving cream and bring the bag on board. Since waiting around at a luggage carousel is an experience about as gratifying as picking the spinach from one’s teeth, I took the hit and tossed the Edge. But I noticed something interesting about the TSA screener guy: As he was giving me my options, he had an almost apologetic look on his face, and a resigned tone of voice, as if what he was really saying was, “Look, I know this is silly. I can see my reflection in your head, so it’s obvious you plan on using the shaving cream for its intended purpose. But this is my job. So just toss the cream and we can go on with our day. Plus, I’m jealous of your muscles.” I may have been imagining that last part.

It was a minor hiccup in an otherwise smooth security screening, but it still underscores the level of paranoia that permeates the process. In addition to prohibiting liquids, kitchen utensils, Pokemon dolls and life-sized busts of Richard Nixon, they also make you remove a great deal more clothing than I’m strictly comfortable with. The list is currently confined to belts and shoes, but both of these items are necessary components in the precarious smoke-and-mirror show that barely conceals my scrubbiness.

I can almost understand the hubbub over shoes – would-be terrorists have been caught trying to sneak bomb components in their Reeboks before, and they’re a natural place of concealment for shameful items, like membership cards to the Pauly Shore Fan Club. Belts, however, are another story. If anyone wanted to bring a knife or a gun on board an airplane, a belt would be about the worst means of conveyance possible; it would require the kind of high-tech utility belt favored by Harlem cops and Batman. The focus on belts takes attention away from far more likely hiding places, almost all of which are hilarious noise-making bodily orifices.

It’s tough knowing how to feel about these screenings. When they were first implemented after the 9/11 attacks, everyone started quoting Benjamin Franklin, the founding father whose head most closely resembles a sock puppet. “They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety,” said Franklin, right before electrocuting himself with his kite. It’s an elegant turn of phrase, and has the ring of truth; but whether that truth is as relevant today as it was in the 1700s is debatable – especially considering that, in Franklin’s day, the very idea of passenger airlplanes would have been a preposterous fantasy. Americans are quick to credit the founders as having an infallible, clairvoyant wisdom, but they were prone to err as is any other human being. The safety purchased by the screenings is only as temporary as the airline industry itself; and for all this talk of rights, a curious few defend the right to visit Aunt Ester in Soux Falls without meeting a violent death. That doesn’t mean it makes sense to ban shaving cream and oggle belts, necessarily, but they’re precautions that should be judged on their own merits, not uniformly disparaged as an affront to liberty.

Here’s a hot tip, though, for any travelers: Don’t wear loose pants.

That was a lesson I learned the hard way. Because I have the fashion sense of a third-world refugee, I still wear pants that were a snugger fit in my heavier days. So when the screener people in Charlotte told me to remove my belt and raise my hands in the air, I naturally felt that bad things would ensue. It’s one thing to tell people you wear sky-blue underwear; it’s quite another to show them.

Luckily, the guy on pat-down duty showed me some much-needed mercy. As my cargo shorts slowly started their shameful journey south, the gentleman stopped them, and said to me, smiling, “You can hold these up, you know.” An act of ocular self-preservation on his part, I’m sure, but a gesture I nevertheless appreciated.

It’s a credit to good fortune that they don’t confiscate our belts outright. With loose pants and no shaving cream, I’d have spent my whole vacation as a stubbly, pantsless malcontent, scratching my beard with one hand and blocking the view with the other – a victim of airline security, doomed to ponder the price of freedom.