Chapter 17: Arriving backwards: Evaluative Enquiry, Innovation, and Democracy

It’s a sultry day in San Francisco. More so in the lazy airport queues. Shoes off, shoes on, laptop out—belt? Not here. What’s the difference? The laziness is not willful; it is a product of tiredness. Like others, I have just crossed the International Date Line. I’ve travelled 12 hours, but arrived earlier than I left. It’s routine, but your floppy mind takes a minute to work it out. Get reconciled. Move forwards and backwards at once. But the arrow of time has one direction only.

It is June 2015, almost 15 years since 9/11. I watched those ‘twin-tower’ events all day while on the telephone to my brothers. We agreed that the world of our freedoms had changed, that we would inevitably be overwhelmed by a new se-curity machine. It seemed obvious. It happened. Pretty rapidly, systems were put in place for airport departures and arrivals: temporary tape-barrier mazes familiar only to the growing security staff, x-ray machines, fingerprinting emerged, along with face-recognition and eye scanning. The paraphernalia of surveillance was frustratingly reassuring. The tedium for the passenger was borne lightly, the tedium for the security staff less so, though it is still rare to hear the slightest overtone of irritability. Then came a ‘liquid bomber’, and new systems were put in place to cope, a shoe-bomber, so shoes off. Fortunately, the airport security staff had a restrained response to the alleged underpants bomber.