Yesterday’s New Jersey Star-Ledger ran a column by Paul Mulshine entitled “It may be 2010, but it sure feels like 1984.” The topic, of course, is the increasingly invasive procedures that TSA officers have been granted. For a guy who “held it in” every day for the six years of middle and high school because of bashful bladder syndrome, the airport has begun to feel like the shower room after gym class. Having been raised with the idea that certain body parts were to be viewed by God alone (and the occasional physician), being undressed in front of others was a nightmare scenario. I still avoid public restrooms when at all feasible. Now TSA officials have tickets to a free “scope and grope” fest whenever you want to fly. I say the terrorists have already won.

Perhaps by coincidence, in trying to keep up with my daughter’s reading assignments, I have started to reread Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. The grandson of Thomas Huxley, Darwin’s bulldog, Aldous had written a foreword in 1946 that was affixed to the front of my college edition of his novel. In it he states his bleak vision of a future where governments have all become totalitarian and control vast numbers of slaves made willing by apathy (read “world-wide web” or “Internet”). Showing your private parts to a total stranger who then gets to grope you later? This is freedom? Abandon hope all ye who enter here.

Have these TSA officials been trained, seriously trained, to deal with the fact that they see what many people would pay good money to glimpse? (Well, not in my case, but you get the picture.) Where are their credentials? No, wait, don’t show me that! If I decide to display myself in public, I could easily be arrested for indecent exposure, but if a pervert wants a free look, all s/he has to do is apply to TSA. What will it take for Americans to shake off their electronically induced haze and say “No more!”? Perhaps I am alone in feeling vulnerable naked before strangers. Perhaps others enjoy giving it all away. Is it not better to survive that flight so that another stranger gets a gander at the jewels when you fly back home? You can kiss my arse goodbye and call it government work. 1984? Brave New World? I think Silence of the Lambs might be a better paradigm.