Terror and Ugliness

So there I was, spooning Tabasco into my porridge to make it taste like food, when all of a sudden this jumped out of the bushes at me:  Being ugly makes a difference to your security.  Well, mine, anyway.  How do I figure?  Two ways.

First, as my bud Big Steve would say, “In poker, they call it a tell.”  (Now Big Steve is a good ole boy, does a lot of thinkin’.  He was the first to let on that the sign Wet Paint is not an instruction.)  See, if the bad guys really are prone to being uglier than not… — sorta gives a guy a leg up on ’em, help see ’em comin’.  Far-fetched?  Maybe, maybe not.  Some really smart professors who get people to pay ’em for what Big Steve and me keep studyin’ Thursday nights across the green felt – well, these birds reckon real good liars do a whole lot better if they’re good lookin’ too (Aldert Vrij, Par Anders Granhag, and Samantha Mann, “Good liars,” in Open Access Journal of Forensic Psychology, Vol. 1, 2009.  Retrieved July 20, 2011 from http://web.me.com/gregdeclue/Site/Volume_1__2009_files/2009-excerpt-Vrij.pdf )

Now, stay with my train of logic, here.  If they’re real good, we don’t see ’em.  That means they get away with it.  Why?  According to the professors’ research, folks just plain tend to buy what attractive people are pitchin’ and it helps even more if the liars don’t talk too fast or act jumpy while making the sale.  OK, fine.  That part don’t help a whole lot … till you get this politically incorrect news flash:  How come so many of the death-to-America chuckleheads are plain butt-ugly?  Now I mean by our standards, of course.  Sure, there’s somewhere where scraggily bin Laden, al-Zawahiri, shoe bomber Richard Reid, Ft. Hood shooter Nidal Makil Hassan, and underwear bomber Farouk Abdulmutallab qualify for rock star status with their roadies.  I just ain’t seen it here.  And even the guys that may not be so ugly like skivvy-slinging Farouk, let on about being socially isolated – feelin’ like a turd in a punchbowl (E. Andrews, “Lonely bomber in his own words: What Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab wrote about his family, sex ... and his love of Liverpool FC,” Mail Online, December 30, 2009.  Retrieved July 20, 2011 from http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1239162/Umar-Farouk-Abdulmutallabs-charred-underwear-hid-explosives-Christmas-day-airline-bomb-plot.html).  That’s right.  Skivvy slinger bellyached about havin’ no friends and someone who went to the same school said, “he was pretty quiet and didn’t socialize much or have a girlfriend (ibid).”  Duh.  Clue or what?

So, here’s Point #1:  The bad guys haven’t broke the code on this tell.  A lot of ’em started out ugly and stay ugly or get uglier over time.  As in not getting’ better lookin’ each day.  Why do we miss out on this tell?  Well, this article from a Canadian magazine, of all places, calls it “the curse of the indelicate obvious. (N. Catrantzos, “Defending Against the Threat of Insider Financial Crime,” Frontline Security, October 2010, (pp. 17-19).   Retrieved July 20, 2011 from http://www.frontline-security.org/publications/10_SEC2_Money.php

I don’t need fancy words like that to cover up a smart way to be stupid.  We do it all the time.  Old lady sees the elevator door open and a big nasty guy in there droolin’ and smellin’ ripe.  Does she stay out?  Nope.  She steps right into that box to get mugged by him ’cause she don’t want to cast aspersions or some such.  You see it all the time (as noted in Gavin DeBecker’s Gift of Fear, New York:  Little, Brown & Company, 1997, available at http://www.amazon.com/Gift-Fear-Survival-Signals-Violence/dp/0316235024/ref=tmm_hrd_title_0 )  Smart folks making theirselves stupid and missin’ obvious clues on account of not wantin’ to hurt somebody’s feelins.   So, if Point #1 is to pick up on the easy tell that the bad guys don’t realize they’re puttin’ out there, what’s Point #2?

It’s that maybe acts of terrorism attract ugly perps.  Why?  What else they got to do?  It’s not like they got to skip out on a lot of dates on a Saturday night to pencil in jihad on their dance card.  Hell, I may have seen one of these guys in his early stages my own self but didn’t know it at the time.  His name was Omar and he actually fought with the Taliban against the commies as a kid.  Used to hurt his feelings in 2000 when someone in the office called the Taliban terrorists.  “Please, freedom fighters,” Omar said, real respectful-like.  Now Omar wasn’t exactly ugly.  He was presentable.  But somethin’ about him turned off the girls in the office.  Can you feature where this is goin’?  No dates on Saturday night – just like the skivvy slinger.  So, next thing you know, Omar takes to talking a lot of politics in Urdu on the phone instead of doin’ his job in finance.  The company lets him go.  Word was, before 9/11/01, Omar had hightailed it back to Pakistan and had been fixin’ to find hisself a bride there in an arranged marriage.  Sure.

Point #2 is that ugly people, or people who see theirself as a social outcast – ugly or not – what they got to lose?  You can sneak up on this point another way.  Ask a Secret Service agent looking into a threat how to get a handle on the subject.  Chances are he’ll be talkin’ about “looking into how the person has dealt with unbearable stress … examining past traumatic events in his life (such as) feeling humiliated or being rejected, especially in public (R. A. Fein and B. Vossekuil, Protective Intelligence and Threat Assessment Investigations, U.S. Department of Justice, July 1998, p. 17.  Fein is a psychologist for the Secret Service and Vossekuil was a Deputy Special Agent in Charge.)”  That sort of academo cop talk they use in formal situations— not like when you break out the kitchen whisky after bustin’ some caps at the range, if you get my drift.

Bottom Line: Keep your powder dry and keep your head on swivel when the next suspicious character is ugly, too.

-- Lamar Bodine, guest columnist and old school world watcher