Several airports that originally welcomed the idea, including Boston, San Francisco and Detroit, are now balking. Some have announced they will not participate. Shorter security wait times, combined with TSA’s downscaling of Registered Traveler privileges (participants would still be subject to random secondary screening along with everybody else), have left many people wondering what, exactly, the benefits would be. Airports, which would be responsible for setting up their own designated lanes, are leery of investing in a program with only marginal appeal.

A pilot program has been underway since June 2005 at Florida’s Orlando International Airport, managed by Verified Identity Pass, a New York company headed by Steven Brill, creator of Court TV and founder of Brill’s Content magazine. Registered Travelers are paying $80 per year.

TSA claims that upward of 20 airports are still signed on, and Brill’s VIP has already agreed to contracts in at least four locations, including Cincinnati and San Jose, Calif. But without the support of the largest and busiest, Registered Traveler is doomed. Which, if you ask me, is the best thing that could happen to it.

Airport security is not a consumer good. By implementing Registered Traveler we effectively commodify public safety while throwing up yet another pillar of support for the ever-growing security-industrial complex. Those who can afford it receive preferential treatment, while those who can’t, or choose not to, languish in line. All the while, security isn’t improved one whit.

Rather than deal with its own incompetence, the government is offering you the privilege of paying $80 to a private contractor to scoot around it. This has nothing to do with security and everything to do with taking advantage of people’s patience. Instead of encouraging fliers to pay to avoid bottlenecks, the whole system of concourse security ought to be overhauled to get rid of the bottlenecks. Those allegedly shorter lines at Detroit and San Francisco notwithstanding, here we are more than four years after You Know What, and still airport security is in many ways a scene of makeshift, improvised chaos — a melee of barking guards, clattering plastic bins and annoyed people milling around in their bare feet.

While it’s heartening to learn that not every American is hungry to embrace a bad idea, the news out of England isn’t so promising. There as well as here, the many gratuitous security measures put in place in recent years, hand-in-glove with ample willingness to part with civil liberties, were bound to land the people someplace weird, if not outright dangerous. It’s been a long and tottering ride along the proverbial slippery slope, but it seems the Brits have arrived.

If you’re like me, you’ll find yourself reading this story more than once, each time convinced that you’re missing something.

Let me get this straight: A fellow in England named Harraj Mann is seated in the back of a taxi on his way to the airport. He’s listening to music, and decides to sing along to the Clash’s 1979 hit “London Calling.” A short while later, Mann is escorted from his flight by authorities and interrogated for three hours. All because the song’s lyrics make vague reference to “battle” and “war” — and because, we have to assume, Harraj Mann is of Middle or Near Eastern descent.

As everyone knows, any jihadi would, in preparation for imminent martyrdom, be sure to preannounce his mission by singing aloud in the back of a taxi. And he wouldn’t be wailing out some verse from the Quran; he’d be crooning along to the Clash. We can all sleep soundly knowing ever-vigilant cabbies are on the prowl, quick to recognize that dastardly combination of a dark complexion and a fondness for late-’70s Brit punk.

The lesson here, thanks to a demented fixation on terrorism and security, is that it’s not only verboten to mention certain words or phrases at the airport — but now you shouldn’t say them on the way to the airport either.

The plight of Harraj Mann is absurd enough, but more disturbing was the 2004 case of another Briton, Mike Devine, who found himself hauled away for questioning after sending out a text message containing lyrics to the Clash song “Tommy Gun.” According to authorities, Devine, a musician who plays in a Clash tribute band, had intended to send the lyrics to a friend, but punched in the wrong number. The message ended up going to a woman in Bristol, who contacted police. The cops traced the sender and apprehended Devine at his office.

That’s the official story, though some terrorism experts have maintained that the British intelligence office GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters) actively monitors the content of mobile voice and text messaging. It has been speculated that GCHQ’s antennae seized on a snippet from “Tommy Gun” that goes, “One jet airliner and 10 prisoners.”

