Those of you who’ve read Never Trust a Thin Cook will realize the playfulness of the above title. According to author Eric Dregni:
The word safe doesn’t really exist in Italian. Sicuro is just “secure.” My students suggest non pericoloso (not dangerous) but add that everything has a certain amount of danger, so “safe” is a paradox.
(Also, the word privacy doesn’t exist in Italian.)
Now, I’m still contemplating the meaning of salvo in Italian, but I agree with Mr. Dregni’s students entirely. In the US, when we indicate that we want “safety” bad enough, a government agency inevitably emerges with its greedy hands already in our pockets. It’s viral opportunism at its best.
Said agency will be headed by a bunch of PR guys whose job it is to cover up the idiotic adventures of whoever has been assigned the impossible task of providing this ethereal concept we call “safety.”
Take President Barack Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser. Please! When interviewed about security lapses that allowed one Mr. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to set his leg afire on a jet bound for Detroit, John Brennan repeated a laundry list of government screw ups, then made sure we’d all understand that the nearly tragic event wasn’t their fault:
“There is no smoking gun,” Brennan said. “There was no single piece of intelligence that said, ‘this guy is going to get on a plane.’” ~ Obama adviser: No smoking gun in airline bomb plot
Dang if Mr. Brennan doesn’t seem to be looking for a swarthy dude with a forehead anointed with blinking neon lights spelling out “I’m a terrorist about to try to blow up a plane flying over city with a doomed economy!” The president’s adviser insists upon a single piece of intelligence that explains the whole terrorism universe before taking action? Yes, let’s wait for that! It’s cheaper than actually doing something!
Without that sublime and compact little packet of knowledge that Mr. Brennan desires, his subliminal message trumpets: we (the hapless traveler) will just have to depend on Dutch tourists to squelch any attempts at blowing up planes. Not only that, but to make us feel “safe” we will be made to forever chase the (other) last known attempt at blowing up a plane, removing our shoes like pious lemmings before the stainless steel x-ray shrine. (Those of you who are hockey fans know that chasing (the puck) is the only sure way of losing a hockey game. A good hockey player is more intelligent than most government agency wonks. Doesn’t that fact just stun you?)
In the absence of Brennan’s sublime nugget of perfect intelligence, something needs be done that costs oodles of money. (You have to spend the government’s (our) money before they give you more. Everybody knows that, right?) I’ve got it! We shall be forced to stand in long lines fronted with government paid gorillas whose gigantic meathooks will gleefully fondle all comers, right down to the last colostomy bag.
This we shall do until those nifty scanners arrive. Then we’ll all diet before getting on a plane, eh? You don’t want to look fat for that “best of 2010” semi-nudie compilation tape they’ll be splicing together in the back room next to the stolen luggage, do you?
All in good fun. All in the name of safety, you know? Can’t beat that with a stick.