HOW HE SEES IT The real terror of everyday things

By PAUL CAMPOS
SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE
NEW YORK -- Nothing drives home the strangeness of the war on terror better than spending a few days in what we can assume is America's most target-rich environment for potential terrorist attacks.
On a Friday evening, I'm trying to escort my wife and daughter to the door of a theater featuring a famous Broadway show that charges terror-inducing prices for the privilege of subjecting its audience to a brand of entertainment that I understand no better than Osama bin Laden understands the average ACLU position paper.
We discover our path to the theater blocked in almost every direction by some sort of police action, which has sealed off several blocks of the theater district. Squad cars and firetrucks block the streets, while a man in what looks like a space suit searches for something in the middle of Seventh Avenue.
What could it be? A bomb? A toxic or radioactive substance? Or is it only a drill? No one knows, and the police aren't talking. Meanwhile, thousands of prospective theatergoers circle aimlessly, trying to find an alternative path to their $100 seats.
But, terrorists or no terrorists, the show must go on, and Broadway's powers that be eventually induce the authorities to allow the masses to make their way through. The next day I check the papers, but find no mention of the incident. Perhaps this sort of thing is now considered too normal to treat as news.
The next evening we go to Little India, and enjoy a reasonably priced dinner in a restaurant that features a cockroach crawling on my daughter's fork. After the cockroach's appearance, my wife and daughter refuse to eat any more of the (really quite delicious) food.
Jaded cosmopolitanism
Adopting a world-weary air of jaded cosmopolitanism, I assure them that a touch of vermin infestation merely vouches for the authentic Third World credentials of this sort of establishment.
Still, the sight of the bug reminds me that the bathroom was quite dirty, which in turn reminds me of Manhattan chef Anthony Bourdain's dictum that one should never eat in a restaurant with dirty bathrooms (bathrooms, he points out, are much easier to clean than kitchens, and the customers actually see the bathroom). I hesitate-- then polish off the lamb vindaloo anyway. Live dangerously, as Nietzsche advises us and Tom Ridge does not.
On Sunday morning, I discover that my flight back to Denver from Newark, N.J., has been canceled, and that there are no seats available on other flights to Denver, or even on flights to connecting cities. I'm offered the option of taking the last remaining seat on a flight out of LaGuardia.
This requires a death-defying hourlong taxi ride, some of it through the incredibly crowded streets of Chinatown. Pedestrians of all ethnic persuasions walk heedlessly in front of the hurtling cab, eliciting a colorful and creative volley of ethnic insults from its Pakistani driver. We somehow avoid killing either ourselves or anyone else, although not from lack of trying.
If anyone has grounds for treating the current concern over potential terrorist attacks as something other than a wildly overblown panic, New Yorkers do. And yet, considering the risks they take every day, New Yorkers have far more concrete things to worry about.
Still, the illusion that we are in control of our destinies when we brave the streets (and kitchens) of a great city is a powerful one. Traffic accidents and food poisoning are things we can control, while terrorism is not -- this is the formula, more or less. That it's almost wholly false belief hasn't kept it from dominating our political and social lives.
XPaul Campos is a law professor at the University of Colorado.