Janet Napolitano, performance artist

By Thomas Lifson

There can be no other explanation for the ever-expanding list of outrageous statements of our Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet "The system worked" Napolitano. She is some sort of postmodern performance artist, bent on illuminating the foibles of bureaucratic sclerosis, using irony so hip that nobody has yet recognized it is all a gag. The late Andy Kaufman had nothing on Ms. Napolitano.

How else to explain her most recent incredible statements defending Director of National Intelligence Clapper, the man who is supposed to coordinate all the multiple intelligence agencies, to make sure that nothing falls between the cracks:

...there was no connect that had been perceived to anything going on in the homeland and that we were in perfect connectivity with our -- our colleagues in Britain," she said.

I think the Secretary tips her hand, here. Connectivity is a major buzzword for IT types, and the double use of variants of connect in a single sentence is a giveaway of the satiric intent. The issue is not what the DNI knew or didn't know, because in the age of the internet, knowledge itself is obsolete. Connectivity is all you need. Clearly this is a postmodernist jab in the eye of obsolete notions of knowledge and truth. National security itself, is a meaningless concept, a mere text. By making absurd, incomprehensible statements, the Secretary is illuminating the contradictions and dilemmas of modern life.

Her statement yesterday on the recent tests which found some airports missed up to 70% of the weapons were missed by screeners builds on her statements last year about the crotch bomber who nearly brought down the Amsterdam to Detroit flight: "The system worked."

Napolitano said national security "is objectively better than it was a year ago, particularly in the aviation environment" due in part to the use of full-body scanners and invasive pat-downs at airports around the U.S., which she said will not change for the "foreseeable future." (snip)

"Many of them are very old and out of date and there were all kinds of methodology issues with them. Let's set those aside," she said. "We pick up more contraband with the new procedures and the new machinery."

The Secretary once again demonstrates that national security is nothing but a text, the ironic reference to "objectively better" giving away the subtext. In the eyes of old-fashioned, unhip observers, national security means preventing people with weapons from getting on airplanes. But it can also mean catching people carrying 100 watt light bulbs in their luggage on the way to California.

The media told us that Barack Obama was the hippest president Americans would ever have, a new kind leader. His appointment of Janet Napolitano as Homeland Security Secretary is part of a sustained postmodernist agenda, featuring other meaning-destroying moves, such as Michelle Obama as fashion plate, 9.8% unemployment as recovery, and Islam as a part of our republic since its founding.

If you don't get it, you are just not cool.