I hate the idea. As I have said before, when you have >500,000 frequent flyer miles, the idea of getting on a sheet metal tube awash with jet fuel holds no romance for me. Yet when I hear the so-called horror stories about the TSA, the best that I can come up with a mildly indignant coupled with a comedy.
You see, I never saw air travel as anything but a big business affectation. As a rich and spoiled society, we started seeing it as a God-given right to jet off anywhere (usually on a credit card) and be the ugly bourgeois boors for the rest of the world to abhor.
It has gotten downright funny lately. The planes are huge, but the seats are vanishingly small. There is way too good a chance that you will be stuck in a tiny aluminum seat next to a big fat fucker such as your truly. The stewardess are either snippy gay males or bitter old harridans.
When you get to the airport, you were once treated as an inconvenience. Now you are treated as a potentially dangerous inconvenience. When you get off, you sprint to get out of the airport as quickly as possible.
And all of this is done for what reason? Business trips are nearly universally unnecessary. There is little or nothing that cannot be as well done with phone calls, faxes, or internet. Vacations are an exercise in dick-matching with the neighbors. Going somewhere to be in a place other than where you live to show off and forget for a little while how badly your life sucks where you are. Maybe if we stop gadding about on airplanes flitting to the far side on nowhere, we will spend a little more effort making the place we live better.
So when the TSA feels up some titties or mishandles the odd set of testicles, I say go for it boyos. The more folks that you convince to stay home, the better for me
I would cheerfully accept a world where the total flights available were 10% of the current total. We would have less noise, less carbon dioxide injected in the stratosphere, and less net stupidity. I would be able to see a blue sky again and lie on my back on a clear, bright-blue summer afternoon and watch stardust descend on the world.
2 comments:
Ralph Waldo Emerson, from Conduct of Life, Part 4: Culture. "I am not much an advocate for travelling, and I observe that men run away to other countries, because they are not good in their own, and run back to their own, because they pass for nothing in the new places. For the most part, only the light characters travel. Who are you that have no task to keep you at home? [. . .] He that does not fill a place at home, cannot abroad. He only goes there to hide his insignificance in a larger crowd. You do not think you will find anything there which you have not seen at home? The stuff of all countries is just the same. Do you suppose, there is any country where they do not scald milkpans, and swaddle the infants, and burn the brushwood, and broil the fish? What is true anywhere is true everywhere. And let him go where he will, he can only find so much beauty or worth as he carries."
The sad fact is that most people are not discouraged by being irradiated and/ or molested. Have at it sez I. My last flight was in 1995, and I swore then to never fly again. To the airlines and TSA, I offer this ancient (tongue in cheek) Arab curse: May the fleas of a thousand camels infest your crotch! Heh heh heh...
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