The Greatest and Most Dastardly Evil Plot in the History Of Movies!
“O, divine art of subtlety and secrecy! Through you we learn to be invisible, through you inaudible; and hence we can hold the enemy’s fate in our hands.”
- Sun Tzu, The Art of War
In the realm of heroes, we’re conditioned to see MacGuffins - Hitchcock’s term for the prized plot item that the characters all want or fear - as pointless and inconsequential. They’re the mechanisms for advancing the story. But what if these fixations were posed as the exact opposite? But what if we start to see potential in the evil plots of most movie villains for their merits as social commentary? What if Hollywood movie villains occasionally have a point about American decadence, corruption, greed, betrayal and imperialism? Are certain catastrophes worthy in their capacity to about-face a society for its more pernicious and destructive values?
One major feature where I’m always aware of these questions would be John McTiernan’s Die Hard With A Vengeance (1995), the second sequel to the 1988 action cornerstone that is Die Hard (1988). I would call this second sequel the best of the Die Hard films for its intricate reading of certain social, economic and racial tensions facing people who live in big cities, though it’s hard to picture it taking place in any other city but New York.
A lot of flotsam from the first two ventures has been thankfully dispensed with for this third go-around, including Detective John McClane’s wife played by Bonnie Bedelia who’s always in the wrong place at the wrong time. She’s a hostage at Nakatomi Plaza in Die Hard and an airline passenger on a plane that can’t land in Die Hard 2. The personal stake McClane is supposed to have in besting his enemies because of her presence as a bad luck victim never landed with me, since McClane, with his Old Testament sense of morality, seems like someone who would have likely done what he did regardless.
Also thankfully absent is the Bureaucratic Obstacle, personified in the form of other law enforcement figures in the first two movies who think this off duty cop is illegitimate or out of his mind and who need visual proof of a security threat. These characters were unnecessary to me in the first two films and the flow of the storytelling as McClane tries to figure out what the criminals are really after was repeatedly sidetracked by these obstacles. In ....With A Vengence, a bomb goes off in a busy area literally the second the credits finish.
The villain has everyone’s attention, including the audience’s. So there’s no need for the role of a useless, stupid and wrong-footed soft antagonist to provide a phony counterpoint to the rogue cop’s progress. It also doesn't take place on Christmas. All of what seemed like recurring plot devices from the first movies are dispensed with and this entry starts free of prior baggage. An action movie plot is a fragile thing. It depends on slick mechanics to work. Interruptions and callbacks are wasted precious moments. It’s a new era. People are dead. We’re starting our story.
McTiernan’s sequel is on autopilot from start to finish. The movie is a wind-up toy. There’s never a point where the pile-driver mechanics of the plot are not showing. In a way, this is good because there’s no filler, even in scenes that don’t directly pertain to the mad bomber. But it also means that the movie is one long action sequence (like Speed, another cinematic product unique to the go-go 90’s), and that the elements of the story are being merely shuffled around like furniture-moving or plate-spinning.
McTiernan and Bruce Willis’s John McClane spin some pretty good plates. But looking closer, I think the cake-taker is Jeremy Irons’ Simon Gruber and the evil plot he’s trying to pull off here, which is quite possibly the most ingenious of any movie villain’s plot I’ve ever seen. A brilliantly intricate and satirical double-con that’s almost like a jazzy riff on other evil movie plots. I’m going to break it down here beat by beat.
Making a withdrawal
There is a sense of prestige and pedigree about Die Hard, which has been deemed “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant,” by the United States Library of Congress. The first Die Hard feature was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry in 2017 (which should give you an idea how proud modern America is of its violent yarn spinning). It is often named one of the best of all Christmas films, which makes little sense to me. It’s been said that within Die Hard, a host of other issues are explored in ways that were new in blockbuster moviemaking - thematic concerns that revolved around what defined traditional notions of gender and masculinity, as well as the widespread concerns about foreign corporate influences infiltrating American soil.
Anyways, that isn’t what this article is about. This article is about screenwriting.
The cop in the first movie doubts himself, is not a hulking macho type, uses his brain instead of his muscles to solve problems. The key to the success of Die Hard is that the audience can believe they are this man.
