A Message From a TSA Full-Body Scanner [Humor]

There’s been quite a lot of scuttlebutt inside the press and amongst the civil liberties crowd about what we-myself and my fellow full-body scanners-are coming on your airports to do. What is our real purpose? It’s measuring penises.

There’s been rather a lot of scuttlebutt inside the press and amongst the civil liberties crowd about what we-myself and my fellow full-body scanners-are coming on your airports to do. What is our real purpose? How invasive, truly, are these full-body scans? Will air travel, over the years, become somehow less dignified, less ” private” ?

I’d wish to take the potential of this writing to allay these and other misgivings. Please know: I’m just here to measure your penises. And I’m very, marvelous at it.

Can I see electronic components or liquid metals? Exotic bomb-making compounds? Timers or wires poking out of foreign orifices that mean us harm? No, no, and no, I can’t. And women, I even have little interest in whatever arrangements you’ve happening down there-no thanks! Fundamentally, I’m a consultant. I was built to measure penises for national security.

Many folks seem to have the impression that their penis scans will simply be appraised by a crew of chuckling, fantastically overweight elementary school dropouts in some musty back room near the luggage drop. While that might well be the case, you may rest assured that your penis can be regarded with the utmost professional care and clinical detachment until the very moment that a superb-grained digital image of your online business leaves my fiber-optic cable en route to our vast federal crotch database.

I’m not only a few dumb consumer SKU from Epson, re-purposed and jammed inside a futuristic beige plastic enclosure and stamped with a TSA logo. I’ve scanned the novels of Proust, Flaubert, and Turgenev, besides literally thousands of pages of pornographic magazines. I will tell the adaptation between your penis and a breakfast sausage, a sock monkey, and a cat’s bladder full of warm oatmeal. I am a professional. I am able to serve.

For nearly a decade, lightly-trained TSA employees had been forced to estimate-to guess, really-your penis size, based on such factors as height, weight, walking style, and disposition. Frankly, that’s asking them to do the impossible. It gratifies me to think that millions of travelers will now be capable to fly a bit bit easier, secure within the knowledge of their newly complete and accurate TSA profiles-all because of my precise genital scans. Length, girth, heft, and any major identifying characteristics. Everything but the color; that is America, and we don’t try this here.

In some quarters, folks were asking: ” Why?” As in, ” Why must the dept of Homeland Security build and maintain an enormous database comprising digital images and memorable attributes of the penises of domestic and international travelers?” Questions like these should not for me to reply to; I’m just an entire-body scanner, not a political appointee. And if this issue is above my pay-grade, surely it’s above yours-finally, you don’t even work for the Transportation Safety Administration.

The salient point is this: Uncle Sam must know exactly what you’re packing for the War on Terror. Provided that you’ve got something halfway reasonable down the front of those sweatpants, what do any of us really ought to worry about?

McSweeney’s is an independent publisher based in San Francisco that publishes books, a quarterly fiction journal, a quarterly film DVD magazine, a monthly culture magazine, and a regular humor website. The McSweeney’s iPhone app is out there during the Apple store. For additional information, visit mcsweeneys.net .

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This post is tagged: breakfast sausage, clinical detachment, fiber optic cable, plastic enclosure, pornographic magazines, professional care