LAXmas wishes

ISN’T THIS thoughtful? Holiday gifts from the last place I want to spend Christmas, and the last people I want to spend Christmas with: the folks who run the nation’s airports.

The Transportation Security Administration, whose Santa’s helpers look you over and sometimes pat you down before they let you get on a plane, is welcoming the festive season at the nation’s airports with the gift of hardware. As of today, you can once again carry your scissors, screwdrivers, wrenches and pliers (of a certain size) onto the flight with you. Once more, you can while away the time between here and Cleveland with a little casual metalworking.

Then there’s San Jose International Airport’s gift to the world: a fast pass for “registered travelers� so they can swan through private security screening while keeping their coats and shoes on and their dignity inviolate -- for the low, low price of $79.95 a year and a prior background check.

Meantime, from venerable, vulnerable old LAX comes the gift of ... deja vu. Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is starting the airport makeover anew, after dumping his predecessor’s $11-billion plan.

Gone is the proposed remote check-in center, a traveler’s version of the old Chicago stockyards where arriving passengers could have waited to be ferried to their gates or slaughtered by terrorists, whichever happened first. (The Rand Corp. said we might just as well have painted a big fat bull’s-eye on the roof.) City officials are keeping the part about rebuilding the antiquated and inadequate south runway -- they may even start working on it by Valentine’s Day.

So, here’s your air-travel gift summary: (1) Small pointy things OK again; (2) a security bypass for the well-to-do, if you happen to leave from San Jose; and (3) no LAX passenger check-in center in another time zone.

(A better Christmas gift would be banning the guy with a backpack the size of a VW Beetle who whacks everyone in the kisser with it as he shuffles down the aisle looking for his seat. It will never happen, but a girl can dream, can’t she?)

For LAX Christmases yet to come, I wish for the same thing our city officials do: revamping of the sad sack place altogether. Maybe they could remedy the troubling symbolism of the sunshiny upper departure level and the ninth-circle-of-hell perpetual gloom of the lower “Welcome to L.A.� arrival level.

As for inside the terminals, it’s as if we bought the gulag and moved it here. The despairing trudge through long, echoing concourses, the stores offering a thin, dreary selection of not much of anything, just like shopping in the old Soviet Union. The best that can be said of most of the restaurants is that they steel you for what will soon be placed on the tray table in front of you.

Still, I do get sentimental about old LAX. This is where Mayor Tom Bradley came back from a trip abroad to find that his limo had been towed. This is where Bill Clinton got his $200 haircut, where O.J. dumped the murder weapon en route to Chicago -- according to a novel. This is where the firebrand congressman, B-1 Bob Dornan, was kicked off a plane to the applause of fellow passengers, after he refused to put his seat back in its full upright and locked position because his hip hurt. I get misty just thinking about it.

And even as it is, LAX is not without compensations. It’ll get hit by a meteorite before it gets snowed in. The Theme Building looks fabulous, even if you can’t figure out how to get to it. And one online critic, after spending more than two hours looking for an arriving friend, found a silver lining too: “I seen WWF wrestler HHH waiting for a plane. So all that running around wasn’t all in naught. I seen a celeb.�

I think he’s on to something. Let’s budget that into Villaraigosa’s new plan: Pay out-of-work B-list celebs to hang out at LAX, just to give the folks a thrill so they won’t start thinking, “Maybe I should have gone to Burbank.