Awful lyrics

Let me say, first of all, I feel terrible about not blogging for two and a half months. It’s been eating me up on the inside.

Just kidding. I was getting married and stuff has been taking off with my band and I just started a new job and, quite frankly, this just has not been a priority. Sorry to all of my dear reader.

And now I come back and it’s not even something directly political I’m writing about. Sorry. Eat me.

I have, for some time, felt guilty about downloading stuff for free when it’s for sale. It may even predate the scolding I received from a G.I. Joe character. But I may have found away to justify it, or at the very least, partially alleviate my guilt.

Last week, I saw System of a Down (with The Mars Volta) at Continental Airlines Arena. Overall, it was a cool show – I could gripe in detail about the sound guy for TMV making the shaker louder than the bass, which is to say both were unnoticeable. (For anyone who’s heard their stuff and knows how challenging their song structure can be for listeners, imagine it without any anchor.) I also would’ve liked to have heard SOAD’s drummer’s cymbals. Can it really be that difficult to turn a few knobs? Suffice it to say I maintain my objection to seeing shows at large venues, although I did get roped into Weezer/Foo Fighers next month. But I digress.

While I really enjoy SOAD and thought the show was really cool, I’ve always had a gripe with their lyrics. In fact there are a number of bands/artists who I really dig musically and even enjoy their lyrical sentiment but find the lack of tastefulness appalling. I recognize that not everybody squirts out of the womb with They Might Be Giants’ sensibilities, and even TMBG isn’t always “on.” But would it hurt bands to compose a second draft now and again?

Maybe a better example of this is Incubus -- I was listening to Make Yourself recently and a few lines struck me as cringe-worthy. Now there’s plenty that makes me uncomfortable about the clichés that Brandon Boyd slings around, but here’s something particularly painful:

“And it feels like a matador is taunting me with his reddest red cloth. And I am the bull”

Call me the imbecile that Boyd is trading brains with on this song… but how necessary is it to say “I am the bull.” Didn’t this guy study similes in sixth grade like the rest of us? If a matador is taunting you with a red cloth, what are you? A mud-brick hut? A lotus blossom? Pauly Shore? No, you’re a bull. No description necessary. Why not say, “I’m driving into a brick wall. And I’m in a car.” Or how about, “I’ve got my finger on the button. And I’m the president.” Note: when you have a metaphor or simile that is so common that it’s cliché, it really doesn’t need further explanation. It just makes you seem like you need words to throw in so you can hear yourself sing some more.

Here’s another great thing I heard listening to that album:

“Meet me in outer space/We could spend the night/watch the Earth come up.”

Could you do that, really? Could you watch the Earth come up, the way you can watch the sunrise or the moon do the same? Just floating somewhere out in space? That’s funny, I’m some silly! I was under the impression that those things happen because Earth is rotating – so from here, everything looks like it’s rising and setting. Thus, if you were chilling in outer space, Earth would just kind of sit there, unless you were on another planet. But no, you’re supposed to be floating in outer space. Because that’s what you need to do to understand what it’s like for the narrative voice to fuck you. See, I explained it in case you couldn’t figure out what the phrase “how it feels to be inside you” actually meant. And I can understand your confusion, because ordinarily when someone says something like that, I immediately think of the movie Innerspace. But I can’t imagine why Boyd what write a song about that.

The most frustrating thing is that Boyd’s sentiments are often really nice, and some of lyrics do draw you in. But once you’re in, you feel like you’ve wasted your time. Here’s what I mean, fro “Wish You Were Hear”:

“The ocean looks like a thousand diamonds/Strewn across a blue blanket”

This is actually a very nice sentiment and I think it’s one of Boyd’s better lines. Now try matching it up against the lines in the same place of the next verse:

“The sky resembles a backlit canopy/With holes punched in it”

First of all, for me the vocal delivery exaggerates the line’s retarded nature. Even still, is there a nicer way of saying “holes punched in it”? From a purely aesthetic point of view, it like getting jerked off with a pair of pliers. And I am the penis.

But beyond that, what’s he saying? The sky resembles that really cheap, homemade science fair-type recreation of the sky. The line conjures images of a big dipper poked out of black construction paper with a desk lamp behind it.

