[...] In a fit of patriotism, the Postal Service announced that it wouldn't participate in TIPS. Apparently if someone's getting packages from Yemen marked BIOHAZARD, and the postman has to leave them at the end of the driveway because the occupant screams FILTHY ZIONIST TOOL! whenever the postman shows up, that's of no concern to the post office.

Imagine this sort of reaction during World War II. Just try. If you dig in the wartime archives you'll probably find a poster showing a jaunty, paunchy mailman in full blue mufti, giving us the thumbs-up under the motto HE'S KEEPING HIS EYES PEELED FOR HUNS or LET'S LICK HITLER LIKE A TWO-CENT STAMP! This year's poster: IT'S NOT IN OUR JOB DESCRIPTION.

Of course we need some sort of civilian vigilance effort, some way of helping people alert authorities. But who ARE the authorities, anyway? In the old days of B-movie sci-fi, the first thing someone did upon detecting giant atomic-mutated weasels was to "alert the Authorities," as if there was one number, one switchboard, one office with a gray metal desk and a man in a uniform.

"The Authorities" meant the military, the police, hospitals, firefighters, and inevitably the eggheads down at the University, who'd been working on this worrisome Giant Weasel scenario for some time now. They were one seamless team of steel-spined Americans who could focus the entire resources of the nation on a single problem and a single solution. (Which usually involved lots of artillery fire at the Giant Weasel, to no effect.)

That was a myth, of course. But there are more Authorities now than ever, and they seem as coordinated as a dozen pigs trying to line-dance on an ice rink. [...]