Fear of Flying

So I'm standing in line at the airport. What airport? Doesn't matter. The lines are ubiquitous. Instead of being called flying, it should be called waiting around. You stand in line to check in. You stand in line to clear security. You stand in line to get a sandwich or a $3 bottle of water. You stand in line to process through immigration. You stand in line to collect your baggage, which always seems to take a lot longer to get to the baggage area than you do, even though it's moving on a rolling cart and you waited at the back of the plane for the incredibly slow line to disembark. And then you stand in line to go through customs.

Once upon a time airports were relatively comfortable places. Your loved ones walked you to the gate. Theirs were the first faces you saw when you got off the plane. If you arrived too early for your flight, you could have a leisurely meal and a glass of something refreshing in relative peace—without standing in line.

In those days, sufficient legroom didn't require you to fly first class. It was taken for granted that human beings need to move their legs around a bit to keep from getting a blood clot. When the individual in the seat ahead of you reclined, you weren't able to determine how recently he'd washed his hair.

Airlines then served food and beverages, even on short flights. I recall once flying from SFO to LAX, with the flight attendants scrambling to get us peanuts and soft drinks before landing. Flight attendants looked happy. Probably they weren't, but they looked it. Everyone wanted to help you. Information was readily available. You could check your luggage for free, and if the airline lost your luggage, they did what they could to remedy this egregious mistake. Now, I understand, even should they lose your luggage, the airline will keep what it charges you to ship it. It was, after all, shipped. It's just that nobody knows quite where it was shipped to.

Not too long ago, on an Air France flight, a flight attendant demanded that I lower the shade on my window. Why? She didn't say but the look she gave me told me quite a bit about her mood. I looked around. There were no television screens and anyway no light coming through my window at that altitude, nothing to conceivably interfere with whatever anyone else was doing. When I refused to comply, she reached over me and slammed the shade down. I lifted it and she slammed it down again. Had she been American, I probably would've been arrested when we landed. Being French, confronted with a rude American, she merely confined herself to the game of you lift it, I push it down. With my knees under my chin on a cross-Atlantic flight, I felt little compunction to act like an adult and call off the game.

Flying, in other words, has driven all of us to extreme rudeness. So I'm wondering—while I'm standing in an endless line, watching people remove their coats, their sweaters, their shoes—watching them step onto the dirty floor in socks or bare feet—watching them place their belongings in plastic bins as their wallets and laptops and iPhones disappear into a curtained box (anyone thinking of Houdini?)—I'm wondering about the freeway.

On the freeway, if you cut someone off or if you merely drive a bit more slowly than someone behind you wants you to drive (even if you're in the slow lane), you risk being the target of anything from a game of cat-and-mouse to bullets. You might only receive a middle finger salute, but chances are you will not escape unscathed. If to err is human and to forgive divine, we have moved far beyond any hope of divinity. In fact, unless owning a gun in order to increase our opportunities to kill another human being can be considered a form of forgiveness, I suspect we're pretty much doomed. (And now a couple of states are seeking to make it legal to carry guns into schools. Hmmm. The family that preys together stays together?)

But back to the airport: We're all standing in line for hours. Our feet and backs ache. Maybe we brought too many suitcases and we're trying to jockey them one-handed while fishing for our passports and boarding passes. Smiles are rare as four-leaf clovers. It occurs to us, looking at the cattle guards that keep us from sprawling beyond the control of our masters, we have been reduced in some ill-defined way by this experience. We have lost something we might never recover, and I'm not referring to the items broken or snatched from our checked luggage by sticky-fingered "security" personnel.

Yet we don't protest. Last week I included a link to a video of a six-year-old child being mauled by airport security while she wept. We don't protest. On the freeway, we do. Some scream obscenities (on a half-hour stroll through downtown last summer, I overheard seven instances of violently loud, driver-issued profanities), and some whip out a gun or their fists. So why don't we resist the indecent treatment we receive at the airport?

The classic definition of a bully is someone who picks on those who can't or won't fight back. In selecting our targets on the roadways, we become have bullies:

...road death and injury rates are the result, to a considerable extent, of the expression of aggressive behavior ...those societies with the greatest amount of violence and aggression in their structure will show this by externalizing some of this violence in the form of dangerous and aggressive driving...

http://www.aaafoundation.org/resources/index.cfm?button=agdrtext#Road%20Rage

What creates a bully? A person who is abused (as we are at the airport) but who has no means of defending against that abuse (as we perceive ourselves at the airport)? After all, we're warned not to even make a joke in line or we could be carted off to the pen. Given current treatment of federal prisoners suspected of messing with the USA, we figure we might wind up in a condition well known in many Latin American dictatorships of the past: disappeared.

Better to take out our resentment on some little old lady poking down 101 in her Buick.

The Decline and Fall of Democracy

Why aren't we angry?