The price of liberty, observed Thomas Jefferson, is eternal vigilance. What he hadn’t banked on is that the price of eternal vigilance seems to entail a slow descent into lunatic paranoia. That being said, both of these overreactions took place in England, not the United States. We Americans like to think our own government, armed with the Patriot Act and the smiling subservience of its populace, has cornered the market on domestic surveillance and the erosion of civil liberties. It’s Britain, however, that has set the bar for privacy invasion. On top of the alleged communications monitoring, hundreds of thousands of closed-circuit cameras monitor the activities of British citizens and their vehicles. The average London commuter is covertly videotaped anywhere from 10 to 300 times daily.

(But here at home, just to test things out, and in the spirit of long-forgotten alt rock, I was tempted to text-message the full lyrics from Stiff Little Fingers’ “Suspect Device” to the cellphones of every airline representative and government official in my Rolodex. “It’s time the bastards fell … We’re gonna blow up in their face!”)

The Clash, of course, in addition to being one of the greatest rock groups of all time, were in many ways the progenitors of modern left-wing agit-pop, and on one level the misfortunes of Mann and Devine dovetail sublimely with the band’s leanings. Nonetheless, there’s something so perversely misconstrued about all of this, we can imagine that the late Joe Strummer is spinning in his grave.

The Clash’s more political songs could be grating at times. I’ll take the bouncy, rock-rasta fusion of “Let’s Go Crazy” or the hammering fury of “Complete Control” over the maudlin “Washington Bullets” any day. And as for the British cabbie who turned in Mr. Mann, one theory — mine — suggests he did so not because he thought Mann might blow up a plane but because he chose to sing along to “London Calling,” albeit a commercial hit but possibly the least compelling song from that landmark double album of the same name. Had he gone with “Rudie Can’t Fail,” he’d have stayed clear of trouble.

GO-AROUNDS

Re: Wrap rapping

“There have been recorded cases of drugs being smuggled inside luggage after check-in by criminal organizations, causing, well, some annoyance to the unsuspecting travelers upon arrival. Hence the popularity of plastic wrappers in airports in Central and South America.”

— Salvador Monroy

“Drugs have been placed in passenger luggage. As perhaps you know, a young Australian woman found with marijuana in her bag in Indonesia was recently sentenced to 20 years in prison. She claimed it had been put there — possibly by airline or airport personnel — during luggage processing. It might be ecologically unfriendly, but when traveling to places where narcotics possession can lead to a death sentence, I would wrap my checked luggage.”

— Jeffrey Harris

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

Do you have questions for Salon’s aviation expert? Send them to AskThePilot and look for answers in a future column.

“It is paramount to the security of our aviation system that terrorists not be able to know with certainty what screening procedures they will encounter at airports around the nation,” Hawley said. “By incorporating unpredictability into our procedures and eliminating low-threat items, we can better focus our efforts on stopping individuals who wish to do us harm.”

We always thought that the “unpredicability” of our encounters with airport screeners was simply the result of incompetence and the arbitrary abuse of power. But it turns out that it’s all part of the grand plan, the — dare we say it? — “National Strategy for Victory.” And the Associated Press says we’re going to see even more of it in the future. Airline passengers “can expect more randomness at security gates so would-be terrorists won’t know for sure what they will see,” the AP writes. “For example, an airport might require all passengers to remove their shoes one day but not the next.”

Somewhere in the caves of Pakistan, Osama bin Laden is laughing.

Still more troubling, the 9/11 report portrays the successor to the beleaguered FAA, the Transportation Security Administration, as infected with a host of similar problems — a charge amplified by a host of former FAA security analysts and aviation security experts.

“Look at security measures before 9/11 and look at them after 9/11,” says Michael Boyd, president of the Boyd Group, an aviation consultant firm based in Colorado. “The flaws are still there.”

The FAA — the guardian of American skies and airports, with a special writ to protect travelers from criminal acts, including terrorism — should have been the last line of defense. Instead, 19 terrorists slipped through its porous shield.

Here are just a few ways the 9/11 report gives the FAA an unequivocal thumbs-down:

In a rare moment of hyperbole, the report calls the discrepancy between the extensive terrorist roster and the meager FAA list, the one that airline clerks perused, an “astonishing mismatch.”

