How the dog and I proved security is a delusion

BY JOE BENNETT

OPINION: I sighed, put down the Sunday paper, crossed the room and took the waistcoat from the peg. The dog looked up. Hope shone from his eyes.

"Sorry, mate," I said. "It's all over. Our bid to do the world some good has come to nothing." I threw the waistcoat in the bin.

The dog didn't understand the words, but he caught the tone. He lay and curled in on himself, turning his head away from me. My heart flooded with pity and anger. Pity for the dog and for the world. Anger at the people who'd stolen our idea and perverted it. The bastards.

I'd made the dog's waistcoat myself from scraps of cloth and lovingly sewn a stick of fake explosive into each of its little pockets. From the $2 shop I'd acquired an imitation detonator and attached it so that the dog could tug it with his teeth. How he'd rejoiced every time I fitted the waistcoat around his chest. He knew it meant an expedition. But now we'd never go again.

In the past few months we'd been all over, he in his mock-suicide vest, me trotting at his heels with a digital camera. I'd amassed snaps of him in position to execute millions. On buses, on trains, in malls, in the queue for a Barry Manilow concert (we did not go in), at a Scottish country dancing festival (I covered the dog's eyes), at the all-night street party when the All Whites beat a tiny Middle Eastern nation, and at I don't know how many rugby stadiums.

If he'd blown himself up at all these events, he could have halved New Zealand's population.

Why did we do all this? Why did the dog and I go to such trouble and expense? We did it for freedom, yours and mine. I don't believe there is a greater cause. We did it to show that security is pointless.

That truth had already been demonstrated for all to see at Christmas, when, as you may recall, a murderous dingbat took a plane from Amsterdam to Detroit. The authorities knew him to be a dingbat from way back.

Furthermore, the dingbat's parents had telephoned the CIA in the United States to tell them: "Our son's a murderous dingbat. He's got a picture of Bin Laden on his wall and a drawer full of gelignite."

And what happened? He was allowed to board the plane. All the screening, all the men with walkie- talkies, all the detectors and the sniffer dogs and the paraphernalia of buggering people about missed him. Only the actions of a fellow passenger saved the day.

But what was truly astonishing was the reaction. Even the generally sane President Barack Obama said that security needed to be beefed up. Wrong. Security had been shown to be hopeless. It needs to be beefed down.

For security is a delusion. There is a risk in everything. And if a dingbat is hell-bent on mayhem he has unlimited targets. You cannot secure every shopping mall, every Rotary convention, every airport, every concert, every everything.

Nor should you try. The more you try the more you concede to the dingbats and the more you bugger the innocent about.

* * *

That buggering about in the name of security, at airports, at stadiums, at concerts, is both insulting and self- defeating. It promotes fear and suspicion. It achieves nothing except irritation.

And it gratifies authorities, who have always loved to exercise power under the guise of doing us good because it helps to keep us docile.

So the dog and I had planned to publish our dossier of photos and use it to call for a Rugby World Cup that was security-free. No bag checks, no sniffer dogs, no scanning machines, nothing. If that frightened some players or spectators, let them stay away. We'd run a brave and defiant competition.

But then in stepped the Sunday Star-Times. They performed precisely the same stunt as the dog and I, but to the opposite moral purpose.

While our moral purpose soared like the Himalayas, theirs crawled like a snake in a ditch. They did it to promote fear. They did it to encourage yet more pointless security.

They did it to take us further down the road toward a bad society. And they did it, ultimately, merely to sell papers. The sods.

Unnoticed by me, the dog had fetched his waistcoat from the bin. He sat before me now holding it in his jaws, his eyes pleading. Some things break your heart.

- © Fairfax NZ News