Take the case of the six-year-old child, probed in every nook and cranny of her tiny body by airport security. The child, dressed in tight jeans and a tight t-shirt, an outfit that couldn't, in the words of one hyperactive enraged commentator (grit your teeth if you bother to listen to him), have hidden a toothpick on her person, was nevertheless subjected (against her tearful protests) to a body search more invasive than any I've ever undergone. Here's the video: http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/555218/insane%3A_six-year-old_girl_gets_invasive_groping_by_tsa_%5Bwith_video%5D/

Where, asks the over-to-top commentator, is our outrage? Where indeed? Passengers, presumably witnessing this molestation of a small child, stand like sheep, chewing cuds and awaiting their turn at the gate. Nothing, it seems, is too heinous to submit to (except possibly a man having his "junk" touched) in the name of security, nothing too disturbing to witness. Early in the 9/11 hysteria, a man protested the groping of his pregnant wife. The outraged husband was handcuffed and carted off to the pokey, in full view of passengers impatient over having to endure this annoying delay:

When [his own] inspection ended, according to Monahan, he retrieved the couple's luggage from the X-ray machine and returned to find his wife sitting in a chair, crying.

"I'm sorry ... it's ... they touched my breasts ... and..." Mary Monahan told her husband in between sobs. She also later informed him the employee had asked that she lift up her shirt in front of the passengers standing in line.

"I felt like a clown ... on display for all these people, with the cotton panel on my pants and my stomach sticking out."

Airport screeners 'touch' pregnant woman's breasts http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=16404#ixzz1JJPW6OUv

Land of the Free and Home of the Brave, eh?

Well, here's what's happening: A man came around taking names. He didn't come for me, so I said nothing. The laugh's on meek American travelers. That man is coming for all of us, has been coming for us since the beginning, picking our pockets and dismantling our Constitution and our support systems for years.

Last week President Obama gave away most of what remained of the store in a budget compromise that never had to be made, contrary to all the propaganda shoved down our throats by politicians and the media. Worse than giving away the store, the President touted the giveaway as a success story! Promise them anything, but give them the shaft. Paul Krugman believes Obama negotiates first with himself, then, having made a large number of concessions, he sets out to negotiate with the Republicans. Oddly enough, the Republicans have figured this out. http://readersupportednews.org/off-site-opinion-section/72-72/5586-the-president-is-missing

Having ridden the coattails of brave freedom fighters to achieve the highest office, Obama refuses to defend a single right, freedom, or liberty—pardon me, he does defend the right of the rich to exploit the rest of us and our environment. I didn't vote for him. I didn't believe he'd be a good president—not that I believed anyone else running would be a good president either. But nevertheless I felt proud that our nation would at last elect an African American president. And I imagined that, while he would be ineffectual in a system that's rigged against decency, he would be earnest and principled. Kind of like Jimmy Carter. Out of his league.

Oh, but he's not out of his league, not by a long shot. I find myself astonished at how low he happily sinks, how lovingly he nuzzles in the pockets of corporate America.

Slashes left, slashes right, slashes everywhere but the military (to protect the wealthy) and to tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy elite. Those are the tax breaks, incidentally, that would save our budget, our programs, our schools, and our nation's greatness.

But, instead: Our great public universities are being decimated. The pitiful remaining public health services, which Obama promised us would improve, in fact are being hacked to nothingness. Soon we'll be in Charles Dickens' land, with beggars blinding their children to make them more successful panhandlers. Our national intelligence quotient, already miniscule thanks to Fox News, prime time TV crap, over-crowded, under-funded public schools, and the general dumbing down of everything from political speech to market-speak, will fall far below measurable. Eventually, as publishing houses become things of the past, except for the ones that put out audio books, no one but the elites will know how to read. We will return to the Dark Ages, when priests controlled the Word of God and the rest of us had to swallow their swill without a peep of protest.

In Britain and in France—not to mention the Middle East—ordinary folk have taken to the streets, in many cases risking their lives. They are flinging their disgust at the highway robbery that is government and declaring their commitment to wage war on the biggest criminals. Meanwhile, Americans in large part doze on.

What accounts for our silence? We fracture our ulnas, giving ourselves continual pats on the back for our specialness. We resist nothing but taxes. We have become special only in our arrogance. In part, we can blame the self-esteem movement that encouraged parents in the 70s and 80s to make their children feel good about themselves, even when their children did no work to earn self-satisfaction. That encouraged a disconnect between what we do and what we imagine we can do:

Students in Asia, for example, excelled on the . . . Third International Math and Science Study. But students surveyed as part of that comparison showed that their opinion of their own skills was relatively low. American students, by contrast, think highly of their skills but perform poorly. http://www.des.emory.edu/mfp/302/302losingfaith.PDF

We're great at telling ourselves lies and even more talented at believing them.