Let’s give this more consideration than it winds up deserving: what if that’s what Boyd’s trying to say – the sky is so pretty that it seems cheesily fake. For a time I wanted to believe that this song was an ambiguous and subtle stab at the person he says he wishes was there: everything’s so beautiful and “in this moment [he is] happy” – he’s realizing that he’s glad “you” aren’t with him. The “wish you were here” is sarcasm. Or, taking it to another level, he’s seeing through some artifice of natural beauty with some level of clarity that “your” absence has brought him.

In my opinion, if that’s what he were trying to say, and were being so subtle and artful about it, it would be a great lyric. Unfortunately, there’s nothing else anywhere in the lyrics to suggest that. It seems most likely that Boyd was just saying, “Dear woman, everything’s cool, I miss you, love me.” Not only does it lack the depth for which I’d hoped to give him credit, but that “holes punched in it” line just seems like an exercise in laziness. Boyd succeeds in getting across the sentiment “happy.” Congrats.

Meanwhile, back to the band that spurred this thought process today, SOAD. I just read on a band bio some of Serj’s thoughts on lyrics: “It comes FROM the universe. It comes THROUGH us. When I write something, I think I know what I’m saying, but I never pretend to know the full meaning of the words.”

Well, Serj, I have a news flash for you: John Donne had a really good sense of the “full meaning of the words.” William Shakespeare, too. You can’t predict how words will affect a listener or their possible interpretations, but words have meanings. Sometimes lots of meanings, sometimes the meanings change. But I hope you’re at least trying to know the full meaning.

In the same bio, the bassist says, “It’s time for the bands these kids are listening to to deliver something deeper than just ‘let’s party.’” Let’s see if they succeed.

“Fuck the system/... I need to fuck the system/We all need to fuck the system”
“Fuck you pig”
“I'm saying fuck you and fuck the norm like that”
“Everybody, everybody, everybody fucks”
“Fuck you, it all goes away”
“We don't give a fuck about your world”
“Where the fuck are you?”

Well, “fuck” is at least one word for which Serj clearly does understand multiple meanings.

Here’s a lyric from “Psycho” that always twists the knife, even at the awesome show last night:

“So you want to see the show/you really don't have to be a ho”

Maybe it’s the delivery of the line, the awkward Armenian-accented melodic white guy interpretation version of “ho.” I’m reticent about putting too much time into interpretations of this song since it’s obviously mimicking the crazified state of some ho groupie on coke, and it’s great in terms of tone. Still, it’s the only line that gives any sort of form to the narrator given the second-person style. Everywhere else, the lyrics just describe what coke has done to the ho or what the ho is going through: “Makes you high, makes you hide, makes you really want to go, STOP”; “do you really want to think and stop, stop your eyes from flowing out”; “So you want the world to stop.” Why, then, this single piece of advice for the ho? Why not, say, recommend not being psycho cocaine crazy? Is the driving point of this song really that you can be fine getting high at a show to the point of it making you totally crazy and stalking the band – just don’t try to fuck them, like a ho? Ho, ho, ho! Hopefully my repeated awkward use of the word “ho” will give you some idea of the sensation that occurs every time I hear this song.

Changing gears a bit: I’ve always wondered why most modern lyricists, the most popular kinds of poets the world has ever known, don’t every try to make a unified philosophical point. Sure, you can shout the sorts of hackneyed slogans one expects at a protest (“This is what democracy looks like!” “Make love not war!” “Hell no, we won’t go!” “Whattawe want? Some shit! When do we want it? Now!”), but this is because you have to boil down your words into something unifying and catchy. “The workers control the means of production” is just too wordy to chant and even amongst socialists you probably won’t gain much traction forcing that one.

So why, when you have a longer-form verse and you’re politically active, wouldn’t you try to put together some sort of treatise to express how you feel? Well, Serj does some sloganeering (see the “fuck” section above), but it seems he also try to spell out a longer chain of thoughts too. Take “Science” for example:

Science fails to recognise the single most
potent element of human existence
letting the reigns go to the unfolding
is faith, faith, faith, faith

Science has failed our world
science has failed our mother earth
Spirit moves through all things

I fully admit that the last part, the chorus, is fun to scream along with and immediately attracted me to the song. Working in scientific publishing, I come across papers all the time that, for example, present evidence contrary to widely held false assumptions. I see examples of experts in their fields vehemently disagreeing with one another, or sabotaging other peoples’ work in order to better their own prospects (or for straight-up political motivations). And in my personal life, I’ve had swaggering doctors insist I had one kind of ailment and that (for a price) they had the best treatment – then another doctor claim I had another kind of ailment for which they were the experts at treating. When you start making personal medical decisions based on who’s the better salesman, you start to question science in a major way. How much of what we accept as fact came to be because of persuasive salesman more than some abstract deductive reasoning process that isn’t even consistent from person to person?

