TSA becomes growing target of humor, jokes - General-Interest Humor Aimed at TSA

WASHINGTON - A recent Tank McNamara comic strip featured two ex-Transportation Security Administration screeners working security at a Major League baseball stadium.

"I miss pawing ladies' underwear like I could when I was screenin' for the TSA," one says to the other.

It was hardly the first time someone took a comic shot at the agency hastily created to take over airport security after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

During its short existence, TSA has been mocked in newspaper columns, editorial cartoons, comic strips, a parody song, even a Super Bowl commercial.

Screeners themselves maintain a Web site that collects cartoons, satirical articles and parody images and songs.

Most of the jokes on the screeners' site involve complaints about management. A typical cartoon shows a supervisor towering over a screener while yelling, "Bathroom break?" We don't pay you to pee, you worm!"

General-interest humor aimed at TSA tends to result from the thorough, post-9/11 airport screening procedures that some air travelers view as intrusive.

Shortly after shoe-bomber Richard Reid tried to blow up a trans-Atlantic flight, syndicated cartoonist Mike Peters drew a couple in their underwear putting their clothes on. The husband says to his wife, "I don't mind these strip searches but I hate when they stick dollars in my underwear."

By 2004, airport security had become enough of an annoyance to inspire a group of Texas attorneys who call themselves The Bar and Grill Singers to record TSA-themed lyrics to the song "Jet Plane."

"All my bags are packed, I have my ID," it begins. "So frisk me to check for clues/Tell me to take off my shoes/Touch me, ask me what you need to know," goes the chorus.

Jeff Millar, who with Bill Hinds has been writing the Tank McNamara comic strip for 32 years, said he tries to find humor in the nexus of news and personal experience. When he heard on a local newscast about two TSA screeners fired because they had, and hid, criminal records, he did a Google search for "screeners" and "fired" and got 16,400 hits.

"The points of reference have to be familiar to the readers, who are generally sports fans," Millar said in a telephone interview. He penned three comic strips with the screeners in mid-April, and then segued to jokes about Giants slugger Barry Bonds, who he calls "an evergreen."

A TSA announcement in December that scissors and small tools would be allowed in passenger cabins prompted a spoof by the satirical magazine "The Onion." Under the heading "New TSA Guidelines," the magazine listed:

And: "Vermont and New York cheddars can be brought on board, but not Wisconsin cheddar_ by far the sharpest cheese in the cheddar family."

All that attention to an agency that's still in its infancy raises the question of whether TSA screeners are likely to replace post office workers as the butt of jokes and the subject of late-night talk show monologues.

"No," says Hank Bradford, who was Johnny Carson's head writer during the 1970s and now writes for David Letterman.

"Basically you're glad they're there," Bradford said. "How do you be antagonistic toward those guys?"

Going through airport screening regularly is also something that only a minority of people experience, Bradford said, and so the appeal of jokes at TSA's expense isn't broad enough for late-night talk show hosts.

He thinks the TSA will never beat the post office for pure comic potential. "When they're not screwing with your mail, they're shooting each other," he said. "You can't get better comedy material than that."

Abusing Homeland Authority (Excerpt)
by William Norman Grigg
May 15, 2006

As it emerges as our country's first national police force, Michael Chertoff's Department of Homeland Security is becoming notorious for abuses of power — and even depraved crimes against children.

The school day had ended and the parking lot at Englewood Elementary was full of energetic kids eager to go home when Leander Pickett saw a late model car obstructing the school bus loading zone. Pickett, a teacher's assistant at the Jacksonville, Florida, grade school, strolled over to the car, which had made a wrong turn into an exit lane, and told its occupants they had to move.

Pickett's reward for looking after the safety of the schoolkids was to be thrown face-down onto the hood of the car, handcuffed, and held for more than a half-hour as students, teachers, and parents looked on in horror.

"I walked up to [the driver] and said, 'Sir, you need to move,'" Pickett told a television reporter. "That's when he said 'I'm a police officer. I'm with Homeland Security. I'll move when I want to.' That's when he started grabbing me on my arm."

"Mr. Pickett asked the guy blocking the bus loading zone to move, and the guy told him he would move his car when he got ready to move it," confirmed eyewitness Alton Jackson, a coach at the school. A second eyewitness, school employee Terri Dreisonstok, added: "At that point I intervened, and I went up to the gentleman and said, 'Mr. Pickett is an employee here,' and they said it didn't matter."

At the time Pickett was assaulted by the Homeland Security agents, school principal Gail Brinson was in the cafeteria. Summoned by an anxious student, Brinson raced to the parking lot and found an agitated Pickett being yelled at by the Homeland Security officials.

"I told them Mr. Pickett was an employee, and asked what he had done," Brinson recalled to The New American. "One of them told me that he had been 'abusive, aggressive, and belligerent,' but wouldn't say what else he had done to deserve being handcuffed. They just insisted over and over that it was 'Homeland Security business.' As I looked at Leander standing there in handcuffs without being told what he had done wrong, I said to the agents, 'Well, if you had treated me like this I would be belligerent, too.'"

Brinson demanded names and badge numbers, but the agents refused to provide them.

"They told me they didn't have to give me anything," she recounts. "They said that they were 'bigger than the FBI' and that they wouldn't let [Mr. Pickett] go until they thought it was okay. And all the time we had teachers crying, children screaming — Leander is really popular with the kids — and parents shouting at us." Finally, after an anguished half-hour, Pickett was set free without any charges being filed against him, and the federal agents drove away.

"You know what I think happened?" Brinson said to The New American. "I think they simply got lost, made a wrong turn into our parking lot, and when Mr. Pickett exercised his proper authority by telling them to move, the two things the Devil likes most took over — pride and arrogance." With the help of an acquaintance who works for the federal government, Brinson pursued a complaint through the Homeland Security Department's civil liberties section, but it availed her nothing.

"You can't get anywhere with these people," she points out. "When something like this happens nobody [in the federal bureaucracy] will listen unless you have a connection. Well, I had a connection, and it still didn't help. I just kept getting transferred around from desk to desk, and finally I spoke with some official who just told me that they 'stand behind our men.'"

Leander Pickett hired a lawyer and prepared to file a civil rights lawsuit. "You know you hear these stories every day and say, 'This will never happen to me,' but … it happened to me," comments Pickett. "If this is Homeland Security, I think we ought to be a little afraid."

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.