Because ....With A Vengence is an expensive big studio project, it can’t be called the work of a single writer. Jonathan Hensleigh reportedly had spec script called Simon Says about a mad bomber taking revenge on an NYPD detective with a series of deadly clandestine puzzles and surprises. The script was purchased by Fox and was intended to be re-written for Brandon Lee as a sequel to 1992’s Rapid Fire. When Lee was killed in a freak accident on the set of The Crow, at least three more screenwriters were employed and dozens of rewrites were undertaken to turn Simon Says into a Die Hard vehicle.
Usually this kind of overcooked committee process is fairly noticeable to the degree that it can wreck many movies, with the viewer being pulled in too many directions. This is one instance where it didn’t. The material in this screen adaptation of Simon Says coheres, is consistent and doesn’t bear the mark of a revolving door process that usually leads to a lot of pablum getting filmed.
It’s established in the movie that the Simon of Simon Says is the brother of Hans Gruber, the fake terrorist who McClane killed in the first Die Hard. Hans was posing as a suicidal political crusader taking hostages as a cover for stealing $640 million in negotiable bonds from a Japanese-owned corporate tower in the heart of Los Angeles. As evil movie plots go, the original Die Hard’s evil plot is a thing of genius itself. The team are prepared to fake their own deaths, and have what looks to be a minutely rehearsed system of memorizing where all the doors are and disabling the security systems.
Now Hans’ brother Simon does him one better, having McClane diffusing bombs and being run ragged all over town in a mockery of McClane’s common sense approach to problem solving. Simon’s tests are geographically and socially specific. He knows how to exploit racial disparities, transportation gridlock and the sense of systemic bureaucracy that’s choking law enforcement’s ability to solve problems. He knows the political and structural implications of what he’s doing. It’s explained by the FBI that he was, “an obscure East German infiltrator,” and his knack for impersonating American officials - being who the situation needs him to be in that moment as he exploits one American weakness after another - is what makes his plot almost like a piece of theatricalized satire.
He opens with a stunt he must fully expect McClane to survive, because of all that he has planned for later. But it’s Level One in this series of games and the racial (and racist) nature of it shows that Simon fully understands New York as a microcosm of the United States. What he’s doing depends on strict timing and precision and yet he knows how to use messy racial anxieties as a weapon, letting the violence of an American ghetto do his dirty work for him.
There’s seems to be no ticking clock for how long McClane is supposed to wear that sandwich sign that is exactly the wrong one to wear in Harlem (the one that’s always changed to “I Hate Everybody” when the movie is shown on TV), and it’s to Simon’s detriment that the black civilian who saves McClane’s life and remains at his side for the rest of the film may just be the element that leads to his downfall.
Have the Jackson character’s frictions with the local police in this movie stood the test of time? You better believe it.
Zeus (Sam Jackson, appropriately ferocious) is not only not a cop, but a Harlemite who sees this situation from the outside. He’s a pragmatist who consistently has the right answer that no one is willing to listen to, showing up not only the NYPD, who are on their own throughout this ordeal, but McClane. The script has the nerve to suggest that Zeus, the wronged everyman pulled into a white action movie plot (“That’s a white man with white problems!'') is the one we should really be identifying with, while the suspended cop, griping about his hangover, has become so set in his ways, so isolated within his own self loathing that he’s ill-equipped to deal with this threat on his own. The police chief tells Simon over the phone McClane is not worth it, and he may be right.
Jackson and Willis never got to share a scene together in Pulp Fiction a year earlier but the conversations in cars the two characters have about race, despite being placed within this absurd material, are more deeply grounded in reality than the movie where the white director threw the N-word around on screen far more gratuitously than any of the black characters.
Simon’s games for McClane have the flavor of those of Andy Robinson’s Scorpio Killer in Dirty Harry (1974) having Harry hustle to those pay phones on foot. Simon seems to be omnipresent, with eyes on every location he directs his prey. He’s even boastful, proudly revealing his omniscience to McClane and Zeus when they’re late responding to his riddle, mentioning he witnessed them kick an obese woman off the phone to free it up (what wonderful dramatic devices pay phones were). Simon knows a police criminal psychologist will be listening on the line and lets McClane think he’s messing with him in pretending to stutter when McClane baits him.
It’s an act that’s obvious to us but apparently no one else in the room because Simon knows how law enforcement types think (McClane included). It never occurs to them that he might be simply and flatly lying, even after they learn he’s Hans Gruber’s brother, whose elaborate scheme was based on lies - a high-stakes cyber-heist disguised as a politically motivated hostage crisis. Just as he’s probably lying about being able to listen in on the police radio frequency, something I see no proof of in viewing this film again. But he tells them he’s listening and watching everywhere and the police believe this lie as well.