In other words, I’m ripe for the kind of argument Serj seems to be making by staging science and faith at loggerheads. It’s about reason versus faith, perhaps echoed in the modern political argument between organized religion and science.

But what is Serj saying? Science ignores faith? That’s not true at all, especially nowadays. A tip of the iceberg: in the last ten years, there have been so many science-based studies about whether prayer helps heal the sick. The debates on abortion and euthanasia and stem-cell research is focused on the line between science and belief: when is something alive? Is creating life to destroy it to save lives a net gain or a moral monstrosity? I read an article about whether fetuses can feel pain, and the implications of all the research are obvious attempts to clarify the sorts of issues that scientists are still vague on – it’s an admission, in the face of pressure from people of faith, that scientific ideas on these area are far from demonstrative unquestionable proof. And in the “Intelligent Design” school of thought, the faithful have even borrowed the rhetoric and processes of scientific rigor and reasoning.

In the end, you realize, this is no argument. “Science has failed” is just another way of saying “fuck the system” – they’re just getting more specific about which system they mean.

It’s a shame, because they too have some songs and sentiments and lyrics that I really like – Prison Song is a great example. The idea that the “War on Drugs” has grown so out of control that it’s like “they” are building a new prison system to incarcerate all of us. And I like the way the “factoids” are inserted into the end of each verse and the bridge. Serj’s flow there, whether you like it or not, is definitely an interesting experiment. Still, it does suffer from a lack of subtlety in parts:

“All research and successful drug policy show/That treatment should be increased/And law enforcement decreased/While abolishing mandatory minimum sentences.”

It doesn’t get any more blunt than that. But could it really be that “all successful policy” shows that? Could even the conservatives led by Bush (of “Why don’t presidents fight the war?/Why do they always send the poor?” fame) maintain a policy which every shred of scientific evidence says is false? Well, the only explanation would be faith… It’s possible that Serj is succumbing to the shortcomings that all sloganeering ideologues run into.

Maybe I’m asking too much from yelly staples of the angry young American Pop Left. Still, I can’t help but feeling that after drawing me in with their music, too often bands like these leave me feeling empty. So I think I’m going to continue trying it before I buy it anyway, and if the lyrics fail to meet some basic minimum standards, I reserve the right to punish the record companies for it. Seems to me that going to a show is a better way to get money directly into a band’s pockets anyway.

Am I being too harsh? As Eminem said,

"Who woulda thought... That I would catapult to the fore-front of rap like this?
How can I predict my words would have an impact like this?"

I'd love your feedback. Respond and let me know your least favorite lyric, the line that makes you cringe every time you force yourself to hear it.

Proselytizing...

For those of you caught unawares, I'm playing in a band that goes by the moniker Sick Liberty. We play some loud, crazy, energetic rock, where you don't know if you want to nod rhythemically in knowing agreement ("Yes, this rocks") or enthusiatically headbang ("Not only does this rock, but I plan to show off my elastic neck") or just slam dance ("My God, this rocks so hard, somebody will pay").

We did a show this past Saturday at The Saint -- it was a pretty good venue, good sound and a surprising amount of space. I remember being there many years ago at a Dan Bern show and the place being packed, even for the crappy opening acts. This weekend, we wound up going on really late and the only people still there were the folks we brought. You guys are hard core and we love you, but we were still a bit disappointed that we couldn't proselytize at all.

Here are my top six highlights of the show:
6. A hot dog cart vendor actually stuck around outside until after the show (like 1 am), as if to provide me with a bottle of water at a fraction of bar prices precisely when I was broke and needed something to drink most. It reminded me of that episode of The Simpsons where the hot dog vendor basically followed Homer around everywhere and explained to Marge, "Lady, he's putting my kid through college."
5. Aloud, in for the evening from Boston, played a really great set. They were tight and the music was really great. We're hoping to play with them again sometime, perhaps in their hometown.
4. Dennis (filling in on bass for the evening) managed to slam dance while playing bass.
3. Dmitry freestyled over some random beat we kicked. I warned him not to but he did it anyway, and he actually sounded awesome.
2. Proving that we are both crazy and eager to please (and terribly warm on stage), the singer/guitarist Dmitry and I did, in fact, strip upon request.
1. Our crowd sticking around for nearly four hours to listen to all the earlier bands plus our whole set. You guys rule!

