Curiously, good sense prevails in smoking sneaker
Tuesday, August 06, 2002
If someone had told me just a few short weeks ago that a Canadian citizen of Iranian descent could take a flight to Pittsburgh, set fire to his sneakers as the plane taxied to the gate and walk away with only a $300 fine for his trouble, I would've assumed that somebody was smoking crack in Attorney General John Ashcroft's America.
But that's exactly what happened at the tail end of a US Airways flight from Toronto on Saturday evening. A 17-year-old traveling with his father, but sitting apart from him, as teen-agers are wont to do during the awkward years, decided to burn the excess rubber from his sneakers with a lighter.
As we all know, burning dangling rubber particles from one's fresher-than-fresh Iversons ranks way up there with the elimination of acne as the main obsession of teen-age boys.
Recently, folks who fly for a living have been skittish about allowing burning shoe fetishes to take place, even in coach class. In December, Richard Reid, an exceptionally goofy British 28-year-old, gave the passengers and crew of a Paris-to-Miami flight quite a scare when he tried in vain to light a fuse leading to a bomb hidden in his sneakers.
Reid was overpowered on that American Airlines flight by folks who weren't in a mood to have Neil Young write dirges about them if they could help it. Fortunately, Reid's ineptitude as a terrorist undermined him as quickly as the bravery of the passengers. He surely would've had his name inscribed in the annals of "Stupid Criminals International" if investigators hadn't uncovered evidence of Reid's connection to al-Qaida operatives in Europe.
For once, even the textile industry protectionists among us are grateful that materials used in Third World sweatshops where most sneakers are stitched together are of such high quality. Can you imagine Uptowns, Royal Elastics or Wallabees bursting into flame like our old canvas PF Flyers? Certainly not! There's way too much street cred at stake for that to happen.
When an attendant on Saturday night's US Airways flight followed the stench of burning rubber to Row 18, where the 17-year-old sat flicking his lighter, she was determined not to stand for any of his teen-age surliness.
The passenger was obviously burning his shoes and immediately copped to it. As a colleague with a son the same age so memorably put it yesterday, he might as well have.
"There are only two things boys their age are interested in," she quipped, "sex and fire."
Still, it's a sign of "progress" in John Ashcroft's America -- not to mention Pittsburgh -- that a 17-year-old Canadian with an Iranian surname wasn't automatically given an orange jumpsuit, shackled like Hannibal Lecter and booked on a connecting flight to fashionable Camp X-ray at Guantanamo Bay.
The FBI, the Allegheny County police and the U.S. Transportation Security Administration quickly determined that the 17-year-old was more a threat to his family's dignity than to national security and released him to his father's custody.
It was a rare return to perspective and sanity in the wake of Sept. 11. Let's face it, federal and local overreaction to real and imagined threats have become entrenched thanks to the mullahs overseeing Homeland Security.
A junior pyromaniac may have dodged the bullet this time, but our civil liberties are still threatened as various bureaucracies struggle to differentiate terrorist threats from oddities in human behavior.
Recently, I wrote about the plight of Getu Berhanu Tewolde, an Ethiopian immigrant arrested at the Downtown Greyhound bus station for allegedly making "terroristic threats" during a bus layover. Getu was held in the Allegheny County Jail's mental ward for six weeks without benefit of legal counsel or a psychiatric evaluation. He'll go on trial in the fall.
Former Art Institute of Pittsburgh student Salam El Zaatari was indicted by the government after carrying an X-Acto knife through airport security. He spent two months in solitary confinement at the Allegheny County Jail, which might as well erect a sign above its door that reads: "Abandon Hope All Ye Foreigners Who Enter Here."
Perhaps times are finally changing for awkward young men who don't conform to our bland preconceptions. Really, we don't have to release John Walker Lindh to his father's custody to be fair to everyone in John Ashcroft's America.
