According to the Concrete Disciples, “On Saturday, November 5th, Richard Sanchez unleashed the Suicide Bomber show on Los Angeles at the Han Cholo gallery.”

Skaters have always enjoyed a kind of fringe style to their music and art, almost as a way of demonstrating against the culture and society that their elders expect them to blithely take for granted. This is no different than any youth movement that finds itself boxed in and deprived of real opportunity, so it is hardly surprising that skater bands and logos would shock those who fit the traditional sense of “conservative”. If you believe the punk movement managed to allow expression that didn’t exist prior, that was the whole idea.

Well, apparently someone on a plane had some skater art/logo on his notebook and was dressed in the typical “thrash” and “rage” gear of teenage angst about the future. Nevermind that this stuff has become mainstream and highly commercialized even with names like “Independent” and “Suicidal Tendencies” , or the fact that the guy was 36 years old and possibly under the influence of controlled substances. The details are interesting, but the point is that his mere appearance coupled with the words “suicide bomber” on a notebook was interpreted by another passenger as a possible terrorist threat.

I don’t have an opinion one way or the other about the art show (although I think the gallery name, Han Cholo, is clever). I just think this is a perfect example of how important culture is to security. If you are unable to recognize friend from foe, artist from attacker, then you have no way of properly estimating threats and are likely to attempt all kinds of irrational and unsubstantiated things just to reduce the feeling of vulnerability.

The Mercury News report quoted Special Agent LaRae K. Quy, spokeswoman for the FBI’s San Francisco office, who “noted, there was ‘no reason to believe there was any sort of terrorist activity going on there.””

An old adage in security comes to mind when I read news like this:

Ordinary Chinese people who feel unfairly treated by China’s one party state have virtually no way of gaining recourse. In their frustration some turn to violence and the preferred method is often some sort of bomb. Explosives are relatively easy to come by in China, unlike firearms which are very tightly controlled.

The adage says if you build a dam, the water will still want to flow around it so long as you remain lower than where the water comes from. If you raise yourself above the water, it will stay in place.

From another perspective, modern combat has come a long way from a romantic concept of the past where poor villagers were helpless and needed some kind of hero to save them. Clearly even the disenfranchised benefit from advances in battle technology, especially if they know how to use organic means/compounds to make weaponized materials. Swordsmanship, marksmanship and the like become less relevant when you only need to be able to press a button or light a fuse to achieve an objective.

And so the response to this transition in risk (greater threat) can not simply be overwhelming force (shock and awe) since history has proven that the force of distributed and reroutable threats are not deterred by dams, this just shifts them to other points of the same low-lying vulnerability. A more compelling strategy would be to change the levels by actually working to alter the political topography…should the farmers lose the feeling or incentive that they must have things a different way, the threats will subside to a more natural position.