There is no experience to better show you just how stupid and untrustworthy the American government thinks you are then the experience of flying, and using airports. As many of you may remember, last week I flew out to Washington DC to attend a friend’s wedding. This journey reminded me of just how ridiculous airplane travel has been, and always will be. Forget about post 9/11 airline travel—I have been complaining loudly about airline travel for as long as I can remember! This is because I have always been a precocious complainer; meaning that I first learned to complain, when I evaluated the living conditions of my mother’s womb, decided I wasn’t free, and so I would kick her in an attempt to gain personal autonomy. After a nine-month war of attrition, I won.
I hate flying because I am a devotee of civil liberties, and I don’t think that there is a single more glaring example of fascism and totalitarianism than a trip to the airport. As a matter of fact, the only thing that comes close to the oppressive experience of flying is my own experience with high school. For example, in high school, you have to ask your teacher’s permission to go to the bathroom, and on a plane, if that damn seat belt sign is ‘illuminated’ a steward would rather see you pee yourself in front of 100 strangers than allow you to get up and use the bathroom. After all, if they let you do it, then they have to let everyone do it, and that sort of lenience could take away from their massive ego power trip. Personally, I think that bending the rules to let someone pee is a good way to prevent the sadistic act of watching a fellow human being writhe in pain as they try to defy physics and nature in an attempt to master their own sphincter muscle. For shame.
If walking on a plane fifteen minutes after take off was a genuine safety concern, then I wouldn’t mind this rule so much, but the fact of the matter is that stewards will regularly begin serving beverages to passengers long before the seat belt sign goes off after take off. It is therefore blatantly hypocritical for these people to parade around the plane using their carts as roadblocks, casually pouring drinks and chatting it up with passengers as some of us sit in pain, holding our legs together and waiting for that magical moment when you can get up and run to the toilet to relieve yourself—all the while risking life-altering bladder damage. Do stewards actually possess an amazing sense of equilibrium that I don’t, one that enables them to walk and pour drinks while I am forced to remain belted to my seat like a kid on a roller coaster in a state of uncertain and prolonged pain? The ego-driven power that some of the stewards will wield these days is mind blowing. It makes me want to bring apples on the plane for the crew members, in an effort to kiss their ass enough to get on their good side so that I might retain a civil liberty or two.
On a multi-leg trip, a short layover is akin to a recess break in school. After a dreadful, four to six hour virtual reality sardine simulation experience (airplane flight), you are allowed to get the hell out of the classroom, I mean plane, and are told to find a numbered gate in a lettered zone within twenty two minutes in a foreign world of bizarre blinking lights while strangers zigzag and run at you like it’s ‘Nam in ’68. And if you don’t make it in time, you have to stay later than you expected as a punishment. Long layovers are like detention, and trying to fly stand-by is like trying to write: “I will not be late” real fast so you can get out early; you’re basically trying to bribe your way onto a plane. In fact, the only difference between airports and schoolyards is that most playgrounds are composed of asphalt and sand, instead of thick, ugly, uncomfortable carpet.
On an airplane, if you are hungry, just like in high school, you can choose to eat a tiny portion of food that is so awful and unhealthy for you that I wouldn’t even wish it upon my own worst enemy (Which is currently the steward who yelled at me in front of an entire plane over the loudspeaker for attempting to get up and pee when the fasten seat belt sign was illuminated twenty minutes after takeoff.) I drink a lot of water, especially when I am flying, but that’s because airplanes dehydrate me, water is good for you, and if I ever crash in a desert and survive, that extra water and hydration will give me an edge for survival. In retrospect, instead of going back to my seat after my public shaming, I should have pissed on the stewardess, but I’d have probably gotten locked up for a while for doing that, and I don’t ever want to become the punch line to a Tonight Show joke.
Unlike Jay Leno, airline travelers do not have the right to free speech when traveling. I noticed several signs warning airport patrons that it is against the law to tell inappropriate jokes in the airport. So I wonder if George Carlin is allowed within fifty feet of an airport—I mean, have you ever heard the guy open his mouth and say anything appropriate? And just what is an appropriate airport joke, anyway? Could it be a joke about how stupid some passengers are, like the guy who tried for a solid minute to stick a seven-foot long bag into a six-foot long overhead locker? I wonder how this guy managed to stick himself in the right hole to procreate—and I wish he hadn’t figured it out, because his nine-year-old kid wouldn’t stop shaking his seat for the entire plane ride!
A different passenger on my last leg of the trip confronted me before I could slip into my comfy window seat, and threatened me with a four hour ride next to her two noisy, whiny children unless I switched with her for a middle seat in the emergency exit row. She assured me that I would prefer the extra legroom to her two awful children, neglecting to acknowledge the fact that I would suffer from a lack of elbowroom and my own window. Well, I agreed with her logic, and I made the switch; but I am still bitter about being verbally hard-balled in front of other passengers waiting to get to their seats, without even a simple ‘hello’; She could have asked me kindly! Some people have no manners.
Airport security has always been ridiculous, even before we figured out that we have to x-ray our shoes, belts, and jewelry in order to tell who is and is not a terrorist. I hate airport security because—well, let me be honest; I look like a freaking terrorist. I’m in my mid twenties, with unkempt hair and shaggy facial hair, and to top things off, I look vaguely Middle-Eastern, with my Russian-Spanish-Cuban-Italian hybrid (and no, that’s not the name of some car designed to save the environment, it’s my heritage). I also dress like a slob and don’t like making eye contact with strangers. Recently, in order to prevent extraneous searches and delays, I’ve learned to try to feign a friendly smile when approaching the security guards, but this only leads to me looking like I’m a terrorist who is trying to look like he is not a terrorist, which causes the airport screeners to search and embarrass me, for looking like I’m a terrorist who is trying not to look like a terrorist.
