Parallelism between past perfect and present continuous

Question

In the following sentence:

Anyone who has stumbled glumly through a British airport recently, trapped in endless queues, will already know the stench of bogus security hanging heavy in the air. I always knew at some subliminal level that even as my nail scissors were being seized by a censorious official,some monstrous breach the size of the Channel was blithely disregarded elsewhere.

The part which is bold seems incorrect to me. I think it should be "was being blithely".

Although if "while" was used as in, "while some monstrous breach the size of the Channel was blithely disregarded elsewhere", it would have been correct.

How should one ensure parallelism between something which is happening now and something in past which still happens?

Answer 1

I find it helps to strip the sentence down when looking at the grammar.

As my nail scissors were being seized, some breach was disregarded.
As my nail scissors were being seized, some breach was being disregarded.

I believe either of those is technically correct. Either the breach was in the process of being disregarded or had been disregarded at the moment of the seizure. I would choose "was disregarded" simply because disregarding something tends to happen in an instant while seizing some innocent person's toiletries tends to take a few moments.

However, I could see using the second sentence to emphasize the "at exactly the same time" part of the writer's thought with the parallel construction. As it is written though, I think the writer was emphasizing the unfairness rather than the timing of the events.