The War on Clothes

In June of 1975, just after my high school graduation and before starting college, my brother and I booked an airplane ride and a week at the Contemporary Hotel in Walt Disney World. We flew out of O'Hare, at that time still the busiest airport in America. We checked our luggage and proceeded through security which consisted of walking through a metal detector. I had an ounce of high grade Colombian marijuana in one pocket of my sport coat and 30 hits of acid in my other. I made sure that I had nothing on me that would, if you'll pardon the pun, trip the alarm. The last thing in the world we wanted to do was cause trouble, and we certainly had no intention of hijacking the plane, especially since it was headed our way. In fact, as we were boarding the plane, the flight attendant asked me if I would be willing to change my seat assignment and sit next to the emergency door over the left wing. She handed me a card with instructions on how to open the door and help people down the chute in case of emergency. This actually happened to me a few times over the years (the seat designation, not the emergency) but I did start to wonder why they kept choosing me to be the last one off the plane in the event of trouble.

I call it the dressing down of America. Implemented through air travel, we have become accustomed to indignities the framers of the Constitution would never have dreamed of. Assuredly body cavity searches fall under the protection of illegal searches and seizures. To be pulled out of line while traveling for business or pleasure, locked in a small room, forced to undress, and have your rectum probed by uniformed men with big hard guns (getting excited yet?) cannot be allowed to become standard operating procedure for the government.

America is a mobile society. The right of unrestricted travel is ingrained in us. The freedom of the open road. The adventure of new places. The thrill of unexplored vistas waiting to be discovered just over the horizon. From sea to shining sea. But now the government is taking that away from us. The TSA, a branch of Homeland Security, has made it so onerous to travel by air that many people are changing their plans or just staying home. We have all seen and heard the horror stories of TSA abuses. The citizens of our country are now given the choice of voluntarily walking through scanners that see all the way through clothes to the naked body or submitting to demeaning and dehumanizing groping of our most private areas. Men, women children. The elderly and the infirm. And now plans are being readied to expand these procedures to train stations, bus depots and roadway checkpoints.

This is all part of a larger conspiracy to prohibit the wearing of clothes. It is very hard to protest against riot police in full tactical gear when you are naked. The wearing of clothes at rallies would single you out for arrest or worse. With Illinois becoming the 50th state to authorize conceal carry gun laws (by court order), the police must operate under the presumption that EVERY interaction with the public will be an armed confrontation. The government's answer is, fine you all want to carry concealed weapons, well try concealing them when you're nude.

Yes, in the very near future, clothes will be only for the elite. They will wear ten thousand dollar suits and women's apparel that run into six figures or more, while we wear our birthday suits. We will come into the world naked and helpless, and we will go out the same way. We will be safer. The police will be able to spot suicide bombers more easily, but at what cost. Once the mystery of what clothes conceal is no longer there, will we still maintain our sensuality? It is our very lust for life that is at stake.