What in the hell …

I’m a nervous sort. Partly excess energy in need of burning off, I think. As part of this I sometimes get a little hung up on certain things that might go wrong. When I used to go housecalling w/ the organizer job I was always very nervous that I would step backward on the front porch steps right at the moment that the person opened the door. “Hi, I’m with - ” *CRASH* There would be no way that person would ever think of me as someone to trust, especially as in a conflict with their boss or landlord. This was not a big fear, just a nervous scenario that flashed through my head pretty regularly, and one which, view from a third person perspective with the right soundtrack would actually be kinda funny.

I have the same kind of thing with airports. A scene runs through my head where I make an inappopriate joke, such that security pulls me aside, fines or arrests me. I wouldn’t do this. I know I wouldn’t. But I can imagine doing so. When I hung out around News and Letter circles in Chicago a few years ago someone told a story about a book that some N&L folk had a hand in producing. Tariq Ali got arrested after security found a copy of Marx On Suicide in his bag. (I found a short article on the incident here, I’m pasting the story below as I think it’s funny in a way - especially Ali’s response - though also disturbing.)

I lived in Cambridge, England the spring of ‘99. I went to a lot of anti-war stuff around the Balkans conflicts, Kosovo and all that, and had a lot of leaflets and lefty newspapers. I had packed in a hurry and threw all that stuff on top inside my suitcase without really thinking about. When I flew back to the US they were checking everyone’s luggage, opening it up and digging through it. My mouth went dry and my palms got sweaty during this, and the luggage-digging-through definitely gave me a look. I didn’t really have any trouble, though.

In any case, I was just thinking since I’m going to by flying across the Atlantic again soon, what would be some of the worst possible books that one could have in one’s luggage?

Cleary, Marx On Suicide. Anything with suicide in the title, really, I expect. Or Taliban or Al Qaeda. Anarchist’s Cookbook, maybe. The Koran?
Anyone got any thoughts?

*

The Independent (UK)
www.independent.co.uk

Tariq Ali: Karl Marx led to my arrest as a terrorist in Germany
‘After 11 September, you can’t travel with books like this, said the arresting officer’
30 October 2001

I was arrested at Munich airport at 7am yesterday. After one day of interviews and book signings and two days spent at a Goethe Institute seminar on “Islam and the Crisis”, I was desperate for a cup of coffee. I checked in and soon my hand luggage was wending its way through the security machine.

No metal objects were detected, but they insisted on dumping the contents of my bag onto a table. Newspapers, dirty underpants, shirts, magazines and books tumbled out in full view. Since news always reaches Germany a day after it has appeared in the US press, I thought the locals might be looking for envelopes containing powder in ignorance of FBI and CIA briefings that Osama bin Laden and Iraq were considered unlikely to be involved in the anthrax scare.There were no envelopes in my bag.

The machine-minder brushed aside the copies of the Sued-deutsche Zeitung (SDZ), the International Herald Tribune and Le Monde Diplomatique. He appeared to be very interested in The Times Literary Supplement and was inspecting my scribbled notes on the margin of a particular book review when his eyes fell on a slim volume in German that had been handed to me by a local publisher. Since there had been no time to flick through the volume, it was still wrapped in cellophane. He grasped the text eagerly and then, in a state of some excitement, rushed it over to the armed policeman.

The offending book was an essay by Karl Marx, On Suicide. It was the reference to suicide that had got the policemen really excited. They barely registered the author, though when they did real panic set in and there were agitated exchanges. The way they began to watch me was an indication of their state of mind. They really thought they had got someone. My passport and boarding card were taken from me, I was rudely instructed to re-pack my bag, minus the crucial “evidence” (the SDZ, the TLS and the offending text by Marx), and I was escorted out of the departure area and taken to the police headquarters at the airport.

On the way there the arresting officer gave me a triumphant smile. “After 11 September, you can’t travel with books like this,” he said. “In that case,” I replied, “perhaps you should stop publishing them in Germany, or, better still, burn them in public view.”

Inside headquarters, another officer informed me that it was unlikely I’d be boarding the BA flight and they would make inquiries about later departures. At this point my patience evaporated and I demanded to use a phone. “Who do you want to ring?” he said. “The Mayor of Munich,” I replied. “His name is Christian Ude. He interviewed me about my books and the present crisis on Friday evening at Hugendubel’s bookshop. I wish to inform him of what is taking place.”

The police officer disappeared. A few minutes later another officer (this one sported a beard) appeared and beckoned me to follow him. He escorted me to the flight, which had virtually finished boarding. We did not exchange words. On the plane a German fellow passenger came and expressed his dismay at the police behaviour. He told me how the policeman who had detained me had returned to boast to other passengers of how his vigilance had led to my arrest.

It was a trivial enough episode, but indicative of the mood of the Social Democrat-Green alliance that rules Germany today. It is almost as if many of those who are in power are trying desperately to exorcise their own pasts. While Chancellor Gerhard Schr�der was in Pakistan insisting that there could be no pause in the bombing and that the war of attrition would continue, his Minister for the Interior, Otto Schily, was busy masterminding the new security laws, which threaten traditional civil liberties.

Mr Schily, once a radical lawyer and a friend of the generation of 1968, first acquired public notoriety when he became the defence lawyer for the Baader-Meinhof gang, an urban terrorist network active in the Seventies. It was said at the time that he also supported their activities.

In 1980, Mr Schily joined the Greens and was their key spokesman in the fight against the stationing of Cruise and Pershing missiles in Germany. In 1989, he moved further by joining the Social Democrats. Today he is busy justifying extra powers for the police and instilling a sense of “realism” in his Green coalition partners.

One of the “realist” proposals being discussed is granting jurisdiction to the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (the German equivalent of the FBI) so that it has the right to spy on individuals it suspects of working against the “causes of international understanding or the peaceful coexistence of nations”. And since - in the debased coinage of the present - “peaceful coexistence of nations” includes waging war against some of them, I suppose that my experience was a dress rehearsal for what
is yet to come. It was a tiny enough scratch, but, if untreated, these can lead to gangrene.