A fool and his explosives ...

OPINION: I sighed, put down the Sunday paper, crossed the room and took the waistcoat from the peg, writes Joe Bennett this week.

 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 last few months we'd been all over, he in his mock-suicide vest, me trotting at his heel with a digital camera. I'd amassed snaps of him in a 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.

And what luminaries he'd been photographed with. I'd got a snap of him with prominent netballers, and another of a television newsreader autographing the detonator while smiling at the camera with faultless teeth. But my favourite is a picture of him being patted by His Worship the Mayor of Whanganui, I think, though I cannot be certain because of the froth around the man's mouth.

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 order to say, explicitly, "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 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 mall, every Rotary convention, every airport, every mayor, 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 to take us further down the road towards a bad society. And they did it, ultimately, merely to sell papers. The sods.

All 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.

» Joe Bennett is an English-born travel writer and columnist who lives in New Zealand with dogs. His columns are syndicated in newspapers throughout New Zealand.

- © Fairfax NZ News

Newest First

Oldest First