Indeed, reading how the hijackers slipped through cracks in security on Sept. 11 is astonishing. Four of the five hijackers on American Flight 11, the first jet to hit the World Trade Center, were flagged as suspect by airline clerks at check-in counters; their luggage was examined, no explosives were found, and they were sent on their way. Two of the hijackers on American Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon, set off the security gate alarm — but the screeners didn’t bother to resolve what caused the buzz. The hijackers were hand-wanded, cleared and allowed to march onto the planes.

And that’s just the airports. Revelations abound about what happened in the sky, beginning with the first chapter, “We have some planes,” a reference to the first thing an FAA controller overheard a hijacker say on Flight 11. Thirty minutes passed before the controller figured out the significance of that statement. Things could have gone very differently had officials realized immediately that more than one plane was in the hands of terrorists.

Then there’s this exchange. When the Air Traffic Control System Command Center in Virginia, which oversees the entire airspace, discovered that United Flight 93 — which crashed in Pennsylvania — was hijacked, it contacted FAA headquarters. A command center controller then wondered aloud whether they should ask the military to launch (“scramble”) jets for assistance.

Command Center: Uh, do we want to think, uh, about scrambling aircraft?

FAA Headquarters: Oh, God, I don’t know.

Command Center: Uh, that’s a decision somebody’s gonna have to make probably in the next ten minutes.

FAA Headquarters: Uh, ya know everybody just left the room.

To most readers, the 9/11 report’s indictment of the FAA may seem thorough and impressive. But to aviation security experts, both in government and in the private sector, the report doesn’t get to the core of the FAA’s problems. They argue that the report pulls its punches on the crucial point: that airline security was sacrificed to the bottom line and that old standby, keeping the customers satisfied.

To its credit, the 9/11 report does assert that the FAA and its self-interested partner, the airline industry, exerted “great pressures” on the Department of Transportation (FAA’s boss) to “control security costs” and “concentrate on its primary mission of moving passengers and aircraft.” But don’t be misled by the government-speak, says Boyd, who previously worked for American Airlines and Braniff International. “The FAA and airlines didn’t care if security worked or didn’t work. All they care about is no lines for passengers. And no flight delays.”

Steve Elson was an FAA special agent for security from 1992 to 1999. He worked for the administration’s covert “Red Team,” which analyzed airport security by, among other things, placing suspicious objects in luggage and carting them through check-in gates — nine times out 10 without detection. A former Navy SEAL and Drug Enforcement Administration rep in South America, Elson is not a timid man.

“I’d give the commission a ‘D’ for investigating the FAA,” he declares. To Elson, the FAA was the very embodiment of a stagnant, insular bureaucracy. Due to its cozy relationship with the airline industry — which is now in debt to the U.S. government for billions of tax dollars spent to bail it out  it perpetually suppressed critical reports.

“The commissioners knew a lot more than they included in the 9/11 report,” he says. “They sold out.”

Elson sent five of the commissioners his own “White Paper.” In 24 single-spaced pages, Elson details decades of what he sees as the FAA’s ineptness. He quotes internal FAA memos, government reports, his own conversations with countless Congress members, former colleagues, and his own Red Team experiences in breaching airport security.

Elson’s paper is intemperate in tone, a sustained rant. Yet it’s nevertheless a damning portrait of a government agency riddled with arrogance, inefficiency and distrust of its own employees.

“The FAA always talked about maintaining ‘layers of security,’” Elson says. “But it was layers of bullshit and facade. It was chary of doing anything that would cost the airlines money. We in the field knew it but couldn’t ever get anything done about it at headquarters.”

Since Elson quit the FAA — “I was convinced they were going to kill people and didn’t want to be part of it” — he’s become a professional pain in the ass, seldom passing up a chance to blame the FAA’s incompetence for the 9/11 attacks. And perhaps his outrage sounds moot now, as it’s not going to bring 3,000 people back to life.

But Elson’s criticism is significant because he charges that the same problems now infect the agency that took over airport security from the FAA, after Sept. 11, the Transportation Security Administration or TSA.

