Christmas Spirit Quote by Janet Napolitano

Crisis is doing the heavy lifting here, not the argument. Napolitano frames “what we are doing right now” as a reluctant, reactive necessity, tethered to “what happened on Christmas” (the failed 2009 “underwear bomber” attack). That timing matters: it invites the public to treat heightened airport screening as an emergency reflex, even as she quietly admits the opposite. “Many of the things were kind of in the works” is bureaucratese for preexisting institutional desire. The security state, she implies, was already moving; the incident simply supplied the politically usable spark.

The quote’s real work is in the naming. “You call them body scanners. We call them AITs” is not a clarification; it’s a fight over the emotional register. “Body scanners” lands viscerally: exposure, intimacy, humiliation, the sense of being searched. “Advanced Imaging Technology” is engineered to sound antiseptic and inevitable, like an iPhone upgrade rather than a new kind of state scrutiny. By translating a controversial practice into an acronym, Napolitano attempts a linguistic laundering: if it’s “technology,” it’s progress; if it’s “advanced,” opposition starts to sound backward.

There’s also a shrewd redistribution of agency. The public is cast as the naive namer (“you call them”), while the department claims expert authority (“we call them”), implying that objections are rooted in misunderstanding rather than values. The subtext is a familiar post-9/11 bargain: accept deeper intrusion now, and trust us to keep it proportionate later. The quote reveals how security policy often wins less through persuasion than through crisis timing and vocabulary management.