An old girlfriend once told me about side job her father took up one Christmas season as a way to augment his meager salary as a traveling salesman. I never did find out what the guy sold, but he was always somewhere out there, on the road. Except for this one particular year when times were tough; the year he got busted standing outside a now-defunct department store somewhere in the San Gabriel Valley, sporting a long white beard and a pillow stuffed down a plush red and white suit. It seemed, quietly, behind the backs of even his own family members, the traveling salesman managed to put himself through a week of Santa school and got himself a part-time gig in order to pay for Christmas dinner. And he’d have gotten away with it, too, had his wife and daughter not visited the store during one of his shifts and picked up on his familiar incantations bellowing from beneath his fake beard. I think of this story now, nearly 25 years later, because I’m sick of worrying about the economy, and the government’s latest planned remedies, and how they will impact my ability to keep the bread and butter on the table this holiday season. And I’m betting all my free weekend cell-to-cell minutes many of you business owners out there feel the same way. And, I’ve had it up to here with fear. I’m not frightened by the thought of the big “A” snowing out of the envelope from my gas bill. What are the odds? What does scare me is what’s happening as we take our collective eyes off the ball and turn to CNN and the Internet for more fear, I mean Taliban and anthrax updates. And meanwhile, lawmakers back in Washington noodle over ways to get their paws on our social security to fund their new war on terrorism. I’m scared, too, because, despite all the hype about getting back to normal, new security measures at the Los Angeles Civic Center now require visitors to whip out their ID to get into public meetings, provided they can also figure out how to get around the concrete barricades. I’m scared that the city is poised to spend more money fighting secessionists’ plans to create a new Valley City, even though each time we get past deciphering the latest LAFCO findings the Magic 8-ball still answers: ‘all signs point to yes’ to the feasibility question. Flying doesn’t scare me either. That’s what white wine and Dramamine are for. But I am frightened by the e-mail I received on Halloween from Congressman Adam Schiff’s (D-Burbank) office in Washington, announcing his new bill that would give our police officers a way to augment their salaries as volunteer sky marshals. Not only would these new air cops be “rigorously trained and certified,” they would also carry FAA-issued ID cards and firearms “designed expressly for sky marshal use.” Not sure what kind of firearms we’re talking about here, but the idea, said Schiff in his e-mail to media outlets across the country, is to deter terrorists and encourage us all to get back in the friendly skies. Oh yeah, one more thing, the legislation would allow these deputized cops to fly free on commercial flights whenever they are on “marshal duty.” And, according to Schiff, the program will not cost a whole lot more than the sky marshal program we already have in place, such as it is. I’m no financial whiz, but I suspect that if the airline industry needs a $15 billion bailout just to keep its jets humming it isn’t going to take too kindly to the idea of giving up seats for free. I called my buddy Ed Stewart at Southwest in Dallas to find out what he thought about the idea. “Honestly, there are so many ideas floating around out there right now about how to make things safer, I couldn’t possibly answer that question and I challenge any airline to answer it for you either,” said Stewart. Stewart told me hadn’t seen or heard of the Schiff bill, but proceeded to tell me about another little piece of legislation he was aware of. Seems someone, maybe somewhere in the midwest, he said, is proposing to make all women check their purses in at the ticket counter. Now that scares the hell out of me. There’s little white wine and Dramamine can do for a girl with no lipstick. My best trips in the air have all been out of Burbank and usually on Southwest Airlines. I love the singing flight attendants and the bad jokes about the great food we’re all not going to get on our one-drink jaunts to Oakland. So I was particularly saddened to see the Southwest exhibitor’s booth at VICA’s 14th Annual Business Forecast Conference last month, completely unmanned. That’s right. Sat empty. All day long. I couldn’t help but wonder if the folks who were supposed to represent Southwest just decided they had nothing positive to forecast, or they, too, got scared. Turns out someone had the flu. I know the economy stinks. I know boarding a flight right now seems risky if not downright extravagant. But I also know that the most normal I’ve felt since Sept. 11 was the day the planes started flying again. I was driving east on the 101, thick in the middle of an evening battle with the folks coming north on the 405. On the horizon, somewhere over Van Nuys, I made out the brilliant orange and sienna skin of a Southwest plane making its decent into Burbank, and all seemed right with the world. I need to see planes in the sky to remind me that I’ve always got the option of leaving. And, like everyone else, I want to feel safe up there when I do. But I think Schiff’s measure is misguided. I just don’t see the wisdom in giving a police force already grappling with a public relations problem over excessive use of force and racial profiling more opportunity to flex its muscle. And I sure as heck know I don’t want to learn on my Friday-night flight to Vegas that my seatmate has been posing as just an average guy on his way to a bachelor party. I don’t want to learn he’s really an overzealous L.A. cop, moonlighting on his new, compressed work-week to pay for Christmas gifts for the kids back home who have no clue he’s also the guy behind fake beard. Reporter Jacqueline Fox can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].