TSA’s annual budget is a staggering $5.3 billion. But in the past two years, the media has gone hog wild broadcasting how airport security is no better than it was before Sept. 11. Throughout 2003, Elson, usually with TV news cameras in tow, waltzed through security gates of the nation’s major airports with objects (blow dryers and oranges) that resemble guns and explosives — by hiding them beneath lead-shield film bags — 135 times. In each instance, despite seeing a black blob on x-ray monitors, screeners didn’t bother to look beneath the film bags for anything else.

But it’s not just Elson and other independent critics who are firing serious barbs at TSA; it’s government officials themselves.

Currently, five U.S. airports are testing whether airport screeners, hired by private companies, perform more effectively than TSA federal screeners. In April, Inspector General Clark Kent Ervin of the Department of Homeland Security (TSA’s boss), testified before Congress that both groups performed about the same, “which is to say, equally poorly.”

The TSA, based on its own commissioned study, concurred, saying “there is no evidence that any of the five privately screened airports performed below the average level of federalized airports.” TSA chief Rear Adm. David M. Stone, a George W. Bush appointee, stated “that all screeners — federal and private — meet the same demanding hiring requirements, pass the same rigorous training regimen, and follow the same standard operating procedures.”

But Boyd argues that it doesn’t matter which group gets better marks, for screeners, while often the central focus of security, are merely one link in a chain that has countless other weak spots. Airports and commercial jets are vulnerable in many other ways. Terrorists could easily load weapons or bombs onto planes, Boyd says, with a little help from a wide range of people — caterers, mechanics, baggage handlers; anyone who has access to jets before they take off.

Boyd goes so far as to say that could be just the kind of help the hijackers had on Sept. 11. Perhaps the screeners really did find no weapons on the hijackers, he says. “I firmly believe there were things ferreted away on those airplanes. I firmly believe there were guns involved. I had one mechanic call me two weeks after 9/11 and say a 767 just pulled into the maintenance overhaul base and they found a couple of box cutters taped under certain seats.”

Tom Burnett, a passenger on Flight 93, did tell his wife, Deena, that one of the hijackers had a gun. But the 9/11 report states that no trace of a gun was found at the crash site; it adds that “if the hijackers had possessed a gun, they would have used it in the flight’s last minutes as the passengers fought back.”

That doesn’t deter Boyd. “What I’m saying is there was a larger conspiracy. They had to have had help by people on the other side of security. They had to have had help by people working at that airport. Mohamed Atta, after planning all this, wasn’t going to risk getting caught by some stupid screener, saying, ‘Oh, you have a box cutter?’ After spending all this money, scoping out Boston Logan Airport for months, would you risk this by putting a box cutter in your bag or pocket? They had to know all this.”

Boyd’s assertion that the hijackers thoroughly researched the airports and the type of jets they would commandeer is, in fact, supported by the 9/11 report.

Otherwise, though, when it comes to co-conspirators at work in the airports, the commission report doesn’t go there. Elson too says he hasn’t seen any evidence of Boyd’s conspiracy. But that’s not the point. What is, Elson says, is that “you and I could get together, sit down and make a plan tomorrow to get on airfields. It’s a piece of cake. We could get on planes with virtually 100 percent of success, plant a bomb, get off, and then blow the planes up. And the chances of getting caught are close to zero percent. That should make you feel good, huh?”

TSA spokesperson Amy Von Walter responds that screeners are just one part of airport and airline security. “That’s why we have a layered security system,” she says. “We now have federally trained, federally hired screeners. We’ve got thousands of federal air marshals, reinforced cockpit doors, and federal flight deck officers, or armed pilots.”

Von Walter stresses that installing secure gates and fences around airport perimeters, and making sure that all areas of the airport are guarded, is a top priority for TSA officials. She points to a recent TSA plan that outlines how airport security firms and local law enforcement, including the police and FBI — “who have the day-to-day responsibility of enforcing the perimeter” — should protect all vulnerable areas, from hangars to restaurants.

In every way, Von Walter says, air travelers today are safer than they were prior to Sept. 11. “Absolutely,” she says. “No question about it.”