Simon knows enough about McClane to know the policeman’s inventive and intuitive approach to solving problems means that he’ll find an unconventional and recklessly on-the-spot way to make it to the phone in time to solve the riddle - even if it means driving a stolen cab through the grounds of central park and then calling in an ambulance to follow not to the subway station but to a street vent where he can jump on the train while it’s in motion and find the bomb.
Every means of urban transportation depicted in this movie is boarded or operated by the heroes in some wild fashion. The consistency of these radical uses of vehicles adds up to a kind of singular strategy in doing battle with this villain that suggests a nobility and worthiness in their struggle.
Of course, the train bomb is rigged to go off no matter what. This is to disable the electronic security network in the financial district so Simon and his commandos can rob the Federal Reserve, just as Hans in the first Die Hard used the FBI’s tactic of cutting the power to the building as a way to disable the magnetic lock on the vault. There are notes in Simon’s plan that rhyme with that of Hans. The NYPD of course has no clue about this so it’s like a little family in-joke Simon is making with himself.
There’s the risk of McClane figuring this out, but Simon is arrogant in pressing his luck. He needs no police in the area, which explains his interest in prolonging the McClane game as long as possible. The school bomb is another means of keeping the police away from the financial district so Simon can fill the area with his own fake police, disguise himself as an American engineer and infiltrate the Reserve deeply enough to kill off the real police guarding it.
Throughout all of this, he needs to be fooling and conning numerous different parties (including his own men) in different capacities based on where he needs them to be. For him to be able to keep track of all this is incredible. Simon is ingeniously several steps ahead of the police, who upon learning of his past as an infiltrator - which would involve familiarity with disguises, fake identities and practical con jobs - continue to take all of Simon’s threats and intentions literally. Nobody gives a moment’s thought to the 14 dump trucks it’s mentioned were stolen the night before that arrive at the Wall Street blast site just seconds after police leave the area to find the school bomb, save for the one police official whom Simon kills.
In Goldfinger (1964), the titular Bond villain was a billionaire industrialist trying to blow up Fort Knox to increase the value of his own gold, essentially putting a competitor out of business. This Die Hard villain is as dandy but doesn’t pretend to be any kind of businessman.
Simon knows the American mentality inside and out. He knows Americans are led by their emotions. In the wake of a tragedy, they mostly cease to think critically and become gullible. Still traumatized by the shopping center bomb that morning, which would be a deeply traumatic event in American history, the authorities, like much of the general public, take everything as a given, never imagining a deeper agenda at work. They see an explosion, are threatened with the possibility of more explosions, and believe Simon’s story that it’s all about revenge on McClane.
After all, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the US government reacted in a similar fashion: attacking the wrong country, doubling down on its racism and xenophobia, and stepping up its supression of the civil liberties of its own citizens, many of whom, along with the majority of Congress, had no trouble supporting and participating in these actions. It’s impossible not to think of 9/11 when watching .....With A Vengeance and being reminded of how ruinously easy Americans are to manipulate.
Note how Simon’s impersonation of an American, with his generic name and folksy attitude, is almost a commentary on the American demeanor. The Public’s capacity for deception is based on its fixation on appearances and personality. Only a European national, exploiting the humble and friendly nature of trusting American citizens (relative to jaded, weary, smug Europe) could execute this plan. “Hook, line and sinker,” says Simon, when he finally makes his appearance in the movie at the 49-minute mark (which in screenwriting terms is perfect). The line lands hard, which in this shift of perspective, was a necessity.
”Bob Thompson”
And at the same time, while Simon is several steps ahead of the police, he has to be only a few steps ahead of McClane, while McClane thinks he’s a step ahead of Simon both times he and Zeus split up. The freak occurrence of McClane figuring out the heist and then magically knowing to go to the Federal Reserve just on a hunch is not one of the script’s strongest moments. But this aside, the police are all following McClane, who thinks he’s putting everything together but is as in the dark as the rest of them. I firmly believe Simon never intended for his opponent to die in Harlem or by failing to disarm the park bomb. If McClane had died too soon, there’d be no central figure to play the game with, no one to lead the police around on their end.
