Keep Your Hands to Yourself, Stadium-boy

A federal judge has ruled that pat-down searches at Tampa Bay Buccaneer games are unconstitutional. Any hope that the humiliating, de-humanizing practice of herding fans like cattle into security checkpoints might end any time soon is probably overly sanguine, but this is at least one small step in the right direction.

Anyone who has experienced this insufferable indignity knows that it has nothing to do with terrorism and everything to do with the NFL monopolists maximizing their control over their tame (or cowed) customers. Prior to 9/11, searching each and every ticketholder would have been met with outrage, but now it provides the owners with the perfect excuse to enforce their prohibitions against beer, water bottles, cameras and anything else that might interfere with their quest to extract every last red cent out of their fans.

The venue owners are similarly pleased with the after-effects of 9/11. Lincoln Center in New York, for performances of the New York Philharmonic, stop every 5'1", hunched-over grey-haired old lady to rummage through her hand bag. The idiocy of this is overarching; but it is an essential ingredient in our modern day madness. No one person, for any reason, can be thought to pose more of a risk than any other, yet the risk is nevertheless thought to be pervasive and omnipresent, requiring that little old ladies be searched. Anyway, cheers to U.S. District Judge James D. Whittemore.