About security

I’m afraid there’s no pretty picture to illustrate this post.
I was going to take a photo of security checks in action, but that’s not allowed for security reasons.

Before I go on, let me make clear my prejudice: I don’t believe “security” actually effectively protects me, it merely curtails my civil liberties. In the blitz it was “business as usual”, but the terrorists have really won this war as they’ve forced us to change our previously relaxed way of life.

I’ve just spent two days working in a meeting of the Civil Aviation Security Committee. This is where representatives of EU member states get together to discuss such things as the introduction of body-scanners and the possible relaxation of the liquids ban for passengers at airports, amongst other things. By definition air travel is cross-border so experts from different countries need to agree to do the same thing. I better not tell you too much more, as the proceedings are of course confidential and there’s probably a member of the secret police out there reading this blog, so I may find this article removed for security reasons.

Seriously though, I find it interesting to work in this committee as they discuss things that have an impact on my life as someone who is obliged to travel frequently by plane for work. I tend to avoid travelling by air for private journeys. It’s not that I’m afraid of flying or worried that my plane will be hijacked and crashed into a skyscraper. It’s not even that I’m guilty about my carbon footprint. No, it’s just that these days I find flying such a squalid, uncomfortable and inconvenient experience, I’d just as soon take a bit more time and cover the distance on the ground. One of the main reasons for that is the hysterical airport security we have to confront “post 9/11” which requires you to arrive at the airport an inordinate amount of time before your departure (at least from a major airport like Brussels). So I like to keep up to speed with developments by listening to the regulators in the Aviation Security Committee.

To prevent a reoccurence of the 9/11 attacks, where terrorists armed only with “box-cutters” were able to wreak havoc, there was a rush to adopt prohibitive measures. At EU level this basically meant giving force of law to ICAO’s existing convention. Under that passengers are not allowed to carry with them onto the plane a number of prohibited articles which may serve as weapons. These basically fall into four categories: firearms, knives, blunt instruments and explosives. Guns are obviously undesirable: firing one could puncture the pressurized cabin with disastrous results. The category “knives” has unfortunately been extended to include anything vaguely sharp: I’m sure you too have had nail-scissors confiscated. “Blunt instruments” covers nasty things like baseball bats and less obviously tools, though curiously the Americans tolerate tools up to 18cm and Europeans only 6cm (no comment). Explosives... this brings us of course into the area of liquid explosives so now, just to be on the safe side for security reasons, there’s a general ban on liquids. This came as something of a blow to me as someone who used to like to take as a gift to friends and family a personally chosen bottle of wine (without entrusting it to the vagaries of baggage handling inside a case alongside with stainable clothes). My only option now is to buy an expensive untasted one from the airport shop. I hesitate these days to use the words “duty free” as items are consistently more expensive than in town.
Isn’t it weird how the powerful airport shop lobby engineered an exception for stuff bought there as long as it’s in some “tamper evident” bag? It strikes me that even inside a special bag a bottle of wine would make a pretty good blunt instrument for hitting someone over the head with or if you were to smash it you’d have a pretty good sharp knife-like object. Yes, many security rules are absurd.

To enforce all of this we have to put our hand baggage through an X-ray machine and pass ourselves through a metal detector, having previously removed numerous articles from our pockets and possibly too our belt and shoes. All of which takes time and leads to very long queues. Metal detectors are curious things, their going “beep” depends on what they’ve been set to. I once had to remove from my person a leather-bound diary with little metal corners; but I also once inadvertently carried an Opinel through one undetected. The Opinel is a French pen-knife where the metal blade folds back into the wooden handle. I was amused to learn once in the Aviation Security Committee that inspectors like to use them to see how good detection is.

Human ingenuity is, however, boundless and a clever terrorist will always find his way around restrictions. I used to say that it will one day end with us having to strip naked before boarding a plane. Now it appears that thanks to modern technology this may not be necessary as there are now machines that can virtually unclothe us, I refer of course to body-scanners.

There’s been a lot of talk about body-scanners following the predictable knee-jerk security industry reaction calling for more of them after the Christmas incident of the potential Detroit underpants bomber. Whether, of course, he would actually have been detected using one is another matter. The European Parliament soon weighed in, declaring them to be an affront to human dignity and the raiser of fundamental rights and health issues.

