A compliment or a slur?

Don't know why. But it's required that I submit my passport to be checked by a Ryan Airlines flunky at least two hours before my flight from Sardinia to Beauvais in France. All she does is give a quick, two-second glance. Then stamps my boarding pass. Which I acquired on the Internet a week earlier. Maybe it's a precaution. To see if I look like an Arab. Or an alien bent on terror. Maybe I look harmless. Or maybe the passport check was merely to give the flunky something to do. Haven't gone through security yet. So I'll be checked again. Maybe more diligently. Or maybe not. Seems to me, it'd be easy to fake a passport. Make it look real. That is, if I really were a terrorist. Or maybe I'd be singled out for special attention if I looked like a handsome Arab. Instead of a handsome Slavic. A friend likened my looks to a handsome Boris Yeltsin. Don't think she's kidding. Other than for the handsome part. Gives me incentive to travel to Moscow some day. To amble down the streets near the Kremlin. To see if Russians do a double-take. And ask for my autograph. If so, I'll be obliging and sign, 'Your hero, Boris.' Might as well allow them to be fooled. But didn't Boris die a few years ago? Maybe the Russians didn't hear. Anyway, several decades ago, my associates at work posted a picture of the king of Sweden on the bulletin board, and scribbled that it was me. Incognito. Good gawd. Means I've gravitated. Aged. From looking like a handsome Swede monarch. To looking like a handsome dead Russian. Makes me wonder. Is that a compliment or a slur? --Jim Broede