Video and pictorial documentary evidence exists of the show, and I'm sure we'll get it posted asap. You can always check out www.sickliberty.com for that shit. (Music and show dates are available there and also in condensed format at www.myspace.com/sickliberty.)

Since I know you want to be there, are next show is THIS SATURDAY NIGHT at Albion (sometimes known as The Batcave) in NYC. Be sure to check out their website for a discount coupon that'll get you $5 off at the door. Jersey folk can get there via easiest mass transit, as the club is conveniently located just south of Penn Station. (You can also take the PATH to 33rd, walk south 3 blocks and west 1 avenue.) And New York people -- shit, you can find it just as easily.

Republican majority victimization

Perhaps Mike Spaniola’s Guest Commentary, “Republicans must educate public, not debate Democrats” (MichNews.com, Apr 26) qualifies as “In-depth”, but I’m pretty sure he betrays the rest of the web site’s “Conservative, Honest News & Commentary” slogan. To start with, I’m sure members of any movement could point to a few court cases decided against their positions as “evidence” of a runaway activist judiciary, but that hardly presents a complete picture. In fact, 53 percent of federal judges were nominated by Republican presidents and 9 of 13 circuit courts now have a Republican majority. While some might call these “statistics”, Mr. Spaniola thinks they represent a “myth of a conservative tilt” pushed by America’s “Democrat-dominated media”.

The depth of Mr. Spaniola’s inconsistency would be fun to observe if it weren’t so misleading to his readers. In one moment, he betrays his “republican” beliefs by pushing democratic populism, and in the next he writes off public opinion on behalf of his personal opinion. For example, he says that “judicial appointment… have allowed Democrats to usurp the will of the people”, but then he cites and dismisses an opinion poll with favorable results for Democrats, saying the truth is “obvious to most Americans.” He decries federal and state who overturn laws they deem unconstitutional, rather than leaving it to a popular vote – then he claims that Democrats are using “selective, unethical back-door political maneuvers.” Just so we’re clear: there should be state and federal referendums on issues where Mr. Spaniola, our personal arbiter, believes judges are wrong and popular opinion backs him up. However, if those who oppose him work within the framework of the constitution and the rules of the Senate, THAT would be a back-door political maneuver.

I wonder if he was using the same language in the 90’s, when Republicans used the same techniques to block Clinton judicial appointments? No, says Mr. Spaniola, what we are no witnessing is all sour grapes. I guess all those liberal “activist judges” never got around to changing the constitution’s position on the Senate making its own rules. The only intellectual consistency here is that whatever Republicans try to do is good, and whatever Democrats try to do is bad. Never mind that sometimes both groups have tried to do the same things.

This article is just silly. I too could spate a list of decisions which I interpret as furthering the conservative movement at the cost of defying the law, but I will refrain as I am neither trained as a judge nor was I party to all of the details in any given case. I will note that unlike the House of Representatives, which was designed to be more directly representative of voter will, the Senate was designed specifically to balance the House and protect the rights of the minority. That’s why North Dakota sends as many senators as Texas, and it’s why the filibuster and other rules exist in the first place: the Senate is designed for compromise and moderation as compared with the tempestuous nature of the House.

It amazes me, and is telling of our times, that technicalities of procedure have been elevated to such a heated political level that Mr. Spaniola urges that Republicans not even engage in debate with Democrats over this relatively fine point. He uses every misguided trick in his book to convince us that even when Republicans control every branch of government, they are still the victims.

Episode XVI: A New Pope

So there's a new pope:



I'm surprised to learn that it's former actor John Ratzenberger. I didn't even know he was religious, let alone that religious. Or even Catholic for that matter. When asked about the work ahead, Ratzenberger (now known as Pope Clifford XVI) said, "Okay. Everyone to your stations. Let's go!" Ratzenberger was immediately criticized for being too conservative; a story circulated from earlier in his career, when he issued the order to close shield doors that endangered the lives of two officers in a local mililtia. A local bear-creature yelled, and then some midget in a cramped robot costume beeped.

