When you travel from London to Boston by air, as I did recently
— during which ordeal I was forced to dump my precious, unopened
bottle of wine in a trash bin, and engaged in a childish
confrontation in midflight with a middle-aged woman flying with a
brood of unruly kids — you expect to find relief at your
destination and a chance to begin to recover from one of the
least enjoyable experiences progress has imposed on humanity.
Not a chance in hell — the customs regime at Logan has other
plans for you. In the name of “homeland security,” the well-fed
customs agents ensure that the humiliation and discomfort you’ve
endured the last seven hours last a little bit longer. You stand
aside, hands clutching your travel papers, as you watch the
contrived drama of your bags being ransacked by bulky, uniformed
men and women in gloves looking for things you know very well
they’ll never find.
This ritual can take forever, depending on what the customs
agents read on your face as you leave the luggage carousel. The
process would be comical it weren’t so painful. To cope,
travelers must adopt a certain posture suited to their
personality. If you’re a wimp, you pretend to enjoy the show —
you put on fake smiles and answer all those inane questions from
these overworked peons, for whom the cost of your plane ticket
amounts to more than their monthly salary, hoping to hasten along
the pointless process.
For the rest of us, we create our own show: I try to imagine how
the agents would look if they lived in a country without cars and
fast-food restaurants; I rearrange the women’s hair, adorn them
with ear rings or remove them, scrape their makeup, trim their
hips. While the agents search through my dirty underwear, my mind
is elsewhere creating its own fantasies and keeping my focus off
all those useless souvenirs I bought for other people at
exorbitant prices on another continent.
After going through customs in Boston several times, I’ve begun
to take the agents’ treatment as a personal affront. How could
you not? In my most recent encounter, every piece of paper and
mail in my bags was examined. Mysterious notes in my electronic
travel record were perused and added to. While other travelers
seemed to breeze through customs, I was kept waiting for an
eternity. No question seemed out of bounds. In what’s supposed to
be a free society, shouldn’t certain inquiries about a person’s
travels be illegal? Has air travel come to mean relinquishing
one’s privacy?
Having rummaged through my bags and found nothing illegal, the
exhausted woman had one last prurient inquiry to get out of her
system. Before releasing the bags to me — with the mess inside
left to my companion and me to put in order — she affected a
friendly tone, picked up a souvenir given to me as a gift by my
mother, and asked, “What’s this?” In no mood to chat, I said,
“It’s a decorative gourd,” and set about to repack my bags.
I’m not an anarchist. I have never participated in street
political protests. I don’t give money to radical groups. I’m not
affiliated with any political party. I’m as ordinary an air
traveler as you would expect to find in the economy cabin of an
intercontinental flight. I’m the last person you would expect to
find on a government’s travel-watch list. But some of the
questions and comments from the Boston customs agents have made
me wonder whether my name is on any such list. This scrutiny has
also now made me more curious about what’s in my travel dossier.
Maybe I shouldn’t bother to ask to see a copy. Some members of my
family think my troubles might have something to do with things
as mundane as my attitude (unable to take abuse lying down); the
way I look (tall, dark-skinned and bearded); the way I sound (a
pedantic inclination to speak in long, complete, grammatically
correct English sentences); and the region I frequently visit
abroad (the Horn of Africa). They suggest that my confrontational
nature may spark in law enforcers a gratuitous urge to punish
me.
Anybody with enough courage to fly these days must reach a truce
with such irrationality. Common sense is on an indefinite leave.
Almost every traveler is a suspect, and every traveler is tense.
Men and women with the misfortune of being burdened with the
responsibility of providing security find themselves enforcing
rules that even they themselves find absurd. My wine posed no
threat to anyone, and yet there it went, into a garbage can at
Heathrow.
With those long lines, the silly rules about what not to carry on
board an airplane and the claustrophobia in jets with leg room
that makes the traveler pine for the ample space in a metro bus,
no wonder everyone is on edge. In ordinary times, the British man
in the seat next to mine watching DVDs of “Yes, Prime Minister”
might have thought twice before stepping on the arm rest of my
seat to pass over me on his way to the lavatory. And the woman
with her unruly brood might have been more considerate and
forgiven my minor indiscretion with my blanket, which had fallen
onto the aisle, becoming a safety hazard. But these are not
ordinary times.
