This is Rosa Parks. She refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white person. She’s a folk hero. In a strange yet related way, she’s connected to this story.
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If you have flown commercially since 2001, then you’re well-acquainted with the TSA. You know, they’re the guys and gals who tell you, ever so politely, to remove your shoes (because one guy a few years ago had an explosive in his shoe); to remove all change from your pockets (they might set off the metal detector); to put your laptop in a separate bin (it might, after all, be remotely wired to who the hell knows what). Now the TSA has body scanners that depict a nude you on some screener’s computers (because we did, after all, have that one real weirdo, the underwear bomber).
If you refuse to go through the body scanner, as John Tyner did two days ago at the San Diego airport, then you must submit to the grope and feel by a TSA agent. Or, as Tyner put it, if it was anyone other than the government doing this, it would be considered sexual assault. The video he shot with his cell phone is below. It’s harrowing and sounds like something out of Blade Runner. Tyner invites anyone to copy his written account of his experience. The link is here. This written account is powerful. Tyner may be a folk hero on a par with Rosa Parks.
Rob said, “But it’s not a synchro.” Well, maybe not. But it certainly looks as if it’s about to become a mass event. In just two days, Tyner’s video has received nearly 300,000 views on you tube. I think it speaks to something archetypal, to that part of us that rebels when any authority or government seeks to justify its actions by citing national security, preservation of freedom, it’s for your own good, we know best, or, as with Rosa Parks, the superiority of one race over another. In a sense, Tyner speaks for the rest of us who have gone through airport security, dreading it, hating the invasion of our privacy, secretly thinking that Bin Laden won, after all, that he – if still alive – is hooked up to his dialysis machine in a cave somewhere, chuckling away.
Here, the government’s use of fear, fear, fear to control the populace is stripped of pretense. Here, we see the emperor without his clothes.
If you’re a guy traveling on November 24, you may want to consider a protest first put forward by Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic: refuse the body scanner and wear a kilt the way real Scots do it, without underwear. Here’s the Opt-Out website link.I think Rosa Parks would really like this.
Wanna make your own TSA shirt?
Go here and make it and be wearing it on your next flight.
https://www.despair.com/mytsa.html
Cheers / Daz
Well said!
When I first saw Bush's army mass for Afghanistan, and then for Iraq, I personally felt that Bin Ladan's gang of Muslim extremists, who were marginalized in their own world, were dancing with delight at the success of their exploit. Among other things, two wars with as much efficacy as Vietnam have had a great deal to do with bankrupting our economy. So sad this……….
sue tyner for what? the truth? it isn't libel or slander if it's the truth – geeezzeeee – guess body cavities weren't enough to dig into for tsa – investigation wise, of course –
Daz – love the site!
Darren – too funny! That t-shirt would get anyone flagged instantly!
I know when I saw this I thought
good for you!!! He is right about the sexual assault and now they say the govt. wants to sue him!
Way too much government control, I don't like it one bit.
wv-dityropa haven't got an idea but thought it was funny, you know
a dity…you talked about a nude in
LOL!
You might want to wear one of these T-shirts on your next flight.-)
https://www.despair.com/tsa.html
Touching aren't they ?
In the UK there was a story of a man who dared to make a joke to one of the 'friskers' about terrorism. He was whisked away and given the third degree, had fingerprints taken etc. He subsequently missed his flight. No recompense, of course. You simply mustn't be funny at airports.
Security has just gone silly and so over the top.
I'll miss out on the nude-in though, but wouldn't it be funny – forgot, humour isn't allowed.
There's so much wrong with this picture. I'll check out the link, Debra. Thanks!
Now TSA is investigating Tyner with intent to sue him:
https://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2010/nov/14/tsa-ejects-oceanside-man-airport-refusing-security/
What's so sad is that they can legally abuse and subvert and even sexually (you know damn well some of those airport personnel are getting a "rise" out of those pat-downs) touch the passengers, but if a nude-in were to occur, the participants would be arrested for indecent exposure. Isn't that a total riot? Thay can put their hands and fingers anywhere they please on our bodies, and view us naked with lascivious eyes via that computerized XRay, but see us nude in all our full glory? Call the cops! I can just see a long line of nudies hand-cuffed together being herded, sans clothing, out of an international airport! Dontcha just love that image!!!! Hee hee. Look at this WV: "finiors" find yours? 😉 cj
oh, and we'll be sure to let jesse ventura know the dates and places of the NUDE-IN!!!
wv here is "dismet" – hmmmm…misted or id stem [love this one] or dim set or….
Looks like Tyner's protest may be creating the kinds of waves that make a difference:
https://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/11/smith-tsa-touch-junk-sue/
ok ok, i KNOW you all can hear me LAUGHING OUT LOUD!!! i LOVE the nude-in idea!!! LOVE IT!!!
oh, yeah, trish, at LEAST! no telling how many FBI, CIA [and MIB] lists i'm already on – at some of those dc demonstrations, the boys in the baseball caps with the ear plugs were taking pictures of me as i photographed them! gotta run now, i'm headed to my raised window to shout I'M MAD AS HELL AND I'M NOT TAKING THIS ANY MORE!!!
wv = oxylanic = ciao lynx 😉
Here's a great civil rights protest idea for this invasive authoritarian travesty that all air travelers are subjected to these days.
Get ten or more people in line together, planned ahead of time, and simultaneously take off your shoes, and then…everything else and lay the clothes on the conveyor belt.Coordinate that in a dozen other cities, maybe even some bystanders would to join in for the TSA nude-in.
Of course, someone would need to bring along a boom box and play some appropriate music. Maybe something from the musical HAIR.
Oh, the reaction. Maybe the TSA would start an addendum to the no-fly list and call it the no-clothes list!
– R
Gypsy – you and I would end up in jail!
absolutely sickening! see, had that been me, my other-life-revolutionary-self would have manifest and it would have been a far far different video!
how many for how long will sit silently by as today's government becomes even more yesterday's gestapo! i stand in salute of rosa parks and john tyner and all the others who have refused and who continue to refuse to be subjugated by their own government – and as someone on one of my blogs commented the other day: power to the people! well, it's time that the people take back their own power!
Our lives are almost unrecognizable today from what they were just two decades ago. I wonder what two decades from now will look like. If I'm still around I'll be almost ninety and won't be traveling anywhere, I'm sure. Unless that train system becomes reality!
Eventually, I think we're going to abandon air travel as the favored fast form of transportation. If the U.S. ever gets back to making things happen rather than reacting and outsourcing, we could now develop a super high-speed train system that would make air travel slow and archaic.
I think it's going to happen in some version of our future. Hope it's this one, and hope it comes soon.
It sickens me to see the slow creep of fascism descending not only on the US,but all of the so called "Western Democracies" of the world.
It might be a good time to dust off those copies of "1984" and "Animal Farm" and read them again before they're thrown on the great book bonfire and people like us are sent to those planned FEMA camps for our own security.
Good on ya John Tyner and Rosa Parks.It's people like this that keep the blood running through Democracy's veins and the blood of the fascists boiling.
You might want to relive this little clip from the movie "Network" before it gets put on the fascist"s blacklist as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90ELleCQvew
I am so disgusted by this outrage. We are something out of a science fiction movie. From now on I will travel by air only when absolutely necessary. We'll see how that "flies" when enough people quit using the airlines, when pilots refuse to fly the planes. Businesses will use other means of communication when their employees refuse to travel. Families will choose to vacation within driving distance, and no one will want to travel overseas.
you've got it spot-on where you say it's about control, because that's just what it is…