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WHEN THE DUST settled, it turned out that Councilman James E. Davis had been killed by a political rival who had gotten his gun into City Hall because he had accompanied the councilman, who waved him passed the metal detectors—a common courtesy in a profession filled with glad-handling and back-slapping.
Because this is America, where attention spans are probably not even long enough to finish this sentence, the next day’s coverage of the Davis killing focused only on Davis’s act of courtesy and not on the actual accessory to the crime: The legally purchased gun in Othniel Askew’s pocket.
So just a few hours after a respected colleague was shot to death in the city’s secular cathedral, New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg invited the cameras to watch him pass through the metal detector outside his office. From this day forward, the mayor said, neither he nor the members of the City Council would be exempt from the security check.
Imagine that! The mayor of the City of New York will now pass through a metal detector on his way to work, just as airline pilots are now required to do the same before taking their positions in the cockpit. Great. So now the citizens of New York are safe from the very real threat of a mayoral self-assassination, just as airline passengers are now traveling safe in the knowledge that the pilot will no longer be able to hijack his own plane.
But Bloomberg’s one-man show was a bit of street theater that signified nothing. When he got to his office after his metal detector photo op, he didn’t push through any new city laws. He didn’t round up owners of illegal guns for a high-profile bust. He didn’t order the police department to seize assault weapons and melt them down in full view.
Of course he didn’t. Try as he might to deny it, Billionaire Mike is a politician like the rest of them, which means he’s very gifted at symbolism and preternaturally incapable of doing anything else. After all, passing through a metal detector is easy; but doing something bold that could actually save someone’s life—like banning guns, for example—is tough. James E. Davis was killed with a handgun bought legally in North Carolina. Mayor Bloomberg can walk through the City Hall magnetometer every day until he is unceremoniously dumped from office in two years, but .40-caliber pistols will still be sold legally to weirdos like Askew every day of those two years. Unless guys like Bloomberg do something more than submitting to a security check.
My personal experience in New York, even two years after the 9/11 attacks, clearly illustrates the difference between real security and symbolic security. For these two years, security has supposedly been tightened to prevent terrorist infiltration. In fact, you can’t go into an office building in New York City nowadays without some security guard wearing an “Allied Security” patch asking to see your identification. “ID, please?” has replaced “Go to hell!” as the most commonly heard expression in New York City today.
Why they want to see your identification is never clear. After all, fake IDs—the same kind of laminated lies that the 9/11 hijackers carried—are as widely available in New York as counterfeit Rolexes. To me, this makes a mockery of security. And since I can’t refuse a good bit of mockery, I went to Times Square and bought my own fake ID card from a guy named Vladimir, whose understanding of the English language seemed to be limited to the words “sign here” and “forty dollars.”
Vlad the Enabler produced my fake ID in seconds. At first glance, it resembled a New York State driver’s license—if your first glance is taken when you’re drunk. Sure, it says, “New York” on it. And it has my sex, my hair and eye color, my height (I lied; I ain’t 6’2”) and my weight (I lied again, I ain’t 170). It has my address (not my real one), my date of birth (I gave my brother’s birthday, not mine). It even has my Social Security number (so what if I gave the wrong digits?). It even has the pseudo-futuristic hologram pattern like a respectable government-issued ID card—except this one, when held up to the light, reveals the word “genuine.” In my experience, items that brag about being “genuine” tend not to be.
But if anyone bothered to look, the fine print on the back fully discloses the card’s sham. “Card data is supported only by my signed ‘truth pledge.’” (And the funny thing is, Vlad never asked me to even sign any “truth pledge”—although I would have lied on it, too.)
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Armed with my trusty fake ID, I decided to test whether security in New York was real or symbolic. Sure enough, I gained entry everywhere I went, no questions asked. No matter how many fake security guards were in the lobby, my fake ID was treated with carte blanche. I even was given entry to the high-security Time-Life building, where they X-rayed my bag like I was at an airport (were they afraid I would hijack People magazine’s cover and put Neil Young on it rather than the latest starlet?). The receptionist had no problem with my fake ID, but she did want to know what “company” I was “from.” “Me?” I said. “I’m from Acme,” the esteemed firm from which Wile E. Coyote bought all his explosives in the old “Road Runner” cartoons. She didn’t even flinch. Such security!
Now I’m using my fake ID everywhere. I’ve used it when cashing a check. I even used it a week ago to board a flight to Oregon on American Airlines.
So what has my own bit of street theater proved? Only this: The reason I could gain entry into New York’s supposedly most-secure buildings with a fake ID or fly cross-country is the same reason a man could get into City Hall with a gun. As Americans, we want to feel safe, but we’re not willing to do the hard work to actually make us safe. Of course we don’t want to live in a police state, but our current “security guard state” is as much a sham as the plastic card with my picture, erroneous Social Security number and falsified height and weight.
Gersh Kuntzman is also a columnist for The New York Post, where a fake ID will get you passed all four “security” checkpoints. His Web site is at www.gersh.tv
© 2003 Newsweek, Inc.
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Perspectives
