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Airports
I don't think there has ever been a nastier, uglier, more life-denying environment anywhere on the face of the earth than the interior of a modern airport terminal.
I imagine that hell, if it exists, must be similar; it is a place without comfort or grace, sans mercy, sympathy or empathy. The recorded voice, cold and flat, informing you that if you leave your luggage alone for some unspecified length of time it may be crushed, incinerated or blasted into atoms in the name of "Security."
The long lines of damned souls shuffling along in their stocking feet, fumbling with laptops, jackets, shoes and boarding passes: more victims of America's chimerical pursuit of the walking death of life without risk: the world as Gated Community.
(The "security" here is a complete fraud, of course; it's really all about conditioning us to accept the arbitrary violation of our most basic rights for no reason at all. Behold the 99 year-old Unitarian minister's widow being frogmarched away for further interrogation because someone glimpsed a copy of Bishop Tutu's autobiography in her carry-on bag; give witness to the tow-headed toddler wailing piteously as his priceless pink sippy-cup is snatched from his chubby little fingers by a fat reeking red-faced man whose lineaments last relaxed into a grotesque mockery of a smile the night that Giuliani shouted "Drill Baby Drill" to an assemblage of knuckle-walking nonagenarians and reincarnated Gauleiters back in 2008: what if his sippy-cup contained the key ingredient to the latest explosive decoction dreamed up in the Caves of South Waziristan?
"Security" can cover a multitude of corporate sins. Ask an airline ticket agent why your connecting flight has inexplicably been cancelled, or how come you are going to be stranded for at least 24 hours through no fault of your own and yet you have to find your own lodging for the night and pay for it yourself, along with food, and transportation from the airport to Hotel Dogdander and back; but when you do, be sure and be polite, don't raise voice, and eschew any hint of impatience, blame or indignation. Remember, passengers guilty of far less have been hauled away to secret cells far beneath the North-South Runway, to be greeted by burly gentlemen and gentlewomen smiling as they dip their surgical-gloved forefingers into Vaseline jars; stenciled across the front of their white hazmat suits are the words, "In The War Against Terror, Never Ask Why."
And always remember, you are one of the fortunate ones. How about that big family of rural blue-collar folks who, thanks to the perfidy of the airlines and the incompetence of the FAA, airport authorities, et al, have been stranded here for six days by a succession of slush storms, "equipment shortages" and flight crews carrying out a work slowdown to protest pay cuts and a retirement fund plundered to reward corrupt, lazy executives with Golden Parachutes, missing a long-awaited Thanksgiving family reunion back in West Virginia? Thanksgiving has come and gone, their credit cards have bottomed out, and for the last 72 hours or more they've been depending on the kindness of strangers, living in exquisite agony on granola bars, canned soda and fruit jerky; now all they want is to get back home to Bakersfield, but the airline representatives keep telling them, in highfalutin Drop Dead tones, "You know, you're not the only ones ?inconvenienced' by the weather this holiday season." They may be able to get on a flight tomorrow night to Salt Lake City, even though there are dozens of people ahead of them on the standby list; and if that happens, after eight hours in SLC another flight will take them to Phoenix, where they'll need even more luck to catch their flight on to Davis, Calif.; as their layover in Phoenix is 19 minutes. And the Phoenix to Davis flight plan looks like it was designed by John Clease with an assist from Tom ?O Bedlam: first it zigs down to El Paso, and then it zags back up to Colorado Springs, before finally wending its weary way westward, to Tahoe, Sacramento, and a last 20-minute hop down to Davis.
" Davis??? We don't live in Davis, we live in Bakersfield!!" exclaims Layla, the six-foot-tall sexy stepdaughter in the "Plays Poorly With Others" sleeveless T, skinny black jeans and rhinestone high-tops.
"Well, ma'am, we don't fly into Bakersfield any more; they should have told you before they sold you the tickets. The only carrier that still serves Bakersfield is SoCal Sunshine Air, but we don't honor their tickets and they don't honor ours. You could all buy one-way tickets from Sacramento to Bakersfield on Sunshine," fingers clicking away like Gatling guns on her keyboard, "but since you'd be booking less than a week in advance, your tickets would cost one thousand and eighty dollars . . . of course, the under sixes in your party would be half-price."
"But that's crazy!" exclaims Cody, Layla's younger sister by a year, an almost perfect Xerox copy of her sibling except for the spiky ruby red-dyed hair she's trying out "for the holidays" and the tattoo, "Marry Me Johnny Depp" in baroque letters on her right bicep.
"Look, ma'am, I'm REALLY sorry, but I didn't create the universe. That pays a lot more than six fifty an hour, and I sure as hell don't get to rest every seven days."
And even these poor folks can Praise Jesus that there are souls even worse off than they are, much, much worse. Imagine that you and your sprawling extended family, 90-year-old men with faces like eroded anticlines, and the odd stainless steel tooth here and there, clicking their prayer beads, eyes fixed on something far, far away; lovely young widows in dark shawls with deep dark eyes, whispering secret thoughts to each other, their 11-year-olds watching over their six year olds, who are watching the one and two year olds, and bitter-looking gaunt young men in cheap leather jackets and crudely cut jeans, scanning the room with suspicious darting eyes . . . None of them have a home to return to, home is dead and the past is lost forever, and the present and future are snap-frozen eternally in this spiritless place.
"Refugees In Orbit," the world of laws and officialdom calls them unwanted people from extinguished nations and stillborn states, trampolining on thin air from one international transit lounge to another, from one holding camp to the next, prey to Snakehead Gangs, Coyotes, Chechen and Albanian mobsters.
Years go by, tears go by, dreams die , thousands, hundreds of thousands of people come and go, free as birds; . . . airports are launching pads, points of embarkation, for the rare few, maybe, but for all the others just another new kind of Dream Catcher, Venus Flytrap, Circean songstress, agents of the world's Netzestadts. "Did you really think you were traveling to someplace new and different?" asked the Lord of the Flies, and quickly added, "That's a rhetorical question, you don't have to answer." If our era has a temple, a cathedral, a presiding monument, it must be the airport: a monolith full of the illusion of glamour, the exotic, of infinite possibilities, of rebirth, of the reinvention of one's self; but when you take a good hard look at it, you see drab walls and weary rooflines, built on the cheap, and inside a trove of the worst kind of glittering trash, $2,199 "Diver's Chronographs" for corporate drones who don't dive, "Commemorative" bottles of Olde Goniff "Maker's Mark" Blended Scotch in a "Collector's Edition" "Hand-Blown" Bottle based on Michelangelo's Pieta for $999 a pop . . . shades of the post-industrial Era, no place to go and all the time in the world to get there, hopping from McAirport to Mc Airport, flying faster, faster, faster than the speed of love, desperately trying to outrun the sadness of our own perjured dreams . . .
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