But in fact there is a question about it. The 9/11 commission itself declares that the TSA has no “forward-looking strategic plan” in place to correct past problems and “major vulnerabilities still exist in cargo and general aviation security.”

Other federal officials go further. In a General Accounting Office report this June, the government penny-pinchers slighted TSA’s recent airport perimeter plan, calling the agency’s security efforts “fragmented rather than cohesive,” and hardly enough to justify the program’s cost.

Actually, look a little deeper into the bowels of government reports, and you find that our representatives on Capitol Hill are not happy at all with how things are going at TSA. In 2002, a House Appropriations Committee averred that TSA is “seemingly unable to make crisp decisions … unable to work cooperatively with the nation’s airports; and unable to take advantage of the multitude of security-improving and labor-saving technologies available.”

The next year, a Senate Appropriations Committee chimed in that TSA was “characterized by arrogance and disregard of the public’s views. This is particularly troubling given the fact that the agency’s core mission is to reassure the public as to the safety of the nation’s transportation system.”

For Elson, the TSA is quite simply a train wreck. “The fact is, TSA has proven itself to be a reckless, profligate, self-serving organization that can’t solve the most basic, rudimentary, fundamental elements of screening.”

Von Walter responds that TSA has been its own harsh critic. “As we continue to develop as an agency,” she says, “we continue to assess, evaluate and make adjustments.”

One wants to believe it. But inside the TSA itself is one of the world’s foremost aviation security experts, and he begs to differ. In fact, his voice is probably the most sober and frightening one you will hear regarding the current safety of our skies.

His name is Bogdan Dzakovic and his résumé is awfully impressive. He was an officer in the Coast Guard, a criminal investigator with the Navy, a U.S. air marshal and a leader of the FAA’s covert Red Team.

Dzakovic is as earnest as Elson is brash. Yet he has been every bit as fearless as Elson, first within the FAA, and then the TSA, in pinpointing failures in security and broadcasting them to his managers and Congress members. He paid the price for his outspokenness: Today, the 50-year-old Dzakovic is biding his time until retirement as an inconsequential security inspector in TSA. He is a man who fought the law and the law won.

But fight he has. Before the 9/11 commission, he testified that his Red Team breached airport security 90 percent of the time — prior to Sept. 11 — but that FAA managers suppressed his findings and in some cases prevented his team from retesting airports that were particularly bad offenders. “The more serious the problems in aviation security we identified, the more FAA tied our hands behind our backs and restricted our activities,” Dzakovic testified.

TSA was designed to be more open to criticism. Has it been? “TSA is worse than FAA,” Dzakovic says flatly. “Nobody bothered to learn from the shortcomings leading up to Sept. 11. TSA is not only making the same mistakes but they’ve taken things to a new depth of ineptness. And they’re spending 20 or 30 times more money doing it.”

Dzakovic’s own detailed report of security failings at the FAA, and his subsequent claim that his work was being covered up, earned him official whistleblower status by the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, which essentially means, yes, he was telling the truth, and yes, findings from the elite Red Team were “grossly mismanaged.”

Like many FAA employees, Dzakovic was transferred to the TSA, where despite his whistleblower status he was given a lackey gig in TSA’s airport inspection division. After a year, a TSA manager asked him to prepare a “lessons learned” report about his manifold experiences in the FAA. And he did. “I wasn’t just spouting off my theories either,” he said. “I was saying here is the evidence why this will work and why you shouldn’t do this.” Ten days later, Dzakovic was demoted even further by being assigned to TSA’s general aviation area, where he was given computer fix-it jobs that “any kid in high school could do on a work studies program.”

Dzakovic himself doesn’t give the 9/11 commission report high marks. It’s redolent of the political cronyism and craven policies that marred FAA and now TSA, he says. He offered the commission his 500-page whistleblower report, which proved that “FAA security operated in a manner that was a gross threat to public safety,” and yet, he says, the commission turned him down.

“The more I read the 9/11 report, the angrier I get,” Dzakovic says. “I keep reading how the intelligence agencies didn’t have any imagination. But they had too much imagination. They were so disconnected from the real world that they were in la-la land. Now they say the answer is having the agencies talk better to one another. But having one ineptly run agency talk to another ineptly run agency doesn’t exactly fix the problem.”

