Opinion: The great varnish stripper incident

LONDON, United Kingdom — The Great Varnish Stripper Incident at St. Pancras Station is pretty small-bore in a world of great change. But when the dark side gets you down, consider Agent Mohammed.

Writ large, the encounter offers some hope for a post-9/11 age in which ordinary human activities are at the mercy of petty arbiters who too often apply one-size-fits-all rules.

First, a little explaining:

The only substance on earth that rescues gunked-up bristle brushes, it seems, is English glop called Nitromors. Since I live on an old wooden boat, I went from Paris to London to get some.

Flying with a large can marked, flammable, is obviously out of the question. But although the Eurostar is only a train, it also has security screening. The X-ray machine busted me.

“This stuff is great,” a turbaned Sikh security guy told me, describing his own Nitromors home-improvement adventures, “but you can’t take it.” I explained the soul-searing angst of an heirloom brush gone stiff with old varnish. Sympathetic, he called the top guy.

Agent Mohammed (he declined further identification) emerged from his office, having put aside the intricate urgencies of dispatching cross-channel bullet trains to deal with my dilemma.

“Go through passport control and wait for me at Gate 8,” he instructed, “I’ll see what I can do.” With a reassuring smile, he hurried off with my miracle glop.

I waited. No Mohammed. But life delivers worse blows, and I said a stoic goodbye to my brushes.

Halfway to Paris, the loudspeaker crackled: “Will the passenger with the varnish problem please present himself in the club car?” Stephane Favry, the conductor, had my Nitromors.

“Mohammed had this analyzed,” Favry explained. “They found it was paint remover, and he put it onboard for you.”

Reunited with the errant can, I reflected on other recent incidents of the post 9/11 age. They can go either way depending on residual humanity in people to whom we’ve handed over power.

At Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, an evil-eyed woman had me unpack every last item in my roll-aboard. She lurched forward for the kill when I opened my mouth to object.

Yet as I put the bag back on the belt, her assistant murmured, “We work all day with that witch.” And a young woman waved me through secondary inspection with an apologetic smile.

Overbearing security is only part of it. Paranoia over money that moves across borders can turn the simplest of transactions into a Kafka plot.

My friend J, for instance, leads tours in France. After four years with PayPal, some cog in the gears decided she might be a terrorist. As a big trip neared, PayPal froze her funds.

For weeks on end, she patiently explained who she was, what she was doing and why her clients expected to find the hotel rooms for which they had sent deposits months in advance. What stunned her, she said, was the total lack of remedy. If someone on the phone said black was chartreuse that was the end of it until she could find someone else more reasonable.

At this writing, I’m not sure how J’s drama will play out.

Like my St. Pancras contretemps, this is only a miniscule sign of the times. Weightier examples involve billions of dollars and serious risk to people involved.

But civilized states are made up of ordinary people who want protection not only from legitimate threat but also from harassment by the people they pay to protect them.

Dick Cheney attributes zealotry with having shielded America from another 9/11. Yet evidence suggests that pointless war, torture and harsh controls only worsen the threat.

Lunatics such as Osama Bin Laden, like Hitler, do not come along often. Smaller scale terrorists are real enough, and security measures are essential. But so is human civility.

Experience shows that injustices from ethnic stereotypes and petty abuse of power feed the frustrations that swell terrorist ranks.

These days, we badly need careful scrutiny. But it is good to know we have guys like Agent Mohammed who can still tell the difference between nitroglycerine and Nitromors.