So Simon purposely sets challenges that were difficult, but not too difficult for this determined policeman who thinks outside the box because he’s the key figure in this plot. The more he endures and survives - and the more he thinks he’s seeing through the con - the deeper he’s embroiled in the game. Simon, for all purposes, has him where he wants him. What if the park bomb had exploded because McClane wasn’t able to measure out 4 gallons in the 5 gallon jug? Well, he’d be rid of his enemy as a nice little bonus but he’d lose the means for imposing his will over his opponents in law enforcement, having never let them impose their will over him.
This is a tactic straight from The Art of War and Hensleigh & Co communicate to us that it’s very likely Simon has internalized it. He uses his enemy’s weakness against them. They’re always playing the game on his terms. Of all the criminal roles he could have picked in disguising his true one as essentially a bank robber, the role of a mad bomber affords him the anonymity and space to act remotely and with hands-off technology in his plan of mass distraction.
The remote terrorist role enables him to multitask. He can blow things up by phoning them in while easily keeping watch on his targets in the big, crowded city of New York. Even the chemically based bombs themselves are something new and beguiling to chew over, as it’s demonstrated their detonation follows a mixing of two highly concentrated liquids. The script can use this for a suspense device, but this cool new liquid bomb is still another means of distracting authorities with the presentation of an elaborate and uniform string of formal criminal horrors to be given their undivided attention.
Sun Tzu’s ur-text on war strategy was adopted by white-collar yuppie businessmen in the 80’s as they began seriously carving the country up among themselves following Ronald Reagan’s disastrous dismantling of government regulations and corporate oversight. It was then that some of these ruthless corporate types began referring to themselves as “Samurai.” A number of them had been trained by Pentagon officials who Reagan’s administration had dispatched to deficient financial managements in order to teach them modern management techniques so they could “save” the American economy from Japanese takeover. Essentially, the opposite of conservative small government.
It’s because of this xenophobic paranoia that the name of Century City’s Fox Plaza was changed to Nakatomi Plaza for the first Die Hard movie in 1988. Its heroic ragged cop, with a receding hairline, barefoot and reduced to his white undershirt, seems trapped in a foreign world as he negotiates Hans Gruber’s fake hostage crisis. The architecture and excessively ostentatious 80’s decor made the terrain feel alien thanks to some creatively employed art design. We’re to believe the Japanese had already taken over the West Coast boardrooms and McTiernan’s mega-grossing saga got a lot of mileage out of playing to that fear. A vertical action movie playing out within its own self-contained little world.
While there was no room for Die Hard to share Michael Crighton’s racist view of Japanese business practices in his novel Rising Sun, the movie’s vertical setting suggested different levels in a multinational economic hierarchy that’s more or less a closed world to the blue-collar cop.
Die Hard With a Vengeance horizontalizes the Die Hard Model and sets it within a more recognizable world. Its principal fish is no longer out of water. So Simon reworks his brother’s plot of directing the fish within that water. The vehicular navigation of that terrain and the negotiation of its obstacles are the means of play. Cars, dump trucks, commuter trains and freight ships are the game pieces, so to speak. As the brother of a fake terrorist whose entire operation was foiled by a single guy, Simon Gruber is in a unique position. Only he can carry out this plot because he’s related to the man killed by that one guy and that guy’s stubbornness makes him the perfect device for freeing the villain up to get away with the gold.
Simon follows Sun Tzu’s maxims beautifully: holding out advantages to his enemy, getting McClane to draw himself out of his own accord. He strikes at his enemy’s weak points, goes where he's not expected. His opponents don’t know what to defend or what they should attack. In the vault, the security guards are calling for backup to handle what looks to be an invasion and learn all too late that Simon’s men are already on the inside, answering their walkie-talkies as if they’d been there all along.
Despite a plan that must rely on razor-sharp timing and cooperation, Simon’s ability to improvise with details is incredible. He blows up a cofferdam to drown McClane in the aqueduct. He dips into and out of false identities to get into the federal reserve, first as an engineer from the deep south, then an uncouth German manufacturer checking on his deposit. Just for the acting jobs he uses to execute his plot, he deserves credit. Simon is the Rich Little of movie villains.
