From: anonymous

Will you come and teach at my school? We never get interesting people. I guess you'd be interesting.

It would help if I knew what school: where, for example? And what level: high school or college or graduate school? It also depends what you mean by 'teach.' I'm always happy to show up for a day or three and do the visiting rock star thing. A whole semester (or term, or quarter, depending what country you're in) takes longer to arrange.

Most of the invitations I get are from East Coast schools. (It would be interesting to ponder why, one of these fine days.) Most of the time, I have to turn them down. I have multiple sclerosis. Travel is brutal. I can only do it under certain conditions. For example, if I'm flying for more than two and a half hours, I can't do the economy thing, it has to be business class: I need the room because otherwise my legs and back will lock up for days. I also need to rest when I get there and again before I leave--which tends to add at least one night to the schedule. And when I sleep, I need a lot of it, and I need a good bed; I can't sleep on someone's floor. I have to have access to heat in the winter (cold makes my muscles spasm) and air conditioning in the summer (heat slows my already compromised nervous system) and to food all the time, which translates to a good hotel with 24-hour room service. All this means that my list of requirements makes me sound like a prima donna. I hate that. But I've learnt from hard experience that I need what I need and that's that. But if you're on the West Coast then, hey, it's very, very possible.

I love to teach. In February, I'll be teaching an online class for the first time. If it goes well, I'll set up more of them. I'm looking forward to testing the waters. It would solve so many of the hard things about teaching. The best thing about teaching is meeting people, of course, face to face: having a drink and a chat, seeing the faces in the seminar or class suddenly light with understanding or become interior with thought. It's the coolest thing. It's the flying part that sucks.

I don't think flying has to be as hard as it's been the last few years. Uh-oh, I feel a rant coming on. Feel free to skip this one if a tirade about the idiocies of security do not amuse you.

All right. The biggest annoyance about airport "security" is that it doesn't work. The airlines and government are relying on big-system solutions instead of many, many small ones. They are relying on mechanical process and ignoring the most useful tool at their disposal: human expertise. In other words, their attitude is friable, fragile, last-resort rather than fluid, proactive, resilient and on-going. If their system fails, it's like a levee breaking: it's all over. If a good, over-lapping human-based system fails, it like a healthy wetland system being temporarily overwhelmed by rain: it comes bouncing back.

This no doubt sounds a bit scattered. While I've been thinking about self-defence and personal security for more than twenty years, I only have an intuitive sense of the larger systems; I've never really tried to articulate it before. So bear with me if I ramble a bit on my way to the point.

In personal self-defence, the kind I used to teach in England, I said the same thing to my students over and over again: do not rely on a weapon. If you learn to rely on a gun, or knife, or pepper spray, then the consequences of something going wrong--and something always goes wrong--can be disastrous. It's an eggs-in-one-basket problem. In engineering terms, it's a brittle rather than a ductile failure system. If I have a gun, and have only learnt to defend myself using a gun, and my attacker takes the gun, I have no other way to help myself. I'm screwed. However, if I am trained in self-defence the way I teach it, I have a myriad options: I can use distraction, I can use improvised weapons, and my own body weapons, and, best of all, the attacker wouldn't have got near me in the first place. (If you want to know more about self-defence, my new novel, Always, will be out in May, and it's practically a primer on the subject--though admittedly Aud doesn't teach exactly the way I would [g].)

Airline security is like relying on a gun plus a bit of magical thinking. There is this mystical cordon dug like a moat around the castle of the plane. The screeners are the piranhas swimming in the water. If you get past the moat and the piranhas, there's not a lot to stop you from blowing the castle to pieces. Airport and airline security are like France approaching WWII and relying on the Maginot Line; like New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina hit. It is essentially a one-layer big-system solution that will fail, and do so catastrophically.

So, okay, this is actually less true than it was five year ago. Now the inner sanctum of the castle--the cockpit--is hardened. Now there are one or two armed guards--air marshals--patrolling the outer bailey. But there's room for improvement (English understatement). What airline security needs is smart people doing half a hundred different things. Smart people watching the lines at check-in. Smart people scrutinising computer records. Smart people designing the planes. Smart people designing the security of the servers that hold the records regarding the planes and the people on them. Smart people doing the right thing diplomatically, so that no nation state takes up terrorist arms against another. Smart people...but you get my drift. People are the best defence we can have: especially those who are smart, well-trained, mentally flexible, and empowered (in the organisational sense). If some nut dashes through the metal detector, the entire airport should not have to be emptied and the admissions process restarted. There should be a physical barrier behind the first. The wo/man with the wand should be empowered to trip a switch leading to a lockdown, a freezing-in-place of interior transport--the shuttle buses, the passenger train, the special beeping crip cars--so that no one can get easily from one place to another. Passengers should get minimal instruction on not only how to use their seat cushions as floation devices (oh ha, ha ha ha) but how to spot suspicious behaviour and who to inform.

Basically, these single-system solutions--the moat, the Maginot Line, the security cordon, the gun--are yes/no, on/off systems. The best security and defence systems are overlapping and diverse: people and systems that can change their minds, that can cross-reference, that can guess. That means lots and lots of smaller systems, lots and lots of smart people watching and thinking and asking questions, weighing the answers, keeping track of suspicions, talking to others. I don't understand why governments--and corporations, and individuals--are reluctant to implement such systems. Perhaps it has a lot to do with the whole people-are-unclean-and-fallible, machines-and-big-systems-are-clean-and-perfect-and-shiny reasoning (I use the word loosely) that stems from the dualist nonsense, the mind/body split, of Western philosophy. Descartes has a lot to answer for. But that's a rant I've been on before...