OK, so now we are going to have government scanners at
undisclosed locations watching how we all walk and identifying us
by our unique gait.
OK, so now we are going to have government scanners at undisclosed locations watching how we all walk and identifying us by our unique gait. It’s just another fascinating facet of the freshly-rehabilitated John Poindexter’s (remember him from Iran-Contra?) Total Information Awareness system, designed to learn everything about everybody everywhere. Orwell was off by a few years, but we do seem finally to have gotten to the point where it is fair to say Big Dubya’s Watching. Sheesh – now they’re spying on my mosey.
I know it’s going to happen: I’ll be in an airport, just walking along with my distinctive gait, which I like to think of as a really cool damn-I’m-good saunter, and a pair of guvment agents will suddenly be at my side. “Mr. Mitchell,” one will whisper loudly, “we have analyzed your walk, which by the way is amazingly cool – we really like it – and we have determined that to a 94 percent certainty, you are you.”
“Quiet!” I’ll hiss back. “Someone will hear you. Who else knows about this? I don’t want it getting around that I’m me – people might draw the wrong conclusions. Can we just go with the 6 percent possibility that I’m not me? I mean, cut me some slack, I’m a generally law-abiding citizen.” “Sorry,” the one in the darker sunglasses will say, “94 percent is close enough for us, and since you’re a known liberal we’re going to have to ship you off to Guantanamo Bay for a year or so until we can repatriate you back to your farm in Afghanistan.” And that’ll be it; no more columns.
You can see what’s gong to happen here once the news spreads. Suspicious-looking people of visibly non-Northern European backgrounds, you know, the kind who go around making furtive gestures and engaging in behavior which could be interpreted as insufficiently supportive of our troops, will start finding ways to sabotage Admiral Poindexter’s system. They’ll start wearing fake leg casts and hobbling around on crutches, or in extreme cases even riding in wheelchairs, thus requiring the Pentagon to develop the Bipedally-Disabled Perambulation Identification Profile, with which, for only a few million more of your taxpayer dollars, a person’s special hobble or roll, as the case may be, can be uniquely identified.
Measure, counter-measure: it’s the way it works in the never-ending battle for truth, justice, and the American Way. We can’t expect the evil ones among us to just accept the fact that we will have outsmarted them again. Next we’ll be seeing Colin Powell on the news lecturing to the Security Council of the United Other Nations Who Don’t Count about how we absolutely must invade Iran or Canada or someplace – it doesn’t matter much where, almost everybody deserves a major whuppin’ these days for one reason or another – because that place has training camps for evil people. And he’ll be showing videotapes of zealots fanatically practicing how to walk deceptively; there’s a squad doing Groucho Marx’s duck-walk, and another cadre gliding backwards like Michael Jackson, and some guys working on that John Wayne hitch-in-the-gitalong thing. It will be scary stuff.
But we are nothing if not tenacious. Quick as you can say Arms For Hostages, Poindexter will be back before an appropriations committee explaining how for a few million more we can have a Celebrity Locomotion Impersonation Detection System up and running, thus making the homeland secure once and for all.
Has anybody noticed that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is beginning to look like a documentary?