Who Our Leaders Follow

Is the perfect truly the enemy of the good? Pardon me if I don't feel inclined to bow down before this mind-squashing bit of sophistry. First of all, I take issue with that loaded word, "perfect." Its employment here targets all opposition by casting it per se as unreasonable. If you don't accede to a given compromise, you are holding out for some outrageous fantasy, beyond anything potentially achievable.

Is it hewing to perfection to critique a particular compromise as not a compromise but a capitulation? Apparently. Today's press brings news of a pending government shutdown. President Obama whines that, having done the Republicans' bidding in protecting massive tax breaks (GE paid $0 in taxes last year), having taken an axe to programs that serve all Americans, having in fact compromised for what he and they see as "the good," Speaker of the House John Boehner comes back, demanding more cuts. Well, doh! It's been shown that the President and Democratic lawmakers either lack gristle from neck to hindquarters, or they're simply lackeys for the handful of Americans who will benefit from these measures. Hell, I'd come back for more too. And you know what? The Republicans will get it all, every last greedy measure they seek to stave off raids on their treasure--oops, I mean, Treasury, of course,

Wisconsin public workers bailed on an agreement that not only cut wages and hiked up their healthcare costs but slashed their right to collective bargaining. The workers had agreed to substantial pay cuts and reduced contributions from government to their overpriced health insurance, but balked at giving up the right to have a say in their own working conditions. Having that say was fought and died for a hundred years ago by workers who understood perfectly what happened when a wage slave looked to his or her boss for fair treatment. Wisconsin public servants found themselves slandered as "greedy", even by some union workers who had succumbed to propaganda from Fox News. The New York Times ran a front-page bit of hackery, declaring, on the basis of a couple of interviews with unionized workers, that civil servants had no support at all from those who ought to root for their victory. Meanwhile, tax breaks for the rich and corporate America continue to suck the country dry while the average US citizen turns her attention to terrorist threats, immigrants stealing all the best jobs, welfare bums, and overpaid public employees.

Former Senator Alan Simpson blasts the elderly as American's "greediest generation". http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/11/26/deficit-commission-chair-seniors-greediest-generation/ This comes from a man who spent most of his working life on the public dole, receiving excellent healthcare benefits and a tidy income representing the interests of wealthy Americans. Perhaps he'd like to see older Americans hoisted onto one of those disappearing ice floes, drifting out to sea rather than sucking up more of his tax dollars. In fact, many of those who want to eradicate Medicare and throw out “Obamacare” (meaning government subsidies to the insurance industry, which really really needs them) don’t object to feeding at the public trough when it comes to their own needs:

Supporters of the Affordable Care Act that Congress passed earlier this year are criticizing U.S. Rep.-elect Andy Harris as a hypocrite for asking why there was a delay in his government-funded health insurance coverage for him and his family when he campaigned on rolling back the legislation.

Politico reported on Nov. 15 reported that, during an orientation meeting for newly-elected representatives and staff members, Harris asked why he had to wait almost a month for health insurance coverage to begin for himself and his family after he is sworn in.

http://www.gazette.net/stories/11192010/polinew203927_32538.php

The compromise well-heeled Americans want to see goes like this: Poorer Americans give up Social Security, all public services, healthcare, good roads, public schools that aren't cesspools, and any protection of their environment. In exchange, the rich get to hold onto their taxes. Otherwise, poorer Americans are blasted as avaricious pursuers of "the perfect", thumbing their noses at the country's greater good.

How is it that American voters fall meekly for this twisted drivel? Why don't the majority of citizens see that ads for so-called "wealth management," drizzled across billboards throughout the land, ought really to advertise "poverty management"? Only 400 American families require wealth management. The rest of us house, feed, and medicate ourselves to a greater or lesser extent at the mercy of those 400 clans.

Back to the so-called perfect. Substantive changes have always been achieved through the rigidity of those characterized as completely unreasonable. And contrary to the brainwashing touted as "American history class", none of those gains originated with our lawmakers. Social Security was the compromise made with a restive working class, energized by the Wobblies (IWW). To the extent that any oversight of collegiate sports exists today, that was wrought largely through the fanaticism of a man who never met a compromise he liked: Harry Edwards. In the 1960s, civil rights workers risking their lives--to end racial discrimination as well as state terror that kept black voters away from the polls--heard nothing but "be patient" from the nation's leadership. Even the revered Abraham Lincoln dragged his feet on issuing the Emancipation Proclamation so that William Seward observed on its passage that it had been a fact since the first gun fired at Fort Sumter, one the Administration was the very last to hear. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/magazine/mag-03CivilWar-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&sq=Butler%20runaway%20slaves&st=cse&scp=1

Our leaders have always been wet fingers in the wind, following wherever the strongest forces will lead them. Right now, apart from the fascistic right, the people are all but silent.

As the song goes, "When will they ever learn?"