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The Liquid WorldHow to survive in an age of death.

By William SaletanPosted Thursday, Aug. 10, 2006, at 6:22 PM ET

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Passengers wait at Heathrow AirportTwelve days ago, I flew from London's Heathrow Airport to Washington's Dulles airport. In my shoulder bag, I had two bottles of water and a portable alarm clock. If the security officers at Heathrow had taken my alarm clock and my bottles, I still had a wristwatch and a tube of toothpaste. If they'd taken those, I had butterscotch candies and three pens full of ink. If they'd taken those, I had a container of prescribed pills and a key that unlocks my car by remote control.

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You want to stop people from blowing up planes with sophisticated explosives and detonators? Start confiscating pills and car keys.

That's my reaction to the news that we've foiled a plot involving fluid explosives and flash cameras. Airport security teams are confiscating liquids, gels, and lotions. Britain is banning iPods and cell phones. At Dulles, a passenger was ordered to peel her banana.

Do you think somebody capable of hiding an explosive inside a banana peel isn't capable of hiding it inside the banana?

The new no-liquid rules make an exception for prescription medicine. Do you think I can't make a prescription label on the color printer at my office? Do you think I can't empty and refill capsules?

How will you check my key to make sure it operates my car? Will you take it at the security gate? Will you make people leave their car keys at the airport?

Security machines screen for metal, not liquids. To catch liquids, officials say they'll frisk more passengers. But people already carry illegal drugs onto planes by sealing them in plastic bags and swallowing them or hiding them in body cavities. How many cavities do we plan to search?

The government says it's developing gizmos to spot liquid densities characteristic of explosives. Good luck. In the abandoned 1990s "Bojinka" plot, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Yousef left behind dolls with explosive nitrocellulose in their clothes. Show me the gizmo that can catch that. Take my water, and I've still got my clothes.

President Bush praises the "solid" investigation that uncovered the plot. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff says the British did it by following "threads." Attorney General Alberto Gonzales says we're working "to dismantle these terrorist cells before an attack occurs." Kip Hawley, the head of the Transportation Security Agency, says liquid explosives are "on our radar screen."

These are the metaphors of a bygone age. Nothing is solid for sure anymore, not even bombs. Between terrorist cells, there are often no threads. No dismantling is final. Radar's lousy in water.

We're living in a liquid world. All the solid lines—states, borders, battlefronts—are melting. British Home Secretary John Reid made that point in a speech yesterday. Then he reassured Britons that their government, through tougher immigration control, was protecting them from terrorists, "many of whom come from far beyond our shores and have no real connection with our nation."

Nice try. According to reports, all 20 or so alleged conspirators arrested in the new plot are British citizens. Sealing your borders won't protect you.

So, what do we do? As Reid put it,

What happens when the threat to our nation, and hence to all of us as individuals, comes not from a fascist state but from what might be called fascist individuals? Individuals who are unconstrained by any of the international conventions, laws agreements or standards, and have therefore, unconstrained intent? Individuals who can network courtesy of new technology and access modern chemical, biological and other means of mass destruction, and who have therefore unconstrained capability?

The answer is, some of us die. And the rest of us grieve, but we go on, doing our best to fight the bad guys and heal the world. The grieving and fighting and healing never end the dying. "We are probably in the most sustained period of severe threat since the end of World War II," Reid observed. "While I am confident that the Security Services and Police will deliver 100% effort and 100% dedication, they can never guarantee 100% success."

That's the bottom line: We die. In a liquid world, you can't seal off evil. All you can do is fight liquid with liquid. You have to absorb the tragedy, flowing around and through it. You need the strength of a river, not a rock. You need resilience. You can't be untouchable, but you can be undefeated.

Reid ended his speech with a quote from Charles Darwin: "It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change." It isn't the individual who has to adapt and survive. It's the species.

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William Saletan is Slate's national correspondent and author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War. Follow him on Twitter here.

