I WATCHED THE BILL OF RIGHTS DYING LAST MONTH

Last month, I watched the Bill of Rights dying. I don't know if anyone else
noticed; it's been on its deathbed so long that most folks don't even go
visit anymore.

After a pleasant evening speaking to the Karl Hess Club in Marina del Rey,
my return flight to Las Vegas had been abruptly canceled by America West
the night before. So I found myself approaching the security checkpoint at
Terminal 1 of LAX at 6:10 a.m., preparing to catch the 7:56 to Vegas.

I pushed my carry-on bag through the X-ray machine, submitting to its scan
of my personal effects despite the fact neither the airline nor the airport
administration held any warrant to search them, nor even offered me any
probable cause.

But was that enough? Not last Tuesday. As my bag came down the belt, a
tall, sleepy-eyed young man with a shaved head and an ill-fitting blue
blazer, standing on the other side of the conveyer belt, asked "Sir, do you
mind if I search your bag?"

I replied: "Actually, I do mind. I do not consent to any search of my bag."

The young man acted as though I had not heard his question. "Sir, do you
mind if I search your bag?"

"Yes, I do mind. I do not grant my consent for any search of my bag."

"Sir," he repeated, "do you mind if I search your bag?"

I still don't know how long this would have continued. Sensing that it was
up to me to jog the needle on this trance-like broken record, I next asked,
"Did you see something on the X-ray that looked like a weapon?"

"No sir," he admitted. "It's a random search."

"A random search?"

"A random search."

At this point, a bearded dwarf in a tweed jacket, looking for all the world
like former Clinton cabinet secretary Robert Reich, appeared at my left
shoulder, coming to the aid of my somnolent oppressor. "He can ask you to
search the bag, and if you refuse, he doesn't have to let you continue,"
said this strange apparition, holding his own two suitcases and a plastic
shopping bag.

"How is this any of your concern?" I asked the dwarf. "Do you work for the
airline?"

"No," he smiled proudly, like an enormously self-contented bridge-player
laying down the last trump card. "I work for the FAA."

"And you're on duty here?"

"No, I'm not. But I know about this," he smiled even more broadly.

"Then you must know the security directive says they should ask to see our
photo ID, but it specifically goes on to say that if we refuse, they can
not bar us from boarding" I said quite firmly, drawing the attention of the
sleepy-eyed fellow's lady supervisor, who now waddled over to join us. "So
I assume it's the same with these 'random bag checks.' That's why they ask
for our permission, right? If they don't need our consent, why keep asking
for it?"

Astonishingly enough, at this point, the dwarf's smile collapsed, and he
turned and trundled away like a disturbed woodchuck.

"Sir," asked the tall young man, clinging to the security of his minimal
training and apparently hoping to break the record of Paul McCartney, who
once managed to find more than a dozen different ways to sing the eight
words "Why don't we do it in the road?" in the same recording session, "do
you mind if I check your bag?"

"Listen," I said, "I do not grant my consent, and I'm not going to grant my
consent. If you believe you don't need my consent, then do what you have to
do."

At this point, the young man went through the motions of unzipping and
re-zipping the two small side compartments on my bag, barely glancing at,
in turn, a clean pair of white socks and a plastic bottle of Pepto-Bismol.
He never undid the straps or unzipped the main body of the bag, at all.
"Thank you," he said.

"I'm not going to thank you," I replied, "because we still have a Fourth
Amendment in this country, which protects us from warrantless searches. You
do know that, right?"

The bald young man looked right through me, focusing on the far wall, his
heavy-lidded eyes blinking slowly. His supervisor, who had been puffing up
to say something before the FAA troll butted in, looked disgusted but
averted her eyes, refusing to meet my gaze.

These are the faces of tyranny, bored and uncaring. When instructed to load
us political nonconformists onto cattle cars bound for the internment
camps, they will do so in unquestioning, shuffling boredom, eyeing the
clock to make sure they don't work a minute into their next scheduled break.

Thus are our precious constitutional rights daily rendered null and void by
uncaring stooges, like dying rest-home patients clutching their bedframes
in silent agony, writhing their death throes in their own excrement as the
bored orderlies play cards in the break room down the hall, the sound
turned up on the cheerful idiot morning TV calisthenics show, hoping their
shifts will end before someone comes in and orders them to go change the
sheets.