Reported recently by Yahoo! Music:

Metallica frontman James Hetfield was stopped by security officials at London’s Luton Airport for allegedly having a “Taliban-like” beard. … Hetfield was briefly questioned by airport officials until they realised who he was. No explanation was given for why he was stopped, but his bandmates speculated that it was due to his beard.

Which poses this conundrum of who are the bigger idiots: The airport security people who enforce ludicrous regulations that don’t make us safer, or Metallica, for spotting smoke at the bottom of the ocean?

I’m fairly certain that airports in England do the same stupid thing that airports in America do, which is single out people who clearly aren’t a threat for “screening” in order to erect the appearance of even-handedness. Probably, Hetfield was the person they picked just because he was convenient.

At the risk of sounding racist, Hetfield’s a tattoo-laden, white-as-a-bedsheet redneck. His appearance and demeanor make him appear as likely a Taliban member as I am.

So clearly, Hetfield is not in the Taliban, any more than some 80-year-old woman from Iowa is in the Taliban, but still needs to take off her shoes for inspection and keep her blue-tinted shampoo out of her carry-on luggage.

Which makes Metallica a bunch of retards, because everyone knows what a sham airport security screening is.

Now, if airport security really worked, they would have detained Hetfield and the rest of Metallica indefinitely because their music, and their attitudes about defending the sharecropping called major record label contracts, suck out loud.

But the same way Metallica doesn’t realize what crap they are, airport security can’t provide real security.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 15th, 2007 at 10:10 am PDT and is filed under Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.