Arnon Grunberg

Fear

Security

This morning at Schiphol Airport a security officer harassed me. He was huge and not very slim. When he selected me for some patting I told him: ‘I love to be patted.’ Certain people even don’t get the most basic irony.
So he patted my private parts.
My best friends claim we are going in the direction of a police state. This claim should not be discarded immediately, but as long as the police state limits itself to touching private parts of its citizens it is a very subtle police state.
And maybe the war against terrorism consists of touching private parts. Who knows – I mean who knows where the private parts begin and where the private parts end.