Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

I meant to post something about this a couple of days ago when it was pointed out to me. By now many of you have seen it and commented already, but I'm still going to address one point...

I find a troubling incongruity in the FBI's warning that carrying a "popular reference book" makes people suspect. (N.b.: I don't know whether the phrasing that includes the word "popular" came from the FBI document or from the author of the Associated Press article). I mean, I think I see what they sort of meant, but what they effectively said was, "Watch out for people doing ordinary things, because they might be terrorists." Are they that careless, or is this an Evil Conspiracy to rationalize treating everyone as a terrorist suspect? (My money's on "careless", but I'm sure it won't help civil-rights folks sleep any easier.)

Okay, yeah, an almanac can be used to look up information about targets. So can an encyclopaedia, souvenir post cards, or a [bleep]ing road atlas; do we need to worry about folks who carry road atlases in their cars next? And a notepad and pencil can come in handy for plotting terrorist attacks, as can a camera ... Oh, wait, they've already been hassling photographers for some time now. (And I don't just mean my minor (fifty-minute) questioning for shooting a photo in the tourist section of Baltimore; I mean more serious episodes involving nature and railroad photographers, and one fellow who got a whole raft of shit for an innocent cityscape because he had no idea the Vice President was staying nearby.)

"Stay scared, folks!" Feh. Give us something useful, not what amounts to "be scared of everyone". If nothing else, at least give us stuff that doesn't make the organization giving it to us look foolish. Yeah, maybe they'd noticed that a higher percentage of terror suspects had almanacs in their cars than random traffic stops did, but saying, "Watch out for people carrying a popular reference book!" still makes the FBI look silly. (And the very short article I read made it sound as though this alert was based on theorizing rather than statistics ... dunno whether that's correct or the reporter's spin or a failure to communicate on the part of the FBI, but it doesn't inspire confidence in the folks supposed to be protecting us. I don't want fools "protecting" me, and I don't want to be afraid of the people protecting me; I want them to protect me. This notice doesn't make me want to keep my eyes open for people carrying almanacs. It makes me want to follow a friend's suggestion to round up a bunch of cheap almanacs to hand to everyone to point out how silly it sounds.)

Or maybe we should just be scared of people carrying things with Arabic names. (My dictionary says 'almanac' is probably from 'al manakh', by way of Latin and Middle English, but there's also alcohol and algebra to be wary of.)