SundayReview | Op-Ed Columnist
Just Plane Ugly
THE
woman in 27E doesn’t have only one carry-on plus a small bag for a
laptop or personal items. She has one carry-on plus a purse the size of a
bassinet plus some canvas vessel for all of her electronics plus two
different plastic totes for various pillows, blankets and possibly an
ottoman and a coffee table. Shuffling down the aisle, she looks more
like a Peruvian llama than anything human. She grunts and buckles.
She
must have heard the announcement that the flight was full and the plea
that everyone not bring too much aboard, because those words blared
every 45 seconds. But there’s no selective hearing loss like that of the
airline passenger. She reaches her row, predictably discovers that
there’s insufficient space under the seat in front of hers and proceeds
to colonize the space under the seat in front of yours. You arrive to
find that what little legroom you’d counted on is gone. She pretends not
to see that you’re glaring at her.
A
tiff has erupted in Row 18. The man in Seat C has used the overhead for
his jacket, which is lovingly folded there, and is protesting any and
all attempts to move it. He has miles. He has status. That’s why he was
invited to board the aircraft earlier than almost everybody else, and
he’s hellbent on milking that privilege for all that it’s worth.
I’m not describing a flight that I just took. Among my Thanksgiving
blessings was an avoidance of the unfriendly skies. I’m describing
every other flight that I’ve taken over the last year. I’m describing a
flight that many Americans surely suffered through this weekend.
And
I’m doing it not simply to rue the horrors of air travel these days,
which have been rued aplenty. I’m doing it because there are few better
showcases of Americans’ worst impulses, circa 2014, than a 757 bound
from New York to Los Angeles or from Sacramento to St. Louis. It’s a
mile-high mirror of our talent for pettiness, our tendency toward
selfishness, our disconnection from one another and our increasing
demarcation of castes. It’s a microcosm at 30,000 to 45,000 feet.
Most
of the passengers start out in a bad mood, because there’s no good way
to get to the airport. The thrifty, efficient rail links that exist in
many Asian and European cities remain uncommon in the United States, a
reflection of our arrogant and damnable inattention to infrastructure.
Even in recent years, during an economic downturn that cried out for the
kinds of big projects that create jobs, we made only meager
investments. Our airports and the roads and nonexistent tracks around
them show it.
“Our infrastructure is on life support right now,” Ray LaHood, the former transportation secretary, told Steve Kroft in a segment of “60 Minutes” from one week ago. It was titled, fittingly, “Falling Apart.”
Kroft
noted that there was “still no consensus on how to solve the problem,”
which had grown more severe because of “political paralysis in
Washington.”
One
of the impediments to consensus is manifest on a plane: There’s little
sense of a common good, no rules that everybody follows so that nobody
gets a raw deal. Instead there’s an ethic of every passenger for himself
or herself. The existence of, and market for, the Knee Defender, that
device that prohibits the person in front of you from reclining, says it
all.
On
second thought, no, this does: Immediately following news coverage of a
flight that had to be diverted when two passengers scuffled over a Knee
Defender’s use, sales of the device reportedly increased.
Courtesy
is dead. The plane is its graveyard. There’s a scrum at the gate and
then another scrum in the aisle that defy any of the airline’s attempts
at an orderly boarding process. There’s no restraint in the person who
keeps smacking the back of your chair; no apology from the parent whose
child keeps kicking it; no awareness that certain foods, unwrapped in a
tight space, turn one traveler’s lunch into every traveler’s olfactory
reality.
And
nobody really communicates. Conversation between strangers becomes
rarer as gadgets get better, enabling everyone to hunker down with his
or her own music and own movies and own video games, to shrink the world
to the dimensions of a smartphone’s or tablet’s screen, to disappear
into a personalized bubble of ceaseless entertainment and scant
enlightenment.
ON
the plane, as in the economy, most people are feeling squeezed.
Financially, every flight is a death by a dozen cuts. There’s the
baggage fee, the meal fee, the wireless fee. All the base price gets you
is a perch that’s tighter than ever and getting tighter still. In The
Daily Beast two days before Thanksgiving, Clive Irving described
airlines’ sophisticated, inch-by-inch stratagems to “engineer you out
of room,” and they sounded like experiments in orthopedic torture. What
the rack was to medieval times, Seat 39B is to modern ones.
But Seat 2A? That’s a different story. A different world.
The gap between first class and everyone else is writ vivid on a plane,
and crossing from one side of the divide to the other seems to be
growing more difficult. Frequent-flier programs are being tweaked to
reward dollars spent on tickets instead of miles flown, and to give more
bonus miles to people who are already at a high status than to people who aspire to be.
“United Continental’s Miles Program to Penalize Average Fliers,” said a headline in The Wall Street Journal earlier this year. The article went on to explain that the airline was “becoming the latest carrier to shift its loyalty program to favor bigger spenders.”
A recent story
in The Journal explored this further, noted that Delta was making
similar adjustments, and explained, “People who fly on expensive
business-class and first-class tickets and have top-tier status in
frequent-flier programs will see their accounts flooded with miles.”
In
the clouds as on land, the rich get richer, social mobility wanes and
people are funneled ever more ruthlessly into gradations of privilege:
those in sections with names like “economy comfort”; those eligible for
the exit row; those who get to board in the first, second or third
waves; those consigned to later stages and middle seats.
Some
blot out all of this sorting with Candy Crush. Some seethe. Too many of
us lose sight of more than the earth. We forget that simply being up in
the air is an experience that others seldom if ever get. If there’s one
thing in even shorter supply than legroom, it’s empathy.
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