MARKET WATCH COLUMNIST
“California man takes on airport security” , Newsday, November 21, 2010
A well-turned phrase can still pack a punch.
This is actually heartening in an era when words so often seem impotent. But a single outburst captured in a YouTube video can descend on millions of inboxes at once and turn a so-so story into a national obsession overnight.
Just ask John Tyner, agitated airline passenger.
He’s the flier who chose an open-handed pat-down instead of a trip through the new X-rated X-ray machine – then had a frank and colorful warning for the TSA staffer who was carrying out the intimate search:
“If you touch my junk, I’ll have you arrested.”
Suddenly 2010 had its own “Don’t tase me, bro!” – and the topic of intrusive body searches at the airport was shooting up the pop-culture, media and political charts, all at once. Within twenty-four hours, the slogan was on t-shirts.
The timing was perfect, as it has to be for a single phrase to enter the vernacular so fast. This happened just as the new naked-picture scanners were showing up in airports across America, just as beleaguered fliers were preparing for the busiest travel weekend of the year.
No one wanted THAT!
In a flash, the phrase jumped from the internet to the late-night comedy monologues to the 
cable-news talking heads to Capitol Hill. By Friday, Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.), who’s about to take over the committee that oversees the Transportation Security Administration, was calling the searches “overly intrusive.” And, for the first time since 9/11, an airport security measure really might be forcibly rolled back.
Or put another way: Slogan was directing policy.
And why not? The phrase had been uttered, and a whole nation was bellowing back in unison.
HIGH-FLYING QUESTIONS
1. Aisle or window?
2. Checked bags or carry-on?
3. Coffee or tea?
4. Pretzels or peanuts?
5 Pose for naked pictures viewed by anonymous government workers or submit to a private-parts-included full-body pat-down?
ASKED AND UNANSWERED:
Love the hoodie-perp sketch of the purse snatcher, but did western Nassau cops really need nine robberies to wonder: “Gee, could all these crimes be connected?”…Is the hand-counting really starting to tilt Tim Bishop’s way? Or is the Democratic congressman just playing mind games with Republican Randy Altschuler? At this pace, we may know in fourteen years…Love or hate George Talley, should the embattled Brentwood school-board president really have sputtered defensively, even to a hostile crowd: “I am not a racist”?…Did students at Birchwood Intermediate and Oakwood Primary in South Huntington just get a great new excuse for skipping school? “Mom! Do you want me to bring home bedbugs?”…Erick St. Louis of Shirley was arrested for licking medical waste to get high? What happened? Did he run out of frogs?…The Fiscal Policy Institute found LI’s 293,000 immigrant workers do little harm to US-born workers. Who will be the first anti-immigrant activist to say, “Uh, sorry, never mind”?…Want to know the real Laura Savini, the WLIW/21 pitchwoman and so much more? She really opens up to the essential Ray Bertolino, Monday, 12:30 p.m., WHPC 90.3 FM….If the LI economy just added 10,900 private-sector jobs, how come so many of my friends still un- and under-employed? Is it something about the people I hang with? Are they simply unemployable?
ELLIS’ LONG ISLANDERS OF THE WEEK
LI RETAIL WORKERS
Three, two, one – shop! The main-street store owners. The $8.25-an-hour kids at the mall. The employees at the big-box stores. We’re coming, and they’re ready for us. Two years ago, the life-or-death dangers of the Black Friday onslaught became impossible to ignore when a Wal-Mart worker was trampled to death in Valley Stream by a frenzier, bargain-hunting mob. Finally, most area stores have made safety a priority, and it’s the front-line workers who are expected to make it all go well. They did last year. All signs say they’ll do it again.
E-mail ellis@henican.com. Follow him at twitter.com/henican
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Security is essential but you can find glaring interruptions in the effectiveness of specific airlines. Objects accidently get left in purses and so on and never identified by screeners and other big mistakes that might cost us our lives! We have political figures requesting restrictions on the number of people that receive pat downs and scans, of which accomplishes next to nothing! It ought to be all or zero! It would seem to me the previous method seemed to be doing the job, precisely why did they change it!
Thanks Ellis- Finally, a story about a guy who’s trying not to have his junk touched!
So torn about these new TSA procedures. I went through the scanner at Denver International, before I knew how explicit the video was going to be. If I’d known, I probably would have sent a written apology to the poor guy who had to look at me naked. Seriously, the problems I have are: 1) I don’t trust the governement that the xrays are not going to be harmful. (maybe in the lab they’re OK–but with the nitwits I’ve seen at the airport running the things? I can’t believe they are going to be mainatined the way they are supposed to)–and safe for pregnant women?; 2) I’ll be damned if someone is going to grope my daughters like that; and 3)it seems like TSA is always playing catch-up with “fake”, look-good security measures. Does this work? Is it necessary? What happens when the next guy stuffs a bomb up his butt? Will I have to submit to a colonoscopy before my next flight? Will it be covered under Obamacare?