Insert your own Cheers/"Hey Normy" joke.

RIP Basil and Clementine

Newsflash: John Bolton is a douche. Maybe I'm the first person to point this out, who knows.

In more important news, our two pet rabbits died yesterday. I won't share the grusome details but luckily Dana was there to comfort Basil in his final moments. (Clementine had already passed.) As anyone who knows us is aware, we'd had Basil for about three years. He was rescued from an abusive situation by the New Jersey House Rabbits Society, a wonderful group of strangely obsessed people with big hearts. As we had long since decided that these would be our last rabbits (we have a long history with sickly rabbits and were particularly attached to Basil, who has outlived several "wives"), I've been comforted by happy memories from our living/dining rooms in Somerville and our old Edison apartment. I can remember all of our little furballs, but especially Basil, doing the things rabbits do best: running around at top speed, scratching up our new furniture, jumping straight in the air and over obstacles, peeing on the nice new off-white plush carpeting, crunching happily away on their veggies, licking our mirrors, shoving their heads beneath our feet for attention, humping our arms (and each other), bouncing off walls, biting off chunks of fur from one another, trying to chew through wires, menacing our cat Denton, keeping overnight guests awake, curling into us to go to sleep, chewing holes in our coats and pillows and sweaters, tossing their toys around and grunting and squeking and chasing and nipping us for attention...

We're obviously upset at the suddenness of it all but when you think about it, we gave Basil more happy years with us than he'd had unhappy ones previously, and any other rabbit who was lucky enough to spend time in our house got the royal treatment too. Almost any of our friends and guests from the past few years are bound to have some funny memories of these guys and it seems more appropriate to think about how their lives enriched ours than our loss. So, yeah.

Open letter to Jon Corzine

Note: lest I be chalked up as some sort of partisan hack, please note that I am an equal-opportunity jerk. Before any detractors suggest that I was a complete sarcastic dick in my letter to Bill Frist and relatively cordial in my letter to Corzine... you're right. Part of it was the fact that I really respect Corzine for (among other things) his pushing of legislation to pressure Darfur. Part of it is my disrespect for (among other things) Frist's short-sighted support of the "nuclear option" on judicial nominations. Part of it is that I just don't have the time or energy today.

Dear Senator Corzine,

I am a past supporter of yours who is considering a voting for you for governor in the fall, but I must say that I was disappointed by your support for the recently-passed legislation modifying the legal process for Terri Schiavo. Even ignoring the moral questions involved – and we must, since none of us are privy to the full information that was available only to those most intimately involved – for Congress to pass a law aimed at one situation is fundamentally unjust. I consider you a man of principal but cannot understand how you came to support this legislation.

Certainly, no system of justice is perfect, and ours is all in all among the best by any measure. If you find our current federal laws covering related issues problematic, I do truly hope that you seek to modify them. But granting special rights to some people and not others is akin to this administration’s imprisonment of “enemy combatants” under rules invented specifically for what they consider to be situations never envisioned by our founders. A quote (I believe attributed to John Adams) has surfaced quite a bit in recent days, but still I feel it necessary to reiterate that we are “a nation of laws, not men.”

Senator, you are in a better position than most to affect the pursuit of justice in America. If the rules are unfair for some, please see to it that they are changed. But you know as well as I do that this is impossible to do on a case-by-case basis. I didn’t read any statements from you in the newspaper when my own grandmother was on her deathbed two years ago, although certainly there were complicated moral and legal issues in the air then as well. And more than I am upset by Terri Schiavo’s condition, or sympathetic for her husband and parents as they have endured years of agonizing struggles, I resent that a woman’s life has become a political football.

Sincerely,
Mark Zipkin

Open Letter to Bill Frist

Dear Dr. Frist,

I have been following the legislative case for Terry Schiavo and wanted to thank you for all of your support. I feel that I have a lot in common with the southern, conservative Christian movement of which you are a leader – I mean, I’m a liberal Jew from the Northeast. OK, not sure where I was going with that.

Still, I have to respect a man who stands on principal alone. As a stereotypical socialist-commie-leftie, I have been waiting and waiting for government to solve all of my problems. I’m sure you know how that’s been going recently. Anyway, I’m so excited now to hear about government’s sudden interest not just in the personal lives of its citizens, but even the most intimate details of specific private individuals.

