No serrated knives, not even for pilots

Earlier today BoingBoing pointed me to this Ask the pilot column on Salon.com with the kind of TSA story everyone just assumes doesn’t apply to airline pilots:

“No, this is no good. You can’t take this.”

“Why not?”

“It’s serrated.” He is talking about the little row of teeth along the edge. Truth be told, the knife in question, which I’ve had for years, is actually smaller and less sharp than the knives currently handed out by my airline to its first- and business-class customers. You’d be hard-pressed to cut a slice of toast with it.

“Oh, come on. It is not.”

“What do you call these?” He runs his finger along the minuscule serrations.

“Those … but … they … it …”

“No serrated knives. You can’t take this.”

“But sir, how can it not be allowed when it’s the same knife they give you on the plane!”

“Those are the rules.”

But beyond the amusing front…in fact, largely on the second page of the article, Patrick Smith dives into an issue that does fall under the radar more often than it should:

Propped up by a culture of fear, TSA has become a bureaucracy with too much power and little accountability. It almost makes you wonder if the Department of Homeland Security made a conscious decision to present bureaucratic incompetence and arrogance as the public face of TSA, hoping that people would then raise enough of a fuss that it could be turned over to the likes of Halliburton. (Funny, how despite this administration’s eagerness to outsource anything and everything, it’s kept its governmental talons wrapped snugly around TSA.)

While I might not put it in such apocalyptic terms, I think we should all be wary of what powers we cede to the government in the name of “safety.”