What should have been corrected, Dzakovic continues, “is the one thing that should have happened in every agency — the FBI, CIA, FAA. And that’s the people on the bottom level of each of the respective agencies did their jobs. We recognized that the terrorist threat was increasing, we knew that security in aviation was a joke, we reported this to our chain of command, and they did nothing. If we would have been allowed to continue with what we were working on, and had the agencies made changes based on what we were doing, 9/11 wouldn’t have happened.”

Dzakovic has some specific ideas for fixing the TSA, such as placing rigorously trained TSA employees throughout airports, rather than having a TSA manager strolling around with a clipboard, trying to organize myriad security guards and law enforcement agencies, the result being that no one is clear who’s actually in charge. But it’s pointless to offer recommendations, he says. So he stays in his office, doing his work.

“One of my first assignments from the division manager was to go through an old FAA operations manual,” he says. “Every time I saw the word ‘FAA,’ I was to scratch it out and put ‘TSA.’”

I set up my tape recorder on the table and Lowell Handler touches this Sony instead of my shoulder. I’ve been reacting to his actions like the worldly cosmopolitan that I am. I’ve ignored him. I know that Lowell Handler — freelance photographer, college teacher, author — suffers from Tourette’s syndrome. This is why he must do what he does.

“How many people suffer from TS?” I ask. He answers by saying, “How many people have it and how many suffer?”

“Two hundred thousand people have it,” Sue Levi-Pearl answers as she enters the room and takes a seat. She is the president of the Tourette’s Syndrome Association, a family organization that’s been around for 27 years. Levi-Pearl is pleasant looking. Like a librarian. Or a dentist. “TSA was started by the handful of folks who believed they were the only ones in the world who had a child with this disorder,” she explains.

I reach out and check to make sure my tape recorder is running while Levi-Pearl explains that her brother-in-law has Tourette’s. “I married into the family with certain professional abilities. My father-in-law determined that I should become involved in encouraging more science.”

Just what is Tourette’s syndrome exactly? Levi-Pearl waves her hand at Handler. He should answer. “It’s a neurological disorder which in its essence is a lack of ability to inhibit,” he says. “A lack of ability to inhibit movement, noises, thoughts, gesture and behavior.”

Handler’s first book, “Twitch and Shout” (published last year), is his memoir of the disease. “Before I was 24, I had no idea what Tourette’s was,” he says. “I’m 43 now. I felt a relief when I learned that there were thousands of people who have it. But I felt a tremendous burden — I had fooled myself into thinking that it would go away. And here is this doctor telling me that it’s never going to go away.”

So just what is a “Tourette” exactly? “Dr. Georges Gilles de la Tourette,” Handler answers. As he talks, I check on my tape recorder. “He was a French neurologist. He practiced in the ‘Golden Age of Neurology.’”

You should know that I am checking my tape recorder because of an optical illusion. This little Sony looks like its tape is still instead of running. Handler reaches across the table and touches my Sony as well. He doesn’t care whether the thing is working or not. He just has to touch it. “Tourette was a contemporary of Freud,” he continues. “He was the first one to see that this disorder was not psychotic. There is a spectrum of Tourette’s and compulsive/obsessive disorder in the frontal lobe of the brain.”

The first official sufferer of the malady was Marquise de Dampierre, a 19th century French noblewoman whose symptoms included tics and coprolalia — the involuntary shouting of curses and obscene language.

“A friend once said to me, ‘There’s a little Tourette’s in all of us.’”
Handler laughs, touching the tape recorder again. “‘We all want to say “Fuck you” to our boss. Only you guys have the ability to do that.’”

Levi-Pearl is quick to point out that only 15 percent of Tourette’s sufferers have symptoms of coprolalia. Wow. “Only?” That’s 30,000 people. Thirty thousand people shouting, “shit, motherfucker, goddamn, goddamn” in church. In court. In bowling alleys.

“If I had Tourette’s syndrome I’d know it, right?” I ask Levi-Pearl.