But what are body-scanners and how do they work ? Here too, I was lucky enough to attend a presentation to the Aviation Security Committee by an American manufacturer. Or should I say “sales pitch”? At 100 000 to 200 000 euros a throw we’re talking serious business opportunities here, if these things were ever to become mandatory.
The particular model I saw explained uses “millimetre wave” technology. The rival technology “backscatter” is X-ray based and bad news for your health on the ionizing radiation front. Millimetre waves, however, are more benign and emit a level of radiation actually considerably lower than what you get from your mobile phone or leakage from a micro-wave oven (quoth the manufacturer, though this has evidently also been independently verfied by scientists). Basically you enter a portal and stand still for 10 seconds while two curved panels scan you much like a radar would, allowing a 3D image to be compiled of what you look like under your clothes. But fear not ladies (or ageing men with unflattering silhouettes)! What you see has not the quality of a “Playboy” centre-fold; rather it looks more like a black-and-white blurry X-ray photo of a skeleton covered in papier mâché, but crucially with extraneous objects sharply revealed as dark patches. The advantage of the body-scanner is that it can also “see” non-metallic objects, such as ceramic knives and solid and liquid explosives.
The manufacturers have been working hard to overcome the invasion of privacy issue. Initially they offered options of blurring the face and even private parts. Now they are talking “automatic threat recognition”. Basically there would be no need for a human being to study the image; a computer throws up a stick diagram of the body telling you where the offending object is so then a human can conduct a hand search.
Believe me, these things are coming. It strikes me they’re more effective than metal detectors for a start. The only question is how much they will have to raise airport taxes by to pay for them, because you can be pretty sure the extra cost will be passed on to you and me, the passenger.
In the end, I don’t really mind what they do as long as I don’t have to waste so much time queuing. I fear, however, not much will change in that respect as they’ll still be used in tandem with existing procedures.

Existing procedures bring me of course to the human factor. Let’s face it, security staff wouldn’t be doing the job they are, if they had had a better education and more opportunities in life. They of course know this and are naturally resentful of people who have apparently succeeded in life because they are travelling by plane. This is a golden opportunity for them, especially as they are wearing a uniform, to get their own back on society. Rules are rules after all, and there is nothing more satisfying than humiliating someone who thinks he’s better into total compliance.
I’m sorry about that, I realize they are nice people like you and me, who are only doing their job and with our best interests, indeed security, at heart. Can I go now, please?

I’ve noticed signs up in airports in the UK, which as the natural aper of the US is particularly hysterical about security, to the effect of “Warning, our staff have no sense of humour”.
Years ago, pre 9/11, I once had to fly out of Alexandria. The “airport” is miles out of town on the edge of the desert and is actually a military airfield. You enter a barbed-wire perimeter fence with machine-gun guard and arrive at a small modest building. In those days in a hot country I always travelled with a metal water-bottle. The swarthy moustachioed military man in a khaki uniform who was on duty to inspect my bag eyed the water-bottle with suspicion and made me open it. He sniffed it and asked me what was in it. “Water”, I said. “Dreenk!” he commanded. I did and pulled a funny face sticking my tongue out with an exaggerated expression of disgust. He laughed. It was another age. No, I wouldn’t do that now.

Once, for one scary moment, I thought I was on my way to jail when I was about to fly home from JFK and was informed that my shoes had tested positive for explosives. Except I wasn’t told that immediately, I was asked these weird questions like “Do you like gardening? Do you play golf?” I had actually walked one week before on the lawn at Mount Vernon which had recently been fertilized, I know that because the guide apologized for how it stank. That was sufficient to test positive for explosives.

Ah, airport security, does it irritate you as much as it irritates me? Take the train!

But you can’t escape it, daft security is around us everywhere. We get a lot of it at work. I periodically have to get my security clearance renewed to work in all these confidential meetings. The Commission hasn’t the means to do it itself, so it asks the member states to do it. It’s a joke, I haven’t lived in the UK for almost 30 years, they don’t know me from Adam. Or maybe they do, perhaps a little man in MI whatever is reading this blog as I write it.

Then, once I’ve been allowed inside the building, there are secure doors which I have to swipe my badge to get through. Only some won’t open when they should. So as I know the building I just walk around to where there’s an open door. What is the point? This locked door obsession also obliges me to take the lift for one storey when I would happily take the stairs. Good news for the environment.
Ah but, security is so important it has no price.

Only when push comes to shove, it doesn’t actually protect you.
Greenpeace once managed to build a brieze-block and cement wall across the main entrance to the Council building to protest about a fish quota meeting. You couldn’t get in or out.
The security service, looking out, felt that as the wall was technically on the street it wasn’t their area of responsibility. The Brussels police turned up way too late, after they’d mustered enough numbers to feel secure, and just found it amusing, which I guess it was.
Heaven help us if one day Al-Qaeda mounts such a slick operation against the building.

