A Day at the Airport
The airport offers a vision of Hell that would do C. S. Lewis proud. Not the vast emptiness of the sprawling London-Hell of The Great Divorce, but an alternative just as thick with sociological commentary on spiritual life in the modern age: thousands of people, densely packed and all in a hurry, ostensibly trying to leave except they never seem to ever go anywhere, and the crowd never manages to actually thin. It all just trudges wearily along, a great, unoiled machine, slowly grinding away at the edges of its component parts.
The physicality of the place invariably veers towards the vaguely dehumanizing. Even though terminal halls are wide, long, and straight and the few turns and intersections are all so well labeled that one would have to be illiterate, nearly blind, and lack an even rudimentary understanding of illustrative pictograms to ever lose his way, a feeling of disorientation pervades, like a maze whose confoundments are built in on an existential level. The kiosks are rented out to stores and restaurants that have clearly paid high powered graphic design firms many thousands of dollars to decorate their stalls with distinctive, memorable iconography painted in bright colors intended to stand out in both the field of vision and the memory. In practice, they blend together like any other mass of corporate culture. In their attempts to distill the essence of, say, a bookstore, local eatery, or even simple newsstand, they’ve boiled away everything that might have made their simulacra have any of the actual cultural resonance they apparently crave.
Like with malls, the ownership of any storefront within an airport by entities that are not billion-dollar conglomerates is a generally accepted signal of failure, making the variance of options or the input of local color from city to city minimal. As such, with the occasional exception of building materials and the particulars of the local signage, one airport corridor is more or less like any other, giving the impression of an extensive and unbelievably vast prison complex, grey brick walls and Hudson Newses as far as the eye can see.
The devils of this Hell would have to be the airlines themselves (the easy laugh line here obviously being a jab at the TSA, but considering that they mostly concern themselves with harassing those entering and exiting and only rarely intervene with the travelers already en route they are, if anything, Cerberus), not so much the airline employees who are just as trapped as anyone else but the corporate entities themselves. Overbooking flights so that a few passengers are stranded each day by design. Forcing employees unempowered to actually help stare down advancing columns of angry, exhausted customers. Cramming every last body onto each plane into personal spaces tantalizing inches away from being bearable. At great cost and with meticulous engineering they have constructed as a moneymaking engine an environment where the only things preventing a descent into mob violence are the thin bindings of social contract and the constant, hopeful refrain that it will all be over soon.
But like any good dystopia, the denizens are for the most part doing it to themselves. To be sure, the airlines harvest human misery for fun and profit, but it would all be nothing but infernal artifice without throngs of the willing damned to turn the wheels of the whole thing. Slowly, passively we torture one another, willingly playing along and each of us narcissistically certain that this is all somebody else’s fault. Trudging dead eyed from terminal to terminal, we jockey for position with autistic myopia, unable to empathize with or even ascribe simple personhood to our fellows because, God damn it, they are in the way.
And, of course, we could opt out at any time. We can take a car, a bus, even a train if we live on the east coast or are willing to make a couple days of it. But no. Even though, for anything shorter than a cross-country flight, we are, in every real sense, signing on for a day’s worth of unpleasantness no matter how we slice it, that one hour in the air still sounds sweeter than six hours on the road. This is of course quietly forgetting the fact that, factoring in travel to and from the airport, arriving early, getting through security, waiting around, absolutely certain delays, and the easily demonstrable fact that time moves at least 20% slower when spent stuck on tarmacs, the airline's lead has perhaps been overstated.
And people ask me why I usually drive home.
The physicality of the place invariably veers towards the vaguely dehumanizing. Even though terminal halls are wide, long, and straight and the few turns and intersections are all so well labeled that one would have to be illiterate, nearly blind, and lack an even rudimentary understanding of illustrative pictograms to ever lose his way, a feeling of disorientation pervades, like a maze whose confoundments are built in on an existential level. The kiosks are rented out to stores and restaurants that have clearly paid high powered graphic design firms many thousands of dollars to decorate their stalls with distinctive, memorable iconography painted in bright colors intended to stand out in both the field of vision and the memory. In practice, they blend together like any other mass of corporate culture. In their attempts to distill the essence of, say, a bookstore, local eatery, or even simple newsstand, they’ve boiled away everything that might have made their simulacra have any of the actual cultural resonance they apparently crave.
Like with malls, the ownership of any storefront within an airport by entities that are not billion-dollar conglomerates is a generally accepted signal of failure, making the variance of options or the input of local color from city to city minimal. As such, with the occasional exception of building materials and the particulars of the local signage, one airport corridor is more or less like any other, giving the impression of an extensive and unbelievably vast prison complex, grey brick walls and Hudson Newses as far as the eye can see.
The devils of this Hell would have to be the airlines themselves (the easy laugh line here obviously being a jab at the TSA, but considering that they mostly concern themselves with harassing those entering and exiting and only rarely intervene with the travelers already en route they are, if anything, Cerberus), not so much the airline employees who are just as trapped as anyone else but the corporate entities themselves. Overbooking flights so that a few passengers are stranded each day by design. Forcing employees unempowered to actually help stare down advancing columns of angry, exhausted customers. Cramming every last body onto each plane into personal spaces tantalizing inches away from being bearable. At great cost and with meticulous engineering they have constructed as a moneymaking engine an environment where the only things preventing a descent into mob violence are the thin bindings of social contract and the constant, hopeful refrain that it will all be over soon.
But like any good dystopia, the denizens are for the most part doing it to themselves. To be sure, the airlines harvest human misery for fun and profit, but it would all be nothing but infernal artifice without throngs of the willing damned to turn the wheels of the whole thing. Slowly, passively we torture one another, willingly playing along and each of us narcissistically certain that this is all somebody else’s fault. Trudging dead eyed from terminal to terminal, we jockey for position with autistic myopia, unable to empathize with or even ascribe simple personhood to our fellows because, God damn it, they are in the way.
And, of course, we could opt out at any time. We can take a car, a bus, even a train if we live on the east coast or are willing to make a couple days of it. But no. Even though, for anything shorter than a cross-country flight, we are, in every real sense, signing on for a day’s worth of unpleasantness no matter how we slice it, that one hour in the air still sounds sweeter than six hours on the road. This is of course quietly forgetting the fact that, factoring in travel to and from the airport, arriving early, getting through security, waiting around, absolutely certain delays, and the easily demonstrable fact that time moves at least 20% slower when spent stuck on tarmacs, the airline's lead has perhaps been overstated.
And people ask me why I usually drive home.