"Let them eat cake ride buses."

Marie Antoinette, queen of France to Emperor Louis XVI, is rumored to have been informed that the peasants had no bread, to which she responded, "Qu’ils mangent de la brioche," or "Let them eat brioche."

The quote has gone down in pop culture as, "Let them eat cake," but brioche is actually bread, albeit  enriched with a high content of butter and eggs. Of course, if the peasants had had butter and eggs, they would have had ordinary flour-and-water bread anyway.

Whether Queen Antoinette actually uttered the words (and there is no actual evidence that she did), the quote has gone down in history as the premier example of monarchical, dismissive contempt for the masses that characterized Old Europe.

The Queen of Homeland Security

And so it is now with the latest waving-away of the concerns of American citizens subjects by Homeland Security Secretary Queen Janet "Antoinette" Napolitano. Responding to the widespread protests against the TSA's "naked body" airport scanning and near-sexual-assault patdowns, she said plainly that if people don't want to submit to scanning or groping, they may "travel by some other means, of course that's their right." Thank you for that concession, highness. "Let them ride buses" if they don't like how we run our hands over their private parts - or their children's.

So, majesty, we can always - by your leave, of course! - travel by other carrier. Well, let's consider traveling to/from Honolulu. Driving, obviously, is right out. Nonstop flights between Los Angeles and Honolulu take between 5-1/2 - 6 hours and there are many flights every day, costing $330 and up. Surface voyages, if you can find one, take six days and are, shall we say, somewhat infrequent. They cost more than $1,000 for an inside cabin (all info from Expedia.com listings.)

So you're at home in Honolulu, say today, Nov. 19. You get a phone call that your mom has been rushed to a hospital in Los Angeles and is not expected to live more than 36 hours. You can be on a plane almost immediately, certainly before sundown, and land at LAX six hours later. Time elapsed since you got the call: 15-18 hours, tops.

Or you can wait for the next ship to Los Angeles, a Princess liner that will depart on Dec. 2 from Lahaina, arriving at Los Angeles on Dec. 8. Time elapsed since you learned of your mother's imminent demise: 19 days.

Which means you'll get there in time to lay a bouquet on your mom's grave, unless her last request was to be buried in her hometown of Schenectady, which you will reach in another two days on Amtrak. That would make three full weeks altogether since you got the call.

Just imagine how routine sailing and entrainment would work for business traveling. But according to Queen Janet of homeland security, that's your choice

As Mark Steyn has pointed out, the TSA profiles things, not persons. And now the things they are profiling are, well, you know, our things. So we are faced with the lunacy of pilots and copilots being naked-scanned or felt up to make sure they aren't packing a bomb or a penknife, when all either has to do is climb the plane to 500 feet, idle the engines and push the flight wheel hard forward and port!

This is bureaucracy at its worst. A professor of management at a large state university emailed Glenn Reynolds,

Anyone that studies organizations or has spent time in corporate or large-government environments, understands why the TSA and the Department of Homeland Security were bad ideas. The expressed goal was to integrate all of the diverse elements associated with public security into one entity and make them work seamlessly. The only way to do this, however, is through fairly rigid bureaucratic rules and strict policy guidelines. How would you control the behavior of screeners in diverse places such as Minot and NYC? You do it through strict policy and procedures. You simply cannot permit discretion on the part of individuals as this would jeopardize organizational control of these people. This is why TSA seems mindless… the thinking is being done elsewhere... .

No, thinking is not being done at all.

Update: The new nickname for the machines is "porno scanners." Well, yeah, and at the link, Prof. Ann Althouse wants to know, "Who's getting rich selling those see-you-naked TSA body scanners?" Good question.

Update: Gizmodo on Napolitano's permission to travel by other means:

And she's completely correct. You have that right, people. Do you want to travel from New York to Los Angeles? Take the car. Or the train. Or run, Forrest, run. Do you want to travel to Paris this summer? Easy. Get in your bloody car and drive all the way to Alaska, then cross the Bering Strait in a ferry, and drive all through Asia down to Europe.

But if you want to take the airplane, you will have to be the object of the stupid, incoherent and ineffective TSA rules, which include naked pictures at the body scanner or a touchy-touchy session. Just deal with it, ok?

Yep, that's the choice all right.