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Around here, the A&E Network has a reality show in which we follow airport employees through their normal days. They call it Airline. I call it these are the idiots I have to travel with. On two recent episodes, we found drunk women arguing loudly, crowds of delayed passengers arguing loudly, and a single, shrill man arguing loudly. (The drunks and the single jerk both were sent away, and deservedly so.)

Now, here’s the kind of idiot I’d be caught arguing loudly with. A pilot writes in a Salon column about the latest xenophobic right-winger meme making the rounds: a soccer-mom-terrorized-in-her-own-mind tale called Terror in the Skies, Again?. In this, and its followup, we find Annie Jacobsen, a frightened husk of a person who suffered the ultimate injustice of spending a flight from Detroit to Los Angeles surrounded by ay-rabs. A dozen of them — more, even — talking to one another, talking to her, wearing clothes with Arabic letters. Jacobsen glosses over the fact that they were a musical group traveling to a performance: clearly, this is only a front for their terrorist ends. By the end of this descent into madness, Jacobsen has tied these people to a Syrian who was held at another airport weeks later for being in possession of “anti-American material.” (What could that be? Something written in French?) Jacobsen, and now a number of talk-show hosts and other nutjobs, now believe that she and her family saw the face of evil itself as it slid across their seats to go take a whiz.

These are the idiots I have to travel with.

Tens of thousands of passengers of Middle Eastern descent fly into, out of, and within the United States on a daily basis. These are Iraqis, Saudis, Pakistanis, whatever. Millions of them since 9/11; and more power to them, with all of the secondary screens and searches they all face. They’re not flying around plotting to kill you. In fact, most of the time, I bet they’d simply be happy if you stopped picturing them with a pocket full of box cutters while your trembling hand guides the third bloody mary to your lips.

I was on a plane just before Thanksgiving of 2001, two months after September 11th. Once we reached cruising altitude, we got the call from the captain. You know the call: [fsssssht] this is your captain… we’ll be flying over Farmington, Abilene, Mobile, and Pensacola before making our final stop in Orlando…. Only it wasn’t one of those calls. We were told that we live in a “different world” now, and if we see, you know, those people, we should by all means take matters into our own hands. It could even be the guy next to you. You were warned.

All I remember was shouting “Jesus Christ!” and something about how the pilot was just trying to frighten us. What happened on 9/11 won’t happen again. It can’t. Something different, maybe. But the element of surprise is gone. All that’s left is the fear, and the paranoia, and the speculation. Is this the Arab who’s going to bomb my plane?

No, he’s going to a concert in Palm Springs, but thanks for asking.