After the Harlem incident, he chooses on the fly to plant the school bomb in the elementary where Zeus’s kids attend. That means he saved that detail for the last minute. He got an I.D. on Zeus, found out he was a father and where his kids were going to school, hid the dud bomb (complete with a pancake syrup sprayer as a dour joke for the depleted countdown) inside an industrial refridgerator that his men were able deliver to the school that morning, but went so far as to not plug it in so it could stand out and be found by the eccentric bomb expert.
So how does McClane win? Dumb luck, in large part. Dumb luck that he happened to hear about the 14 stolen dump trucks Simon would use for his escape, which McClane just happens to see on the highway from the bridge. Dumb luck he doesn’t run anyone over or kill anyone when he drives a cab through Central Park or throws the bomb off the train and it derails in an underground station to the point of folding in on itself. Dumb luck he stops a kid for shoplifting who suggests the idea that you can steal anything that day because there are no cops around. Dumb luck he bumps into the most articulate and knowledgeable construction worker on the planet who gives him all the information he needs about the aqueduct and solves the riddle pertaining to where to find the school bomb, which McClane only knew to ask about because of a crack he’d made in comparing a driver who cuts him off to Hillary Clinton. Dumb luck that a heavy rainstorm sets in that gives the outgunned McClane the edge in an armed car chase, using the wet asphalt to perform a neat spin move with the car that lets him shoot his target and then sideswipe them into a crash. Dumb luck that he looks under the aspirin bottle the arrogant villain gave him and sees the retailer’s printed logo that points them to Simon’s Canadian border hideout and the gold.
This is all screenwriter's nonsense but appropriate for this franchise, whose most endearing charms and gaping lapses in credibility come from this character’s ongoing relationship to happenstance, coincidence and bad timing.
But there’s another, more telling reason Simon doesn’t ultimately get away with it: he’s unprincipled. Hans Gruber was merely posing as a political crusader demanding the release of dissident political prisoners around the world in exchange for the hostages while his hackers and thugs stole hundreds of millions of dollars. The scene in the first Die Hard where he was on the phone with the media virtually making up his anti-Imperialist manifesto on the spot was where we really saw that he was no more than just a common thief in an expensive suit.
A thief posing as a Wall Street businessman, ho ho.
Brother Simon himself is just an arrogant bank robber who in a remarkable double-con is posing both as a vengeful mad bomber and an anti-Capitalist terrorist with a grudge against the corrupt, decadant west. His own towering henchman, after beating the shit out of McClane, wasn’t clued in to the fact that they weren’t even blowing up the gold as part of a political plot to topple the world economy, but making everyone think they did. He’s killed for making the mistake of thinking that Simon has political principles he doesn’t have. These villains are nuanced characters, going to extraordinary lengths to deny what they actually are: liars, cowards, thieves.
McClane on the other hand, does have principles and this is reiterated time and again in both films as the reason he triumphs over both his enemies and his imcompetant detractors in law enforcement. In the first Die Hard, two FBI agents in a helicopter circling the building are prepared to write off a percentage of the captured party in completing their mission: “I figure we take out the terrorists, lose twenty, twenty-five percent of the hostages.” The other agent responds by saying, “I can live with that.” The lone, off-duty cop on the inside has other plans. He aims to save every hostage. His deservedness to win is based on the fact that he alone places people above profits and property. McClane too, is flummoxed when his hunch is confirmed by Simon that there was no school bomb: “I’m a soldier, not a monster.”
There’s a moment - small but telling - when Simon and his remaining troops are celebrating their victory at their hideout on the northern border. One troop toasts his champagne bottle: “To our fallen comrades.” This brings things to a screeching halt. Having no regard for humanity, no loyalty to his men or really anything outside his own bottom line, Simon appears visibly unable to react to this, before half interestly nodding in agreement, a gesture that looks forced and phony.
In a badassed moment of cinematic nonchalance, Irons casually corrects Zeus about the safety catch on the gun being pointed at him before taking it from him and shooting him with it while eating a hard boiled egg.
Then he’s shown in a completely gratuitous scene having rough sex with his evil little silent German female cohort. By the time he’s attacked by McClane in a helicopter, Simon has come full circle as a spineless degenerate and no less a greedy and selfish Capitalist than the objects of his supposed vengeance. Little by little, all of his lies and pretensions have closed in on him and McClane is revealed to be the better man, largely for trusting and listening to Zeus. He’s earned the right to get away with taking out Simon’s helicopter with just two bullets fired from a .38 snub nose. We’re just gonna let him have that nonsense.
