I’ve been up most of the night listening to information trickle in regarding the undetonated Times Square car bomb.  That I spent last night 5 blocks from the car’s location probably added to what is already my predilection to monitor such things.

It seems to me that a spineless and dim witted terrorist (whether international or domestic) who, upon realizing there was smoke emanating from the back of the vehicle, which might have been followed shortly thereafter by a premature explosion, abandoned the SUV with the motor running and the flashers on.  I don’t know what the terrorist 101 manual says, but I’m guessing that bringing attention to the vehicle containing the explosives isn’t recommended.

And yes, this was a successful act of terrorism.  There may have been no explosion, or loss of life or property, but havoc was created, and another small infusion of paranoia and vigilance now occupies a part of the collective citizen brain that had previously been occupied with creative and productive, instead of protective, thinking.

So Mayor Bloomberg is wrong when he says everything’s back to normal, and New Yorkers should enjoy the city as they always have.   Good thing he wasn’t at his island retreat when this happened.  Wouldn’t have looked good.  My guess is that the frequency of his getaways will diminish some over the next few months.

Meanwhile, with even the NY Times repeatedly pointing out that the Obama administration dropped the ball on the oil rig disaster in the Gulf, and Axelrod and company scrambling the public relations jets to obfuscate their tardy and thus potentially disastrous response,  the folks down there are going through, in the words of Yogi Berra, “deja vu all over again”.

There have been better Sunday mornings.

                          

I’m flying today.  Domestic.  Tampa to NYC.  The more time that passes, the more serious the attempt to bring down a jumbo jet over a major US city is sounding.  It went from a vague report of firecrackers on Xmas day to a full blown terrorist incident by Sunday morning.

I’m not ingesting much if any liquid before or during the flight, because rumor has it that the lavatories will be off limits for the last hour of the flight.  This makes no sense to me, nor have any of the usual suspect pundits professed to understand it, and as they’re usually eager to impress with their unique insights, you know we’re all clueless.  One can tell the guys with enlarged prostates because they’re discreetly inquiring whether the newsstand/convenience store by the boarding gates carry Depends.

This morning I’m packing, cramming every last item I can into an already overstuffed suitcase.  And lying on the floor is a lone DayQuil capsule, bulbous and orange, which I usually carry with me in a compartment of my carry-on bag that’s dedicated to remedies for on-flight maladies.

But not today.  Both Quils, Day and Night, vitamin C, aspirin, and even Airborne, which the government spanked for exaggerated claims, share a plastic bag in the checked bag.  Hope they like it on the cool side.

Although it’s not clear that my precautions needed to be so drastic/neurotic, the frame of mind that caused said precautions brought up two distinct, although interconnected thoughts:

1.  Failed terrorism still succeeds.  Behaviors are altered.  Procedures are changed.  Nerves are frayed.   Business as usual requires unusual effort.  Smiles and nervous patter are presented along with ID’s and boarding passes to TSA agents.

2.  We here is the U.S. are so immersed in freedom, relative to most of the rest of the world, developed and not, that we consider it an imposition on that freedom when even a minor and perhaps meaningless (think DayQuil) intrusion into that freedom occurs.

Without freedom, there’d be no such beast as a terrorist .  Just Mad Max chaos, Neanderthal psyches viciously warring over scraps of sustenance.  Freedom is the counterpoint that gives definition and distinctness to the ugly melody of terrorism.

As long as men in this flat world believe in Gods with egos (an oxymoron if ever there was one) and will stand for no other deities, our balancing prudent precautions with civil liberties will be, although an imprecise art, a necessary sadness.

So the Nigerian is jailed, the DayQuil isn’t available to keep feverish symptoms at bay, and freedom suffers another glancing, but not fatal blow.