I’ve been talking a lot about physical security, but more insidious than this is virtual security. In our internet age vast amounts of personal data are being accumulated on us and passed on. Three cheers here to to the European Parliament for vetoing an EU/US agreement to let the Americans see as much of our banking data as they might want to via SWIFT. Incidentally, on the subject of banking, for security reasons, I am not allowed to open a current account at a bank in my own country as I don’t live there, unless that is I’m happy with making a £5000 interest-free loan to one (sounds a bit like walking round to an open door again).

This amassing of data on us all is not paranoia, it’s a fact, the technology is there and in addition to what we’ve put out there on the net voluntarily (or under coercion to be able to buy on-line) none of us is immune from hacking. Of course, I’m recklessly contributing to the pool of material on me right now. But what the hell! I guess the British secret service has by now formed a sufficiently rounded picture of me to be able to tell my employer that although occasionally irritable I am fundamentally harmless.

But the point is, often the conclusions reached by security services are pure misjudgements based on stereotyping and are prejudicial to individuals. There has been a famous case of a 6 year old white middle-class American girl who, for God knows what reason, is on the Homeland Security’s “no-fly list” and can’t get off it. Welcome to the world of Kafka, Orwell’s “1984” and Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil”. This is where we are.
Until you’ve been adversely affected yourself you may take a benign view of infringement of data privacy for security reasons. But like any other absolutist over-riding reasons, we are right to be suspicious and afraid of them. Since 9/11 civil liberties have quite clearly been eroded in Western society, often quite arbitrarily and for little demonstrable benefit. What used to be normal rules no longer apply.

These days, if you want to stay out of trouble with security and be able to go about your everyday business, I’m afraid you just have to put up and shut up.

About Proust

I have just spent a year living with Marcel Proust.

Last summer I read Alain de Botton’s entertaining and enlightening “How Proust can change your life”, which prompted me to make a serious attempt on the entirety of “A la recherche du temps perdu”. I had already read “Du côté de chez Swann” but I felt it important to start again at the beginning of the 3000 plus pages (as type-set in the Pléïade, which I was reading in the Folio paperback reprint).
I started in September 2009 on the train to Strasbourg. It was my first trip down there to work for the plenary of the European Parliament. I had heard that this involved a lot of hanging around, so it seemed to me that “In search of lost time” would be a rather poetic choice of reading for filling in those idle hours.
In the end I didn’t read the novel just during my monthly trips to Strasbourg but on and off over the whole year finally reaching the end in September 2010, almost a year to the day since starting.

Was it worth it? Most definitely, yes! However, before you rush out to buy a copy on my recommendation, I must warn you that it is not at all like reading any other book you may know.
For a start not a great deal happens. The Monty Python “Summarizing Proust” sketch is most relevant in this respect. It is impossible to summarize Proust in a meaningful way. You don’t read “A la recherche” to find out what happens next. This means that not infrequently you get bogged down in it, saturated, fed up and the best thing to do is to go off and read something else, returning to it when you’re in the mood. Generally I found I could not read much more than about 40 pages in one go. Still, having at this rate got to the end after a year, here is my entry in the summarizing Proust contest.

The narrator (who only once drops his guard and reveals his name to be Marcel) relates to us at length in roughly chronological order the events which most shaped his life. We read especially of his childhood visits to Combray in the countryside, his seaside summers as a young man at Balbec attracted to young women, his introduction to high society particularly through the aristocratic Guermantes family, and especially the homosexual Baron de Charlus, his obsessive love of Albertine who he attempts almost to keep prisoner, but who escapes through untimely death, and his final realization that he has been wasting his time on snobbery and infatuation and better get on with writing his magnum opus.

If you know the work, you will have spotted how my sectioning of the summary corresponds to the initially obscure titles of the seven volumes. Gradually the intricacy resolves itself into a grand overall well balanced design - rather like how you might visit and observe a cathedral admiring the craftsmanship in individual parts before standing back and appreciating the whole (a metaphor of Proust’s own, also taken up in the Folio paperback covers which feature different Monet views of Rouen cathedral). I wrote after the first 1000 pages “It’s not unlike doing a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle: images start to emerge slowly and fit together into a greater picture, but sometimes you just sit staring at the same piece for ages” and that analogy proved to be true as the further I got into the novel the more I knew where to put the pieces.

Some of the pieces are indeed very beautiful. Proust is a master of style and his French is fastidiously precise, often making use of unusual vocabulary. He is justly famous for his seemingly endless sentences and paragraphs. This makes it difficult to find a place to break off when you’ve had enough. Sometimes it even becomes necessary to turn back a page to the start of the sentence as you realize your attention has wandered and you’ve lost the thread. Still it may surprise you to learn that sometimes “A la recherche” is quite direct and laugh-out-loud funny as Proust is quite merciless in his observation of human foibles and people’s use of language.