One cool thing I discovered on this last trip is that since airports ban lighters on flights now, an underground smoker’s movement has started up wherein you give your lighter to a passenger landing in your departure city as you enter the airport, and then when you land, you go outside and hope that a member of this underground movement will hand you their lighter as they prepare to go through security. I think this idea is akin to Bush’s “No Child Left Behind Act”, only you can replace child with smoker (Thanks for the tip, Dr. Chuck!). And I can’t come up with anything more sensible to explain why matches are still perfectly safe on flights, aside from a corporate fear that some overzealous music listener will hold their lighter in the air as a salute to a great guitar solo, like at a concert, and if there is a movie playing at the time, then the lighter could prevent someone from being able to see the latest Whoopi Goldberg flop (edited for content) on one of the few, miniscule 10” television screens conveniently placed twenty feet apart from one another.
I can’t stand the new ‘transit security instructional videos’ that play while you stand in line to wait and see if you are one of the lucky passengers who is going to have their personal possessions arbitrarily searched by security officials in front of a line of frustrated strangers. Do we really need an instructional video that shows us how to take off our own shoes and belts, and one that also explains to us what a metal detector detects, and what is and is not made out of metal? How stupid are we as a culture? Does our government really estimate that the average airport patron does not know to remove any and all metal from their person before walking through a giant machine that detects metal? And if any of my readers have ever “logged onto TSA.com for extra tips on airport security,” please let me know so that I can remove you from my subscription list, and then please bang your head against every object in your house to discover which ones are and are not made out of metal. No need to send me any results, contact Darwin.
On my trip I had the luxury of stopping each way with a layover at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, which I have always thought of as the Disneyland of the Midwest. This is because O’Hare has a ride similar to Disneyland’s Space Mountain, which is also known as the walkway between the B and C terminals. At O’Hare’s creepy future space warp ride, you get to stand on a moving walkway as bright neon lights flash, and ‘trippy’ futuristic elevator music plays haunting renditions of Mozart and Bach. It’s like “A Clockwork Orange” without the ultra-violence. And where else besides Disneyland and O’Hare do you get a chance to pay three times the price that an ordinary restaurant would charge you, for a portion one-third the normal size, and then eat it with plastic utensils?
The pilot on my first flight home was the chattiest pilot I’ve ever endured. This pilot used the loudspeaker at least fifteen times during a two-hour trip to inform us of such ‘amazing things’ like the fact that United Airlines is the first and only airline to allow its passengers to listen to the pilot to tower transmissions for the entire flight. He also informed us upon arrival that we had landed two minutes early, which is ‘another reason that United is the best airline to fly.’ I found this amusing, because I fly all the time, on many of the major airlines, and United is my least favorite airline. United has more black out dates for frequent fliers than any other airline I use, and moreover, their flights are chronically late, delayed, or cancelled because Chicago O’Hare is the United hub, and Chicago weather is awful, year round. Chicago O’Hare is repeatedly ranked second in the U.S. as the most flight-delayed airport in America, and it operates more flights per day than any other airport in the world. I once sat on a United plane on the tarmac at O’Hare for four hours, in the blistering August heat, with no A/C, and the whole time the fasten seat belt sign was on, and we were actually forbidden from getting up to use the restroom. I’m no Che Guevara, but by hour three of that debacle, I was plotting a mutinous overthrow of the fascist forces that were keeping us down—literally.
To be fair, there are a few things I like about airports and airline travel. Personally, I like the march of shame that us regular passengers make past first class travelers. I like that the airline seats them first, and then we all get to walk past them and see their smug expressions, or their meek appeal to us with lame smiles that insinuate “we’re ‘regular folks, just like you”, but we all know that they’ve paid more than us to receive a lot more leg room, better service, and to have their egos padded for the length of a flight. I like to walk past them holding up a big Karl Marx book, just to scare them into thinking that the next generation is going to overturn capitalism and take away their first class privilege and seven of their nine cars in order to fund socialized health care for the poor and needy. In all honesty, I loathe communism like I loathe fascist stewardesses, so, really, first-classers have nothing to worry about; I only like to put a little ripple in their first class experience because I am extremely jealous of their legroom and superfluous amenities.
But my favorite game to play at an airport is the one where I pick out whoever it is from my flight that seems to be in the biggest hurry to get to the baggage carousel, and then I race that person to the baggage carousel. A great part of this game is when my opponent realizes that I’m racing them, and then they get into it, so when they get on the moving walkway, I opt to remain on ‘real, not moving ground’ and then walk so fast and with such large strides that I actually beat them, even though they have a 3-4 mile per hour advantage over me. Not only does this game make for some pretty good exercise, but there’s nothing like beating someone to a baggage carousel only to watch them twitch with rage as they realize that they have raced real fast just in time to wait for half an hour for the bags to begin to arrive, and by the time the bags do come out, even the elderly passengers have made their way over. The best part of the game is if you are lucky enough to get your bag before your opponent gets theirs, because then you get to give them a big sarcastic grin, stroll outside to see if anyone has a lighter, and as you leave, it feels just like it did on the day of your high school graduation; like embracing freedom!