It

You can find it on ebay, whatever it is, but if you accidentally leave it in the bus station, or drop it in an alley, or God forbid, deliberately put it where people can see it, jumpy citizens and humorless bureaucrats will find it, fear it and over-react to it. Emergency personnel will be called in to examine it, evacuate the area around it, cordon it off, and eventually blow it up. Cities will grind to a halt around it, no matter how mundane or benign it might be. Authorities will assume that it is an infernal machine and will spare no expense to try to protect us from it.

Even if it is determined to be completely harmless, highly trained ordnance disposal teams will bring their most sophisticated equipment to deal with it, to detonate it in place or remove it to a specialized facility where half a pound of C4 will ease our minds about it. See? It did explode!

If in the final evaluation it is determined to have been part of a guerrilla marketing campaign or at worst a prank, the it will really hit the fan. Ashen faced politicians will declare that it was part of a malicious hoax and that someone must be held accountable for it. They'll enlist an army of scowling bean-counters to tally up the costs of dispatching police, fire and bomb disposal teams. They'll factor in everything from overtime, to the cost of the protective booties worn by their bomb-sniffing dogs. Then they'll tally up more esoteric costs of wages lost to people sitting in traffic, to the number of unsold lattes at Starbucks, to the amount of life savings idle day traders were not able to bilk from their clients. Fingers will be pointed. Patsies will be identified. Arrests will be made and restitution will be demanded.

But while we are prosecuting street artists and teenagers to the full extent of our idiocy, who's out looking for the real terrorists? And if we see the hand of Osama Bin Laden in every blinking cartoon character or forgotten umbrella aren't we helping the terrorists win? Our own unfounded paranoia is Al Qeda's greatest asset.

Our leaders just don't get it.