You may well have wondered what the title of the first volume “Du côté de chez Swann” means. It refers to the countryside walks taken on Sundays by the narrator’s family in his childhood. They had two favourite routes, one taking them past Swann’s property, the other towards the land associated with the Guermantes. This becomes a metaphor for the different influences on the narrator’s life and the direction it takes accordingly: fascination with the arts (personifed by Bergotte for literature, Berma theatre, Vinteuil music and Elstir painting) and fascination with the aristocracy (personified in particular by Robert de Saint-Loup, the Duchesse de Guermantes and the Baron de Charlus). Finally he comes to see art as all important for its evocative power, and the aristocracy as worthless for its superficial hypocrisy.

The central section of “Du côté de chez Swann”, “Un amour de Swann”, is the only part of the book written in the third person and its story predates the narrator’s account of his own life. However, Swann’s obsessive love of Odette, prefigures Marcel’s own of Albertine and the key characters in this section reappear as important figures in the narrator’s own life, not least Swann himself who plays a key rôle in initiating him into the arts. Mme Verdurin, a social climber, also reappears as she dabbles too in the worlds of the arts and high society, but in a much less appealing way.

The rest of “A la recherche” is written in the first person interspersing reminiscences of things past with reflections on the narrator’s inner life, describing how events and his relationships have their impact on it.
In the course of the five middle volumes the indecisive narrator successively struggles to come to terms with: the uncertainty and contradictions of his attraction to the three key women in his life, Swann’s daughter Gilberte, the Duchess and Albertine; how to make himself known in high society while wondering about the true nature of his new acquaintances; the changing nature of his one true friendship with Saint-Loup; the implications of Charlus’ homosexuality; his suspicion that Albertine is also homosexual; Albertine’s death; his vocation as a writer.

Proust brilliantly draws all the threads together in the last volume, “Le temps retrouvé”. He starts it by revisiting the “madeleine” episode which is right at the start of the first volume and is the one bit known to (especially French) people who have not read all the book: it’s the particular flavour and texture of a small cake dipped in a cup of herb tea that brings childhood memories flooding back to him. The notion that lost time can only be regained through this kind of revelatory sensual memory is expanded on much more in “Le temps retrouvé”.
Then, in one of the best sections of the whole work, the narrator attends a party bringing back together all the main characters twenty years or so later on in life. The narrator himself realizes how much they and more importantly he himself have aged and are the same people only in name.

Names and how they suggest notions to the individual that may not tally with reality and which change over time with experience are another thing that fascinates Proust. Key characters in the book also change name through marriage in a way that is deliberately paradoxical and confusing.

At the end of the novel the Swann side and the Guermantes side merge as the conclusion of the “plot”, which I won’t give away. Then in the final reflective digression from the narration of events, which is the book’s standard modus operandi, the narrator realizes he is the sum of these ultimately chance influences and that it his resulting life that forms the substance of his book to be.

It should by now be apparent that what most interests Proust is how objective outer reality impinges on our inner subjective reality through how it is percieved and misperceived. The “madeleine” moment is one of heightened perception that can transcend time by tapping into what is unchanging in ourselves. But the novel is also littered with far more countless moments of misperception where characters, not least the narrator himself, get the wrong end of the stick, especially in their mistaken conclusions about the nature of others, misjudging from their external behaviour. This does indeed result in wasted time.

Thus the subject of “A la recherche du temps perdu” is how we experience life. This may sound odd as Proust’s and therefore the narrator’s life is far-removed from our own: it is that of an unmarried man in France at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, sufficiently well-off not to have to work but in ill health, largely living as a recluse engrossed by the arts and introspection, now and then venturing forth into high society, while all the time trying to get his act together to write a book. And yet as Proust observes himself, the reader must recognize as right and true everything which in the work of the writer corresponds to the reader’s own experience of life. As you read this does happen time and time again. So as you plough on thinking “What the hell do I care what late 19th century French high society was up to?”, you suddenly feel “Wow, I’ve felt that too!”.

One of the key ways in which De Botton believes Proust “can change your life” is by bringing you the reader to rediscover the delights and fullness of life in its banal and everyday form. That is not unlike what French painters of the time such as Monet were trying to do and what in a rather different way his contemporary Joyce does in “Ulysses”.
This is what great literature can do for you: help you to grasp that this life we experience is all we have, but it is sufficient.

So Proust too writes “about being here”.