On Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 8:35 AM, Gautam John <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: [...] > Because they are! I fail to understand this line of reasoning. Theatre > for theatre's sake is what you're advocating? If what you're saying is > that the general populous need to 'feel' safe instead of actually > 'being' safe, there is some merit to it. But I don't think we're > arguing from a generic perspective here.
An extremely detached and philosophical position to take would be to suggest that all of life is theater. We wrap fiction and make believe around what we perceive as harsh reality to make it more palpable. There are lots of fundamental questions about our lives for which we have no answers only theories. At best, we push them out of our minds and don't ever confront them. For most people, life would be quite unlivable if they went about every day of their lives pondering the meaning of life, or the purpose of humanity. I draw this elaborate example lest anyone suggest that removing theater is somehow better for all, it isn't. Theater doesn't only exist in the security sphere, it's there all around you. A look at the modern banking system tells you that for as long as there have been bankers there has been theater. Bankers lend money that they don't have; backed by guarantees that the Government is ill equipped to issue. The chicanery only gets better and better as more complex financial instruments are dreamed up by bright MBA graduates. Occasionally the public will blink and get a fuzzy picture of the house of cards that it all is - and then PANIC. Luckily we have short memories and we go back to life as usual. This piece of theater acted out by the TSA is laughably bad, and so we make much merry out of it. And yet it continues to be copied all over, often with much lesser panache. When I drive into my local multiplex's underground parking lot the security guard on duty makes a big show of waving a metal detector at the insides of my car. I don't think he has the faintest clue of what he is looking for, or realize the pointlessness of waving that wand at a metal car. At this other mall I have a mirror rolled under my car for a brief second with equally useless result. Why then does this exist? To make people feel safer, because people demand it. The same reason that P Chidambaram appears on TV almost every day these days and lies through his teeth that the Indian economy has strong fundamentals, and the stock market predictably rises only to fall the next day. There are alternatives to theater, but they are tough, and they aren't for everybody. It's about as useless as asking the harried investment banker visiting a shrink for Xanax and Wellbutrin prescriptions to quit his high stress job. Cheeni