“Would you know it if you had it?” she repeats. “You may go through life having a little involuntary movement and clearing your throat irregularly. ‘Oh that’s just David’s habits.’ Then you would see one of our public service announcements and say, ‘That’s me.’”

We talk about children. “Kids that get diagnosed fairly early are lucky,” Levi-Pearl says. “Parents realize what the child has instead of thinking they have brain tumors. Most children with classic Tourette’s syndrome do quite well in mainstream education. There are those who have TS as well as learning and attention problems.” She pauses. “In a third of cases there are varying degrees of obsessive traits.” She looks across the table and smiles
at Handler. “And by my even saying it, Lowell wants to do some stuff.”

Handler honks.

“I don’t even have to look at him,” Levi-Pearl says. “He’s already thinking about his stuff. Everyone has their own obsessive stuff.”

Handler touches my tape recorder.

“What exactly is your stuff?” I ask him.

“I do a lot of touching of inanimate objects and people,” he answers
matter of factly. “There are other people who have obsessive-compulsive stuff who are just the opposite — they can’t stand to be touched. There are people who have to have specific symmetry in every object. There are people who have to get dressed in a specific order or else they have to get undressed.”

I point out that I basically ignored his stuff. “How should I react to you?” I ask, and then imitate him reaching out to touch the tape recorder.

“People have all kind of reactions,” he answers. “I was on the subway a few months ago. This guy was in the subway car and I was on the platform. I’m Touretting and shaking and doing all kinds of things. This guy looks up at me and shouts, ‘You must be some kind of fucking retard.’ And I said, ‘You’re right. I’m retarded. And you must be a very smart man.’ And the doors closed and he was screaming at me as the subway went away.” He pauses and
halfheartedly touches my tape recorder.

“It’s easy to get interested in the strong reaction,” a newcomer says. It’s Jonathan Lethem, the final participant in this discussion. This prolific, brilliant novelist’s latest novel, “Motherless Brooklyn,” stars a private detective who has Tourette’s.

“I’m fascinated by the things that point exactly in the direction ‘Should I ignore it?’” he says. “What Tourette’s exposes — someone behaving strangely — is the way that we all weave together a social world where we allow a certain amount of strangeness. We filter it out. Have a built-in denial that says, I’m not seeing that. That didn’t really happen. There was a reason for it and I don’t
know the reason. I don’t need to think about it. Or, I’m not going to react to that. Tourette’s can become an example of something that exposes aspects of human interaction that are at work everywhere.”

I check my tape recorder as Lethem adds, “I found that writing is extremely Tourette. It’s got rituals. My revision takes an obsessive grooming of the text. My generation of metaphors is to turn ideas upside down. Wordplay. A game like written tics.”

Levi-Pearl raves about Lethem’s book. “I read it in one sitting and
thought, Either this guy has Tourette’s or all his friends have it. He had so captured the essence, the feel of Tourette’s. There is an intuition there.” She pauses. “When I learned that Jonathan had never seen anyone with TS I was truly blown away.”

Handler touches the tape recorder and gives a honking laugh. “You’d never seen anyone with it?”

“Seen is the wrong word,” Lethem answers. “Because I had of course seen them. But then I read about Tourette’s in Oliver Sacks. It was moving and intriguing to me. I also read ‘Twitch and Shout.’ I was going to have to explore Tourette’s in my work because of the enormous level of identification that I felt. Tourette’s became my own response to the world even if no physician would ever consider me a candidate for diagnosis. I had voluntary Tourette’s.”

“You should have called me up,” Handler honks, touching the tape recorder again. “We could have gone Touretting through the East Village.”

“I was tempted and at the same time I was protective,” Lethem says. “Once I had my notion of my narrator Lionel in place I put up some walls, because I only wanted to know what I knew because I was on fire with my character and I needed to just go.”

“The aspect of Tourette’s syndrome illustrating larger aspects of human nature is what I’m hoping people pick up on from my book,” Handler says to Lethem (just two authors talking). “It’s something that illuminates universal aspects of human nature.”

