Well, I succeeded in keeping off the net for three days. The flight to Arizona, which I had been slightly dreading because of fears that my two children would be driven to the point of insanity by 9+ hours on a plane, actually went very smoothly. Both of them (the smug father will let you know) couldn’t have been better. The only stress came, not unsurprisingly, as we tried to navigate the chaos at LagosDublin International Airport. After an EU-led investigation revealed that Dublin Airport Authority was found to be operating a security screening process about as thorough as that run at Moscow’s Domodeveo airport, the DAA are indulging in a typically Oirish effort to shut the stable doors after the horses have bolted. The queue to gain entry to the newly revamped theatre that passes for a security zone was stretching right around the airport. What would have been funny if it weren’t so infuriating is the way the union lags nominally in charge of this zoo behave like outraged dowagers if you voice a timid complaint about being treated like cattle.As I tried to find the end of the line, I moaned to a bearded representative in a fluorescent tabard, “Is anyone in charge of this mess?” (It was a strictly rhetorical question–I did not expect a candid negative.) This character almost fluttered his eyelashes as he tried to digest the offensiveness of my remark. “Excuse me,” he said, “but I’m helping some passengers here!” This help consisted of nothing more than waving two exhausted-looked sexagenarians to the back of the queue. Having completed this mission of mercy, the employee then briskly told me that, actually, someone was in charge. Unfortunately, he did not reveal the identity of this elusive administrator.Once we finally hit the screening area, the only real difference I could make out is that everybody was being made take their shoes off. I can’t help thinking that this reactive approach to security should be called the “Maginot Line” defense. As any WWII buff can tell you, the French built the Maginot Line along the Franco-German border in the aftermath of WWI in the belief that the next war would be very like the last one. They envisioned a static war of attrition along the lines of the trench warfare that characterized the fighting of 1914-18. Of course, Hans Guderian and his panzer divisions quickly outflanked the Maginot Line by plunging through the supposedly impassable Ardennes, making the line of fortresses somewhat irrelevant to the matter in hand.Similarly, if al-Qaeda is as fiendishly clever as we are endlessly told, it’s unlikely that they would plan a carbon copy of 9/11, never mind recruiting someone like Richard Reed, the gormless shoe-bomber. Even if it were the case that terrorists were going to smuggle a shoe-borne bomb on board, I can’t see why getting, say, a pregnant woman from Kinnegad or wherever to slip off her shoes is going to thwart their plans.Not that the zombies who are supposed to run Dublin Airport care about real security versus the appearance of security. All they’re worried about is not being made to look like incompetents again. Unfortunately, being who they are, it’s probably only a matter of (a very short) time before that happens again.