Photograph of passengers waiting at Heathrow Airport by Daniel Berehulak/Getty.

COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray:

Since the end of WWII, American politics has been driven by fear. We feared the Communist and purged the War Department, the State Department, television, and movie writers with the charge led by the dreadful Sen. McCarthy. We feared minorities and had fire hoses and dogs trained on peaceful marchers. We feared drugs and not only passed a huge range of controls on private, personal behavior, we launched a massive police invasion of our civil liberties. Just as the silliness of the drug war was being revealed by police officers hauling moms off to jail and booking for not fastening their seatbelt and sentencing drug dealer's girlfriends to life in prison, along came terrorists to give us more fright and more reasons to cede our civil rights to government intrusion.

Safety is an illusion. Any politician promising safety is lying to you to get something, most likely your vote against your interests. We are not safe, cannot be safe, and never have been safe. If you ever felt safe, you were just ignorant, not safe.

--MacAdvisor

(To reply, click here.)

"What happens when the threat to our nation, and hence to all of us as individuals, comes not from a fascist state but from what might be called fascist individuals?"

What did we do when Timothy McVeigh, a fascist individual, attacked and killed many Americans in Oklahoma City?

Answer: we enforced the rule of law. We put the preps on trial and punished them according to the rule of law and justice.

We didn't flip out and attack all white males with conservative or right wing views. We didn't bomb Oklahoma or Michigan. We didn't go to war against the Michigan milita. We didn't go to war on an emotion. We abided by justice and law.

We need to do the same with Islamic terrorism. We need to enforce that this is a Western world and that Western standards of law and justice will prevail. We need to catch terrorists and put them in jail. We need to treat them like the criminals they are. Nothing else will humiliate and marginalize the terrorists better than this. Nothing else will better enforce what kind of world this is to be.

Unfortunately, we are doing everything wrong. We are remaking the world according to the desires and aims of the terrorists. We've attacked countries and persons who had no tangible connection to terrorists. We've visited mass retaliations on people who have little or no connection to terrorists or insurgents. We've jailed and tortured and abused people without reference to law or justice or even common sense. [...]

All we have done in the war on terror has only increased the power of the terrorists. All we have ensured is that we will live in a world of terror instead of a world of justice.

--nerdnam

(To reply, click here.)

A truly rational response to this threat is not to harass young families or grandparents, or, in fact, the vast majority of the flying public. The only people who ought to be carefully checked should be young muslim appearing types or, at the most, any younger males of any racial or ethnic makeup, traveling alone sans families. Of course in this day of idiotic political correctness any such suggestion would be met by stupid and irrational charges of racial discrimination. So I am very much afraid that we'll continue to see images of people totally unlikely to be rabid suicide bombers tossing their lipsticks, or water bottles, or prescription medicines, or cough syrup or what have you into the trash bins. And, of course, we'll truly not be any safer.

--ThoughtfulTed

(To reply, click here.)

There is nothing inherently new about a "liquid world." There are just a lot of people who pretended the world was ever different. Maybe money and military might gave their fantasy some weight, but it was always gossamer.

Some, like Jacob Weisberg, think The Left just doesn't take "the global battle against Islamic fanaticism seriously." Almost certainly we will be engaged in military conflict against global terrorism for years to come. At worst this engagement will lead to the as yet unrealized terror of a war between the West and Mohammedans of every stripe. At best it will breed scores of new successful terrorist plots. What Weisberg takes for naivety, we'd be wiser to call a deeper perception.

We all want another option. Our best hope is to begin dealing with problems with an eye toward their effects on the individuals most harmed by any of our policies, both domestic and foreign. In other words, a strict cost/benefit analysis will no longer suffice. We can no longer ignore "the least of these." Make the poor, the hurt, the disenfranchised the focus of your concern, and in fifty years there may still be a civilized world.

--hopelesslynaive

(To reply, click here.)

(8/11)

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