Someone tried to tell me today that it wasn’t the job of Congress to get involved in legislating specific cases, particularly ones that involve private family issues that have nonetheless been adjudicated in courts of law for years, and have finally come to a conclusion. This friend of mine told me that if Congress were to write a law that was so specifically designed that its intended subjects – er, I mean, citizen – were referred to by name, it would be a clear violation of the Framers’ intent to constitutionally mandate a separation of powers. I stopped my friend right there, because I had to remind my friend that no one could rise to the rank of Senate Majority Leader without a clear understanding of what his or her constitutional role would be in shaping the government. And besides, Bill Frist is a man of principal.

I reminded my friend of the role you have had in advancing good judges to the federal court, people without any discernable ideological agenda, unlike those “activist judges” who have pushed radical changes like ending segregation, promoting gay marriage, or advancing abortion rights for women with their willy-nilly claims about equal rights under the constitution. I so easily convinced him that your interest in seeing jurists reach the bench who acted independent of political winds was plenty of evidence that you would never attempt to overstep the strictures of your position to score political points.

I just feel lucky that we had a medical doctor in the Senate to help us sort through the some of the confusing issues involved in this particular case. Sure, it might be tough keeping up with the latest complicated aspects of medicine, particularly the ones you had never specialized in, while one is serving in the Senate – but heck, what could really happen in a decade anyway? I am really glad you were able to so thoroughly evaluate the evidence, even from a distance and based on some tapes that were circulating on the Internet, and come to your firm conclusion that contrasted what those ridiculously biased specialists who studied Mrs. Schiavo firsthand for the past few years had suggested.

And can you believe this woman’s husband? He’s like some kind of animal, wanting to move on with his life after only 15 years. I’m sure it was a really easy decision for a craven beast like himself to forego the sums of money his in-laws offered and fight a very public, decade-long legal battle to respect his wife’s wishes. Actually, Dr. Frist, this brings me to the reason for my letter. Since you take such a personal interest in the individual lives of the citizens of this country, even those who are not your constituents, I thought you could help me out. I considered contacting my own senators about this, but their records do not suggest they would be nearly as helpful as you.

A few weeks back I got a parking ticket. The thing is, I got home late and the only spot available was in front of this hydrant, and I knew it was wrong and a little illegal but what’s a guy to do, you know? Anyway, I thought you could just push a little bill through that exonerates me from it. I promise, I won’t do it again.

Now, I know that you’re thinking this might not really be fair to the other people out there who have to pay their tickets. And you’re also probably considering the energy you’d have to expend to put this thing together – the man hours your staff would waste crafting legislation. I guess you’re used to having lobbyists put it all together for you. You’ll be happy to know that I formed my own lobby, the Mark Zipkin Parking Ticket Inequity Lobby (MZPTIL), and I’m hoping to open an office on K Street next month. In the mean time, I’ve already been hard at work on the language, I modeled it after the Schiavo thing, hope you don’t mind. Perhaps you can just slip into an appropriations bill or tack it onto the Bankruptcy one? No one who matters is looking.

“For the relief of the Mark David Zipkin. . . .

“The United States District Court for central New Jersey shall have jurisdiction to hear, determine, and render judgment on a suit or claim by or on behalf of Mark Zipkin for the alleged violation of any right of Mark Zipkin under the Constitution or laws of the United States relating to the giving of a stupid friggin’ parking ticket to him.

“Any person who is Mark David Zipkin shall have standing to bring a suit under this Act. . . . The District Court shall entertain and determine the suit without any delay or abstention in favor of State court proceedings, and regardless of whether remedies available in the State courts have been exhausted.”

Thanks so much Senator Doctor Bill, you’re a peach.

Sincerely,

Mark Zipkin, I-NJ

It's time to chill out.

Here's an absurd news flash: school nurses are unprepared for a terrorist attack.

Choose your own punchline:
A) What happened to the federal kung-fu training grant they were given?
B) Terrorist attack? I couldn't even get a box of tissues from them when I was in school.
C) The Pentagon is offering training but it's part of Rumsfeld's covert ops, so we don't know what they'll teach.
D) Shh! Don't let the terrorists know our weakness!
E) Yeah, we can't monitor everything that comes through our ports, either. But you don't see anyone freaking out about that, do you?