Paranoia's Lost Its Horror

Between reading Ross Douhat's piece in the current Atlantic on the return of "the paranoid style" in American moviemaking and actually watching a thoroughly paranoid movie, The Bourne Ultimatum, last night at the hotel, I'm a little bit nerve-wracked as I wait for my flight here at Ronald Reagan National. (The tiredness isn't helping.)


The backdrop here is a long, slow ride to the airport, one which featured a horrible 20 minutes inching down K Street along the edge of Franklin Square, which was entirely circled with police tape and full of a dozen cop cars. God only knows.


Once I finally go to the airport, I realized that the whole place is basically a scene from Bourne Ultimatum. Everybody but me is on a cell phone, some vaguely-uniformed guy was running a scanner over barcode decals affixed to various items in the men's room (baby changing table, towel dispenser, soap dispenser, et cetera), the radio station runs frequent ads for military-industrial companies, my fellow terminal-bar drinkers include numerous nondescript white guys in black trenchcoats, and there are as many security cameras as passengers in the gate area.


Air travel: not relaxing.


Forecast: Significant blowing and drifting, with the possibility of heavy accumulation in rural areas.