In order to ensure that security theatre see its caliber of performance bolstered by no less than the finest special effects and pyrotechnics, MiniDef is installing (with no pretense at discretion) an anti-aircraft missile battery on top of a residential estate in East London, where some seven hundred people live.
This vantage point affords security forces a commanding view of the games’ venues as well as urban airports, probably of the new
US Embassy construction site too. The building of such a gargoyle is really the limit: no doubt everyone hopes that the event of the summer benefits one and all, but it is hard to accept that anyone aside from corporate sponsors and defense contractors are going to come through the hassle any richer for the experience. It is no great strain on the imagination to think up ways that this could go terribly wrong, and if such measures are deemed necessary and the threat is in any way tenable, shouldn’t the whole affair have been called off long ago, to spare the expense and all the humiliation for the regular people of London? There are easier avenues for the promotion of public safety—and imagine what’s not hailed in the news and carried out publicly if we are already privy to this—but the business of security has become self-perpetuating and won’t obligingly be forced back to its original confines.
