David L. Ulin - The Lost Art of Reading: Books and Resistance in a Troubled Time

Early in May 2017, the Transportation Security Administration initiated a pilot program at two domestic airports in which travelers were told to remove paper productsbooks, notebooks, and other documentsfrom carry-ons before X-ray screening. I know: at this point, when the news cycle seems to have sped up as if through time dilation, that reads like ancient history, especially since less than two months later, the TSA announced that testing had been completed and there were no intentions of instituting those procedures nationwide. All the same, bear with me, because suspended or otherwise, such a program has something to tell us about who and where we are. In the first place, the TSA may not have been true to its word, exactly; this past September, in Orlando, the agency released a statement affirming new procedures for travelers to divest their electronics larger than a cell phone, liquids, and other items that may give a cluttered image to the X-ray operator. The other items can include food, books, and magazines.

More to the point, weve been here before. In October 2001, the American Library Association announced its opposition to the Patriot Act, particularly Section 215, the so-called library records provision, which required librarians to turn over the records of patrons when asked to do so by law enforcement. That provision was sunsetted out of existence in 2015, but the aftereffect lingers like (to borrow a phrase from Don DeLillo) an airborne toxic event. Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it, Nadine Gordimer once observed. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever. What shes describing is a state of fear. Something similar might be said in regard to the TSA, which is not in the business of security so much as it is in the business of security theater: a form of magical thinking, Bruce Schneier, a fellow at Harvard Universitys Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, has written, that relies on the idea that we can somehow make ourselves safer by protecting against what the terrorists happened to do last time. Schneiers right. There is no point, no value, in making travelers take off their shoes because one time, a lone individual tried to blow up an airplane with a sneaker bomb. In the United States, however, we have lost the thread of logic in the stories that we tell. Just think about the headlines during the first twelve months of the Trump administration: the Muslim ban and the immigration raids, the Russia collusion investigation, the pussy-grabbing and the paid-off porn star. Just think about the racist rhetoric that runs, like excrement, from the presidents mouth. On the one hand, America has always been a racist country. On the other, that has never before been rendered as acceptable. No, we are in the midst of a broken story, and we have lost the ability to parse its lines. Stories, Ive long believed, are connective, the only tool we have to reach out of our isolation, regardless of how fleetingly. This is as close as I get to faith, this notion that narrative can save us, even (or especially) if we cannot, finally, be saved. And yet, living in this place and time, I wonder whether thats another disrupted narrative. What if stories are not what we need, not what brings us together, but rather, as Schneier asserts, what we fear?