“Do you know when you’re going to start doing your stuff?” I ask Handler.

“Sometimes I can get a premonition,” he answers. “Sometimes it just jumps out without warning. Stress affects it negatively.”

“That’s universal,” says Levi-Pearl. “Anxiety and stress.”

“And exhaustion,” Lethem adds.

I ask if there are medications. “Yes,” says Handler. He takes something called Orap, or pimozide. And Prozac. “I helped get Orap approved by the FDA,” he says. “I testified in 1983. I started taking Prozac right after it came out.” He then adds, “I was prescribed the Haldol. It just blew me away. It was horrible. I took that hoping the side effects would go away for almost a year.”

I ask Handler something personal. “Do you drink?” I say. Then add the word “recreationally.”

“Yes,” he answers. “I drink recreationally. It lessens the symptoms of Tourette’s. But not for everybody. It might make the symptoms worse. For me it’s a tranquilizer.”

“You said sometimes you can forecast Tourette’s when it’s about to happen,” I say. “But when it’s happening are you always aware?”

“I’m aware all the time,” Handler answers. “It’s like someone holding a mirror up to your face. If I’m alone in my apartment I don’t notice it much. But I notice it in the reactions of others.”

“I’m completely comfortable with you,” Lethem says. “But I still watch your hand go out to the tape recorder. I watch it and you see me watching you. That’s me holding the mirror up right there without any ill will or misunderstanding or lack of information.”

Handler honks good-naturedly, but doesn’t reach for the tape recorder again.

“Do you have to touch it?” I ask him.

“I have these compulsions to do things,” he explains. “An obsession is the thought. A compulsion is the action. I had the thought I have to touch not just the tape recorder, but one specific spot on the tape recorder. And if I don’t I will feel terrible. So until that action is complete I will feel amiss until there is another action I must do.”

“It’s a little like me checking to make sure it’s running.”

Lethem, Levi-Pearl and Handler all look at me and give dramatic nods. “You’re discovering your place in the spectrum,” Lethem says.

“I bet you do other stuff,” Levi-Pearl says to me, a little wickedly.

“Yeah,” Handler adds.

I confess to the three that there are times when I exhibit compulsive behavior in private. I don’t tell them that this behavior exclusively involves rituals I must perform before I can leave my apartment: I must check to make sure that A) the stove is off, and B) the iron is too. I do this checking even when I know that I did not drink any coffee or iron any clothes.

“When someone has compulsive-obsessive disorder with no tics,” Levi-Pearl says, “their need to complete an activity is so pressing because something terrible will happen: My mother will die. I’ll get run over by a truck.”

My apartment will burn down and kill my dog, I say mentally.

“That is a classic disorder,” she continues. “For folks with TS, those
forethoughts of doom do not seem to manifest. But rather, they have to do this. They just gotta do it.” Then she looks at me. “Is that clear? Because we know what you got now …”

Handler begins arguing good-naturedly with Levi-Pearl about the association’s position on Tourette’s jokes.

“I really disagree with a stand that feels compelled to criticize every joke about Tourette’s,” he says. “I have heard some hysterical things. I heard a thing on the radio about a guy with Tourette’s calling a whorehouse. The madam didn’t know the caller had Tourette’s. But it should have been apparent as the caller got crazier and crazier. Asking about different fetishes. And
finally he goes, woo woo woo” — Handler really puts his heart into his woo woo woo’s — “and the madam says, ‘That’s between you and the girl, thank you, good-bye.’”

He pauses, then says, “I understand part of TSA is to be a watchdog organization, but we’re in a society here where really anything
goes. Anything is ready to be made fun of. But at the same time anything is OK to be taken seriously too. People know the rules.”

Then he touches the tape recorder. He does it almost casually, like a man flicking a cigarette in an ashtray. “Of course it’s funny. It is funny having Tourette’s. It’s also sad. It’s a million different things at the same time.”

Handler takes his hands away. And I reach out. But stop. I want to see with my own eyes that my little Sony is running, that everything is working the way it’s supposed to. Then I say, “To hell with it.” And drop my hands in my lap like Handler, the one with Tourette’s syndrome.