airport scanners

The worst thing about having a major car accident and ending up in hospital is not waking up in the ER, it’s not even having your painkillers administered by enema, or even finding out that half your limbs won’t work properly for a good few weeks; it’s the bloody irritating mess it makes of a recently acquired pedicure.

As the product of an English boarding school education I’m a grand master at getting undressed and re-attired in a very modest fashion with the artful draping of clothing, towels, etc. It came as a very nasty shock during my stay in hospital that not only could I not dress or undress myself but that someone else had to take care of deeply personal things like wiping my bum. However, with the administration of suitable drugs I soon got the hang of it and although I can say I was never fully comfortable with it, it made me reconsider the fragile artifice that I carry around as my modesty.

I swiftly came to the realization that it is totally artificial. Mostly in the sense that, especially in a hospital, most of what I have, they have seen many, many, many times before and probably in both better and worse shape than mine and almost certainly in every shade of the currently available skin color range. And so what am I objecting to? The fact that the bits I was born with or grew into, my bits rather than anyone else’s, were going to be seen by a near-stranger? By which I mean a medically trained professional.

For a while in the late 80’s and early 90’s, the artists and paintings of the Impressionist movement were hugely popular. You couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting another exhibition, discussion or book on the subject. Transferred onto mugs, printed onto posters, reproduced as canvasses, screened onto shopping bags, umbrellas until we all became not only sick of it but totally immune to it’s transcendent beauty, simply because it seemed to be everywhere, on everything.

“What has all this got to do with airport security?” I hear you asking. Well, I think we should all consider the wider issues (apart from the obvious elephant in the room, being blown to smithereens by a bomb concealed on a fanatical nutter) and I would humbly submit they are these:

1. What steps are being taken to ensure that the people who have to scan our bodies all day, every day, won’t become totally immune to the simple and breathtaking beauty of the human form? Who will be there for them when they are unable to look at yet ANOTHER body, much less want to have sex with it?
2. For those passengers going through a dry spell in their love-life, getting a pat down could be seen as the nearest thing they get to a good time, and who are we to deprive them of this modicum of fun? Because I am willing to stake a fair proportion of my not inconsiderable poverty on the fact that it’s a lot less fun for the TSA employee than it is for us.
3. .And if a TSA employee or two are standing behind a screen laughing at whichever bits of my anatomy they find amusing, well I say, “go for it”. I’m happy to bring a little laughter into what must be a singularly thankless and largely tedious job.

And, in the final analysis, in a culture where we continually expose our intimate thoughts, secrets and ideas via social media outlets, where an alarming number of people seem to be delighted to show off their bodies to millions via an uncensored, unlegislated internet via webcam, I am at a loss to understand how, exactly, the body scanners represent an invasion.

common language

George Bernard Shaw made the observation that England and America are two countries separated by a common language. I would venture to add my own two cents worth when advising my fellow countrymen preparing to live in this grand nation of small nations; forget everything you know about the English language.

My very first brush with the complexities of language use in the US came with my first order for coffee. Ordering phrases typically start with the pragmatic “can I get” which sounded so rude to my untrained ear. But a “thank you” is often countered with the cheerful “you’re welcome” for which the Brit equivalent “my pleasure” sounds so much more staid.

In the early days, I was often caught up not by the big stuff but by the small stuff. It took me a while to realize that ‘quite’ used before something was generally a positive pronoun whereas in England it can, and often does, mean the reverse.

Another hurdle arose in the assigning of cultural identity. Growing up, if someone said “I’m Irish/Scottish German/French” etc, it generally meant one of two things; they were either born in the country they claimed as theirs, or their parents were. After my initial ignorant aggravation, I slowly began to realize that it’s a cultural shorthand, a marker, a way of saying which tribe you belong to without having to go through a whole series of cultural identifiers.

So, for example, here in Chicago, if you were Irish that might indicate a whole host of things which might include Catholicism, family in the police or firefighting profession, a certain kind of political outlook. Or, of course, it might not. But it certainly made me think and it made me wonder how else you might declare yourself in a vast country filled with so many different nationalities, faiths and cultural constraints.

Language is, of course, a two way street. A few of my ‘Englishisms’ have made it into local usage here. My work colleagues now ‘nip out’ as opposed to ‘run out’, I’m required by one of my friends to verbally use the word ‘schedule’ even for a quick cup of coffee and a natter because she loves the way it sounds.

On arrival I was enchanted by the use of the word ‘fall’ for autumn. I had assumed, wrongly as it turned out, that this was an evolution in the language and that the word autumn had fallen into disuse. As it turns out it’s a preservation; fall was the word used by the original pilgrim settlers. People often remark that I speak ‘proper’ English as if that’s some sort of preserved standard to aspire to. What I think they hear is not the language preservation but the accent, which, by all accounts, can fool anyone.

After all, as I tell everyone who asks me, I’m from Alabama.

skymall

I have a guilty secret. Actually, more accurately, I have several, but for the sake of some pseudo-propriety, I’ll stick to this one for now.

And it’s this: I am addicted to SkyMall magazines. For those of you who are lucky enough not to have to make regular domestic flights, or have been living under a rock for the last couple of decades, Skymall is one of the free magazines on the back of every seat along with the instructions on what to do if the airplane you happen to be on falls out of the sky.

In fact, it’s got to the point where I won’t even read it during the flight in order to savor the pleasure of a more luxurious read when I get home. In short, it’s a magazine full of those essentials you never knew you couldn’t live without. A kind of consumer Pandora’s box but without the carnage or guilt.

After my most recent trip to the wilds of Florida, I began to wonder why this magazine holds such a strong attraction for me. After all, I don’t exactly need an underwater pogo stick or a kitty litter artfully disguised as a pot plant or spy camera disguised as a common pen. Or do I?

And yet here’s the rub: a lot of the items so lavishly photographed seem to be exactly the kind of thing I just didn’t know I needed until that very moment.

Let’s get one thing straight; I’m in no way a conspicuous consumer. Well, unless you count the art supplies and the chocolate. I come from a long line of recyclers from my grandmother (plastic bags) to my dad (jokes). My grandfather famously ‘recycled’ one of the shelves in the hall closet into safety bars for the bunk bed we slept on as kids. Not really that odd, you might think, until you saw the strange boomerang-shaped holes in the hat shelf the next time you went to put your coat away.

The older I get, the more conscious I’ve become that the practices I grew up with were largely green. Take a shopping bag with you, take your shoes to be repaired, dry your laundry on the line, and bathe once a year whether you need it or not. So perhaps this secret love of such blatant consumerism is firmly rooted in a lifetime of enforced recycling practices. But closer examination brings with it the realization that it’s not the products that I actually want, it’s the ideas they generate.

As an artist with engineering tendencies, I have designed and made things all my life. At the dreaded English boarding school after a particularly gruesome game of field hockey, I once designed a hockey stick with motorized cart which grew, in time, to have not only a seat and hood, but stash of food, a heater and, in it’s final iteration, a TV. It’s truly amazing what cold, wet wintery days out on the fields with wooden sticks and shin pads will inspire.

And so the real appeal of the SkyMall magazine is the magnetism of all those people sitting out they’re saying “what if”. What if you could actually pogo UNDER water? What if my kitty litter box actually looked like a houseplant? And then actually got someone to make it.

It’s not really so much about the consumer goods for me; it’s more of a quick check to see if there are other people out there like me. And it’s with a large tinge of relief that the last time I looked, there were.