Seeing Vermillion Over Flaws in Terror Alert Code

Even I have a hard time believing it myself. My new American idol? He’s Christopher Cox -- Republican congressman from Orange County.

I know what you’ll say: Chris Cox? The same Chris Cox who voted for the dreadful Bush tax cuts? The stone-hearted Chris Cox who voted to limit the patients’ bill of rights? The guy who’s against gay Boy Scouts and campaign finance reform?

Look, I’m not saying he’s perfect.

But I’d have forgiven him just about anything, the minute I heard that he too thinks the government’s color-coded terror alert system is about as useful as a toboggan in Baghdad.

Even better, he said it on television, and on Fox News.

Fox’s call letters could be KGOP -- WGOP in the Beltway. It’s the official, gospel-truth fount of news for people who believe that sex education causes teen pregnancy, and that global warming is a myth ginned up to rob Americans of their God-given right to drive SUVs.

Cox is not your run-of-the-mill Republican. He’s the chairman of the House Select Committee on Homeland Security, and as such he swings a mighty bat. On Sunday, on television, he swung it at the five-color terror scale, and connected:

The present threat alert system, he said, may in fact be scaring “an awful lot of people who really can’t do much with this information other than hand-wring and hanky-twist.”

(Hanky-twisting, I love that. My grandmother used to do that as she watched basketball on TV.)

The terrorists, Cox declared, “are playing a losing game. But if by making idle threats that are always taken seriously by people who are just scared, we can impose enormous costs on the country and the terrorists can impose enormous costs on the country.”

He didn’t come right out and call the color system dopey, but I can read between the lines.

Last March, the Homeland Security people instituted the five-color scheme. They told us we’d know what to do by checking the color code du jour. Green, low risk of terrorist attack. Blue, general risk. Yellow, significant risk. Orange, high risk. Red, severe risk.

That’s it. America was left to figure out the rest on its own.

If you work for the government, the colors actually mean something. Going from yellow to orange, which happens to be the hue du jour, costs millions, because orange means more vigilance at the borders and airports, more cops posted hither and thither, more precautions at public events. (I’ll be watching for the FBI’s undercover float, “Duct Tape Dreams,” in the Tournament of Roses parade.)

But for the rest of us, the incidental millions of Americans, Comedy Central had more to say on the subject than did the Department of Homeland Security. The only red and green that we know how to react to are traffic lights, and the only orange that makes us sit up and take notice is on traffic cones.

The terror color chart is like a box of computer parts that comes without instructions -- here it is, congratulations on your new laptop, now you’re on your own.

This is Cox’s point: “Right now, the color-code level is a one-size-fits-all notion.... No matter how general the threat, we can be certain that the country is not threatened in a homogenized way everywhere, the same way at all times.”

Right again, Chris, my man. Why should Omaha have to go all squirrelly with angst when it’s Las Vegas in the cross-hairs? Why get Kankakee in a swivet if it’s Houston that the evildoers are gunning for?

And why only five colors? It was obvious from the get-go that five wouldn’t be nuanced enough, and false rumors soon swept Washington that a sixth color would be added between orange and red.

Me, I think it’s un-American to have only five colors. We have 31 flavors of ice cream, a dozen brands of fast food, 200 TV channels, God knows how many kinds of athletic shoes. Five colors is an insult to the American way. I did better just rummaging in my Crayola box, and mine isn’t even the big one with the built-in sharpener.

You want green? Here’s a spring green, olive green, sea green, blue green and yellow green. Blue alert? Would that be turquoise blue, midnight blue, sky blue, navy blue, cadet blue or violet blue? Yellow -- take your pick: maize, orange-yellow, yellow-orange, lemon yellow. You want orange, you can have bittersweet and red orange and burnt orange. And if you’ve got to go to red, there’s red violet and violet red, Indian red and brick red. And of course regular old fire-engine, high-octane, red-blooded American red.

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Last week, Secretary Tom Ridge told us he’s raising the alert level from yellow to orange. I ask again, what are we supposed to do about it?

I’m the last person to invite safety tips from a president who, as a governor, made it legal for Texans to pack a concealed weapon. But surely some terror-alert guidelines are in order, if only to offer comfort to the hand-wringers Chris Cox was worrying about. Something simple would be enough to start with:

Green alert: Go about your business, because the business of America is business.

Blue: Don’t check the Koran out of the library unless you want the FBI to come knocking.

Yellow: Report any unknown person with a beard, except Lincoln impersonators and Santa Claus.

Orange: Take your Kevlar umbrella to work.

Red: Get out those hankies and start twisting.

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Patt Morrison’s columns appear Mondays and Tuesdays. You can reach her by e-mail at patt.morrison@latimes.com. To read her previous columns, visit latimes.com/Morrison.