“Yes, We Scan!”
Wednesday, February 10th, 2010Here is another delightful micro-article from the Dutch paper Trouw. Worshippers attending midnight Mass next Saturday night at the Lutheran church in Cologne, Germany, presided over by Pastor Hans Mörtter, will first have to pass through the sort of “all-body scanner” increasingly put into use at airports around the world to enter the house of worship.
Keep in mind, though, that we’re coming up on Carnival time, and that Cologne is in fact really the epicenter of Carnival celebration in Germany, with the biggest and most-famous parades and general public carousing. Pastor Mörtter publicly claims that his intention with these scanners (which really don’t work) is to weed out those who are not Lutheran and so to ensure a “heretic-free” zone inside his church for his parishioners. In reality, though, it’s just a Carnival stunt, whose only possible constructive contribution to public discourse is as a gesture against what German media reports about this stunt (which I have not been able to find on-line) call our modern “total-fear culture.”