This gradual unraveling is what makes Simon so fascinating. Certainly he holds our attention better than William Sadler’s disgraced Colonel William Stuart in Die Hard 2 (1990) and Timothy Olyphant’s Thomas Gabriel, the destructive cyber-terrorist who might be the greatest patriot this country’s ever seen in Live Free Or Die Hard (2009). These villains are deeply principled, which allows them little room for panashe and this makes them one dimensional and boring. This leaves Willis’s anachronist stalwart flatfoot to carry the show, which truth be told, I’m not sure he can.
Villains and their villainy are as crucial to action movies as heroes and heroics. You must have these two opposing forces and each must be as nuanced as the other. Action movies work on us in these silly Manichean terms. We need to understand not only what the antagonist is doing, but why they are doing it. A good evil plot in a movie is something of a miracle, with its own internal sense of logic. A truly great evil plot is one you almost root for to succeed.
At the end of For Your Eyes Only (1981), the most mature and serious of Roger Moore’s Bond adventures, Bond has snatched an electric console that gives complete power over Polaris nuclear submarines back from the clutches of a mercenary who would sell it to the Russians. Bond throws the device off a cliff in front of the Russian Prime Minister because perhaps the British, with their own history of imperialism and hegemony, are not worthy of this prize themselves. What if in keeping the MacGuffin out of The Wrong Hands, we learn there is no such thing as The Right Hands? Would Simon have been a just and fair leader of whatever country he’d purchased with all that gold if he’d gotten away with it? Was he prepared for life after that heist?
I’ve always sort of rooted for villains in movies when they were motivated by grudges against Capitalism and nationalist obstinance. I’m just kind of like that. Their showing up of American negligence and ignorance always made sense to me, that is, until the movies had to show them hurting a defenseless woman or threatening a child to remind me not to fall in love with them. But good evil plots in movies may make us think critically about our own system and adjudicating the failures of the people at the helm.
Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant
In 2014, a number of news outlets reported about a nuclear power plant located just 50 miles outside of Washington D.C. that was virtually unguarded and totally vulnerable to a terrorist attack. The reporter and his crew were able to just drive right through the front gate. No one took notice or stopped them from entering the site on multiple occasions. While I abhor victim blaming, if a villain comes along to exploit this negligence, is it so shocking how much he can actually get away with?
When Simon learns McClane is unable to call for backup on the ship because he’s been put on hold, he laughs and says, “God, I love this country.” We know what he means. It’s the painful ring of familiarity, hilarious and terrifying. Irons sells this character with icy precision. There is so much cold resentment in his voice. But he always comes across as up to the task, capable of pulling off this insane scheme. The villain as the catalyst for illuminating the structural failings of a wayward society. The hero can diffuse the bomb, save the girl, kill the bad guy, etc. But this is only putting a bandage on the situation.
I hope when Hensleigh and the writing team finished cooking up this perpetual motion machine of a story, they looked up and grinned at each other. Putting down their copies of The Art of War, I hope they lit big cigars and put their feet up on their desks after a dizzying schedule of script conferences in which they’d addressed the current draft’s loopholes, closed them and then had to close the other ones created by the ones they’d just closed. Their creation became something where in order for the glory and beauty of the villain’s weakness-exploiting double-con to reach a point where it could preen its plumage with full cinematic aplomb, it needed to depend on the heroes making all the exact choices they did and no others. Just one small deviation or accident or variation of behavior could have made their whole concoction collapse in the performance of its utter lunacy.
It can only happen in a movie (Die Hard With No Variance?). But to not be thinking of this while the movie unspools in front of us - a movie so self-satisfied with its energy that it could probably be successful playing to an empty theater - is what makes it something of a marvel of modern big studio screenwriting. A pot-boiler elevated to the level of high art. My hat is off to it. The movie is a shaggy dog and who doesn’t love a shaggy dog?
If a plan is that ingenious, maybe its intentions can’t be that dishonorable.
Comedian Lewis Black talks about America’s out-of-balance reaction to the 9/11 attacks as seen through the disastrous illogic of airport security. He’d witnessed a formally dressed elderly woman in a wheelchair at the terminal, looking “as if Protestantism had sprung from her womb.” She was being patted down, having her chair searched and checked for explosive devices as if she somehow were an al Qaeda operative. “You let her through,” he says, “because if the enemy has actually hired her to work for them.....then they deserve to win.”
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