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The Cynical Traveler Posting Date: Dec 2 2007 1:52AM I’m writing this as my flight from Toronto to Washington prepares to take off. As the pre-departure safety video plays, it occurs to me that if you are not already familiar with the workings of a seatbelt, you might not be qualified for the challenges of air travel. Surely, if we can use airport security to ferret out every bad ass dude with a bottle of mouthwash in his carry-on, we can screen for seatbelt experience as well.
My prejudice against the buckle-illiterate aside, the best thing about air travel is the variety of people you can observe, simply for the price of a ticket. Airplanes, you see, are society’s version of the core sample – long and tubular and carrying a little bit of everything – and the experience of flying is like a laboratory experiment that puts we traveling mice into a maze to chase cheese, or at least an escape from the airport without a body cavity search, which is a pretty low bar for satisfaction, if you ask me.
Travel, you see, is all about lowering expectations. Every agency and corporation in the travel business strives to attain the most modest of goals. Many travelers, me included, have succumbed to the conspiracy and now take pride in accomplishments like walking through metal detectors without getting the beep and the wand. Before I hit security, I remove my belt, watch, tie clip, keys, jacket and shoes. Everything but the zipper on my pants comes off. When I emerge on the other side to deafening silence, all smug and scantily-clad, I feel like a champion. The extreme example of this phenomenon is, of course, when people clap for a successful landing. Commercial air travel is one of the safest activities in the world – safer than taking a shower, eating a ham sandwich or wrestling a vending machine – so clapping for the landing of your Airbus 320 is like applauding for getting off the toilet without being bitten on the ass by a crocodile.
When we travel, we also lose sight of many of the fundamental ideological principles that shape our society. In fact, as soon as we enter an airport, we submit to a caste system where the price of your ticket and the frequency of your travel dictate everything from where you sit, to what you eat and which bathrooms you use. Sure, the people who buy the most expensive seats at a basketball game or the ballet get a better view, but at least you can hand those tickets to a less-fortunate friend if you want and everyone still pretty much pisses in the same pot.
During air travel, however, the privileged carry titles like royalty. If you travel rarely, you’re a serf without identity. As you buy more tickets, however, you start gaining adjectives like Boy Scout badges – gold, platinum, elite, priority elite, super elite, ultra elite, ubertastic stupendous elite … the list and the privileges go on until eventually, you get awarded a private jet and a special place in hell where you can work for all eternity to pay for your carbon offsets.
When the flight is over, we stoop and shuffle toward the front of the plane where we pass among the wide seats and warm champagne dregs of the upper classes. At the basketball game, the folks in the nosebleed sections can at least exit shamelessly without having to walk through the luxury boxes and courtside seats.
Standing at the baggage claim, we travelers finally come together, united in our concern for our personal effects. The expectation-lowering conspiracy continues to the last, however, for no matter how long we wait, no matter how apparently misguided our golf clubs or baby stroller appear to be, there’s always a lonely, single bag on the next conveyor. It goes around and around and we all look over at that suitcase, clearly and egregiously separated from its owner, and think to ourselves, “At least I’m not the guy who owns that bag.”
Little do we know, it’s a plant. The bag is empty, its owner a soulless corporation. The airline puts it there in an endless loop to lower our standards of satisfaction one last time before we step out of the airport and into a life of hopefully high expectations. |
