The Slain TSA Officer’s Funeral Felt Like a Lament for the War on Terror

Yesterday was the public funeral of TSO Gerardo Hernandez, the lone casualty of the recent shooting at LAX. A  guy who was murdered at work for no reason. It also concluded an episode in the Global War on Terror that fits neither a left or right wing narrative or agenda. On the whole, the shooting and subsequent funeral don’t seem to have been heavily politicized, and the scale and tenor of the media’s reaction seem more or less appropriate. Still, watching the funeral from the sidelines, one moment in particular (I’ll get to it in a minute) felt like watching the last drop of gusto for the American Security State finally plop to the ground, like a cellphone falling out of someone’s pocket in a movie theater.

It was held at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum on a cloudy Tuesday morning, and despite the size of the venue and the heavy media presence, it still felt like a funeral. Gerardo Hernandez was born in El Salvador almost exactly 40 years ago to the day. He moved to the States when he was 15. He had two kids. He liked blueberries and strawberries in his oatmeal. He had a decent job working security at LAX, and some guy with a screw loose ran in with a rifle on November 1 and killed him, wounding two other people in the process. Now he has the unenviable distinction of being the first TSA officer to be killed in the line of duty.

That’s why the Memorial Coliseum had the biggest flag I’ve ever seen hanging out front (pictured above). Apparently called the "Patriot Flag,” this 30x56 foot, 75 pound flag tours the country commemorating 9/11. Two firetrucks (what else?) have to raise it with their ladders. I tried to stash my irony, and try to take myself back to 9/12, like Glenn Beck would do. This was no place to scoff at overt patriotism.

Plus, I knew security would be involved, since high ranking members of the federal government were going to speak. Presumably, there were snipers camped on the roof, and Secret Service agents checking pay phone receivers for plastic explosives, but I didn’t see any of that. I just saw that it was shockingly easy to get into the media entrance of the venue without showing credentials of any sort. I just had to empty my pockets, the contents of which no one looked at, accept polite greetings from some police officers, and then step through the world’s most ironic metal detector. My shoes stayed on my feet the whole time, and no one even made me submit to an X-ray scan.

It was a fine funeral, but it started with things that seemed perfunctory and insincere, and the scripture and invocation by Father Paul Griesgraber was spoken so slowly it bordered on bizarre. A frequent refrain during the opening remarks was that Gerardo was always smiling, that he was proud of, and even loved, his job. This seems plausible, but it got me wondering if people would say the same thing about me if someone ran into the coffee shop where I do my writing and murdered me. Would the other regulars here refer to me as a friendly guy who loved coffee, even though I just kind of sit there and occasionally ask someone if I can reach behind them to use an outlet?

Then things took a turn for the genuinely moving. The TSA Chorus performed R. Kelly’s “I Believe I Can Fly,” and it spurred me and the other attendees to applaud for the first time during the proceedings. If they learned the song as some kind of tongue-in-cheek anthem about airlines, it has since mutated into something beautiful. Think I’m joking? Here they are, performing the song under happier circumstances:

After all this, the biggest celebrity in the house, Attorney General Eric Holder, was slated to bring it home at the end, but instead his speech sucked the air out of the room. In his usual sprightly tone of voice, he swore vengeance, saying he would “not rest until justice has been done, and we will do all in our power to make sure those responsible will be held accountable.” Odd choice of promise, since this particular (do I really have to say alleged?) gun-wielding psychopath wasn’t an ululating jihadist, but another deranged loner with a legal firearm, and he’s languishing in a hospital as we speak.

Like the DC Gunman, Aaron Alexis, (remember him? He was like four shooting sprees ago), Paul Anthony Ciancia carried out his murder under politically charged circumstances, but without a decipherable political motivation. That’s not to say that these acts aren’t connected to terrorism. A 2010 comparative study published by SAGE profiled rampage killers and suicide bombers, and found that they’re close enough in their patterns of behavior to categorize the two types of crime as the same thing.

I find this particularly disturbing because I want to think of terrorism as something external menacing America. I want it to be possible to weed out terrorism with tight security, but what if it’s not? In that case, what’s scarier? The idea that a uniquely American breed of gun-toting crazies are actually terrorists, or the idea that so-called “terrorists” are just the same gun toting crazies with different nationalities and resources?

So when Holder dusted off Bush-era “We’ll smoke ‘em outta their caves” rhetoric for use in a distinctly Obama-era “Another shooting rampage? Yawn,” situation, the two types of tragedy suddenly overlapped for a second in my mind. It made the idea that the enemy is within less of an old saw, and more of a lucid and uncomfortable reality.

"His story will inspire generations of public servants,” Holder went on to say. But will it really? With TSA’s starting yearly income of $17,083 per year, will Hernandez’s sacrifice motivate others to follow in his footsteps at the risk of losing their lives? Why would it? The terrorists aren’t in our planes to begin with. They’re only occasionally in our airports, and mostly they’re in our schools and malls.

@MikeLeePearl

More on domestic terrorism:

Trying to Report on the Sandy Hook Shooting

Should You Take Your Guns to Town?

Did Police Screw Up During the DC Navy Yard Shooting?