Al Qaeda’s AARP?

"Travelers younger than 12 years old and older than 75 no longer have
to take off their shoes to pass through airport security."

— The New York Times, Jan. 6

No, sonny boy. I am definitely not gratified by the Transportation
Safety Administration's deciding that I no longer have to take my
shoes off in airport security lines. Not by a long shot. It means that
my own government has certified me as harmless.

Don't deny it. That's what this means. That's exactly what the T.S.A.
was thinking: We don't have to worry about that codger. Let the old
guy right through. He can keep on those orthopedic clodhoppers he
moseys around in.

Why, a bomb would probably slip out of his hands anyway, what with all
that arthritis he must have by now in the fingers. Or maybe, just at
the moment he was to signal his co-conspirators that it's a go, his
prostate would start acting up and he'd have to drop everything and
troop off to the back of the plane, where he'd have such a struggle
opening the bathroom door that a flight attendant would come over and
discover plastic explosives under the arch supports of his Hush
Puppies. Also, the way his memory's been lately, he's likely to forget
about the bomb until he's standing at the luggage carousel, watching
the bags go around and wondering if he'd just gotten off the Greyhound
to Des Moines.

Our convenience? If it was for our convenience, it would be our belts
they'd let us keep on.

Why? Because as some men get older, they suffer from D.T.S. —
Disappearing Tush Syndrome. An older guy with D.T.S. gradually loses
his hindquarters, which makes it hard for him to keep his pants up
even with a belt. I once saw a man in North Miami Beach, Fla. — a
retired insurance adjuster from Paramus, N.J., who was using both
hands to carry a tray in one of those cafeterias where you get all you
can eat for $8.95 if you arrive before 5 o'clock — walk right out of
his pants. One minute he was a respectable older citizen wearing his
pants up to his sternum; the next he looked like one of those gang
wannabes who wear their baggy jeans so low you'd think that they're on
the subway mainly to display the thread count in their boxers.

The way I figure it, the T.S.A. called in some of those statistics
geeks — the sort of guys who used to walk around the halls in high
school with slide rules on their belts. On one side they calculated
the odds that Gramps would be an effective terrorist, and on the
other, how often the T.S.A. was sued by an old guy who bent over to
retie his shoes and ended up breaking a hip.

No, I don't blame the T.S.A. employees, who are actually working the
security line. They're pretty patient, particularly considering how
many passengers they have to listen to grumbling about those X-ray
machines that let some screen-monitoring drudge in Boise, Idaho, see
you naked as a jaybird.

Not long ago, in a security line at LAX, I stood just behind a woman
of some years. No, I wouldn't guess how many. There was a time when
women didn't go around telling total strangers their age and shoe size
and whether they'd fantasized about sleeping with two Slovenian
firemen and a Chihuahua. Let's just say that if you made a reference
to, say, Perry Como, this woman wouldn't have looked totally blank.

As she approached the X-ray machine, the T.S.A. guy asked her to take
off her shoes — a pair of snazzy-looking wedge sandals. She pointed to
the sign that said passengers over 75 didn't have to. The guy smiled
and, as he waved her through, said, "Well, I would have never
guessed." She beamed. It was a nice moment. But I had to wonder what
she could have hidden in the heels of those wedge sandals.

Calvin Trillin, a contributor to The New Yorker, is the author, most
recently, of "Dogfight: The 2012 Presidential Campaign in Verse."

NYT