Eternal Vigilance is the Privilege of Stupidity

Even after so many years of the War Against the Abstract Noun, there remain a few ivory-tower academics who have not fully grasped the extent of its liberatising pacificality. An American Airlines passenger found herself seated next to a man engaged in suspicious behaviour amounting to possession of dark curly hair and scribbling cryptic alien squiggles on a pad; naturally, she passed the stewardess a note, got the flight delayed and denounced the suspect to the FBI. The man, a professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania, had been doing a differential equation, and has declared himself perturbed by the workings of a security system that "relies on the input of people who may be completely clueless". He has obviously been spending too much time with his differential equations and not enough observing the world as it has become since the régime of Dick Cheney and his pet chimpanzee.