Christopher Schaberg is the Dorothy Harrell Brown Distinguished Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans and the author of The End of Airports.
That attack in Istanbul was atrocious, and it stung especially on the heels of the awful Brussels bombings in March. But the Mirror’s notion that airports have only “now” become targets is just plain wrong.
Since their inception, airports have been “the place” for spectacles of violence. It’s not always terrorism, though. Sometimes it’s a daredevil stunt gone awry, other times it’s a terrible crash or near disaster. Occasionally it has to do with the military occupation of these otherwise civilian spaces. Throughout the twentieth century and up to now, airports have been stages for displays of excessive power, and their corollary dangers.
What makes airports popular targets for violent spectacles?
First theory: Airports are preeminent sites of progress, cosmopolitanism, and freedom. So oppressive regimes and their ilk target these spaces to cause symbolic as well as real damage. However, air travel is so regularly disparaged and frustratingly tolerated in public discourse that this doesn’t seem right. Perhaps during the so-called “golden age” of flight, airports vaguely held this special place in our minds—but definitely not anymore.
Second theory: Airports are places where masses of people congregate, thereby making them apt points of congestion and confusion at which to stage an attack. But this theory doesn’t hold up: There are plenty of other places in contemporary society that combine masses and modern rituals (stadiums, mega churches, shopping malls, theme parks—“soft targets,” as they are called). Yet these places are not routinely attacked.
Third theory: Airports are access points to big weapons (airliners) that be commandeered for nefarious ends. But besides 9/11 and a handful of other hijackings, airplanes have not been the focus of airport attacks. It is usually more about inflicting violence on innocent passengers and random airline workers.
Fourth theory: The prevalence of airports as sites of drama—delays and cancellations, for one, but also crashes, bombings, extreme weather, hijackings, air rage, even toy airport battles—has created a weird feedback loop: People look to airports for trouble, and they find it there no matter the political, empathetic, or violent agendas.
The last theory is probably the most accurate, if also the most unfortunate, because it implicates everyone. It means that in order to break this feedback loop, the public would have to radically change travel by air—and not just by adding ever more layers of security. As it is, with new airliners stolidly projected to last at least 30 years, things seem determined to persist basically as they are. Airports suggest freedom but deliver discomfort, and that makes them perfect venues for terror.
If you are feeling consternation about recent gender trouble in public restrooms, you might look to the heavens for relief. Not for divine intervention, though. Rather, gaze at those airliners cruising by, 35,000 feet above, contrails dissipating in the ether. They’ve got this issue figured out.
On first blush, airplanes seem like the most egregious sites for the recognition and policing of identities—terrorists being the obvious specter. Air travel can bring out people’s worst bullying and nationalistic tendencies, and class-based structures rule the cramped spaces of flight. Unfair stereotypes are still associated with flight attendants, and there remains a persistent patriarchy among pilots. Gender politics have by no means disappeared up in the sky.
Still, airplanes prove that some gender battles have already been settled. For instance, airline lavatories are unvaryingly non-gendered, and they work just fine, flight after mundane flight.
Furthermore, gender does not determine whether a person can fly a plane or pass out pretzels. When it comes to your pilot, skills and training are far more important than what body parts they appear to have under their uniform, or what gender identity they adopt. Likewise with flight attendants: Travelers have long since learned to care less about whether they present as male or female. More important: whether they are snarky or sincere, miserly or generous, negligent or professional.
Airplanes are metal tubes of pragmatism. Let’s just get from here to there, please, and without incident. When a flight attendant asks passengers sitting in an exit row whether they are willing and able to help in the event of an emergency, this has nothing to do with gender, and everything to do with linguistic fluency, mental wherewithal, and physical ability. When it comes to facilitating an efficient evacuation, gender is not a critical factor—a fact all travelers accept every time they take a commercial flight. Then think of your seat-mate. It matters less if they seem to be a man or woman than if they are an armrest hog, an endless talker, or if they are emitting an overpowering fragrance.
There are differences that matter on an airplane, differences that make gender little more than an incidental marker—and one that is mostly a matter of surface display. Genders can intrigue, astonish, perplex … or simply fade into the background. Airplanes are performance spaces where, for the most part, gender just exists without incident. (Though occasionally bizarre limits are transgressed and enforced, even amidst the clouds.)
Gender is usually less pressing and more profuse than its current hype would suggest. Airplanes prove that when it comes to people, there are almost always more differences than just two, and that being attuned to this more is what actually allows people to travel together—and to live together—in the first place.
Snacks get us through the day. They bridge the gap between meals, and help us tolerate excruciating think tanks or boring presentations. A snack can be as simple as an apple or banana, or as complicated as the array of salty flavors and accompanying micro-gustatory promises proffered at the vending machine.
Recently I learned about a company called “Love With Food,” which offers monthly boxed assortments of healthy snacks. For each box purchased, a portion of the proceeds are donated to food banks across the United States. It sounds innocuous enough, and even social-justice minded.
A blitzkrieg issued from the sample box I received in the mail: kale chips, rice crackers, fig bars, kosher cookies, gluten-free waffles, and even small green tea latte hard candies tucked in the corner (snacks, really?). Here was all of the globe tucked into a tidy bright red box: a primer in cosmopolitanism couched as a simple, healthy dietary decision and laced with with a touch of philanthropy to assuage the pangs of snack-guilt.
But as I sifted through the box’s bewildering contents, I noticed a message on the bottom of the box: “Still hungry? Shop more at LoveWithFood.com.” This is not really about snacking so much as it is about shopping.
Scrolling through the company website reveals it to be just that, a shop entirely like any other shopping site. Columns of options, some tantalizingly sold out. “Snack Smart. Do Good.”—so the company advocates all throughout. Yet one cannot help but hear a persistent murmur beneath the Platonic overtones, a quiet mantra emanating from the rows of packaged offerings: shop, shop, shop, shop.
We are all hungry these days. But what are we hungry for, more than anything? The strangely addictive snack of online shopping—and for goods shipped via boxes we dispose of, which in turn are full of packages we also throw away. In truth, we snack on consumption, which ultimately feeds the gaping trash gyres of the oceans. Love With Food’s website is littered with the most positive language of our time: love, simple, smart, healthy, good, discovery. Meanwhile, factories elsewhere hasten to churn out ever more small glittery packages to fill these red boxes, and later our trash cans and landfills. Like the return of the repressed, what is feared is pushed away—waste, want, work, greed—only to be revealed in even stronger terms.
Snacks are no mere stopover between real meals. Rather, snacks have become their own beast, something way beyond what we ever imagined could fit in such small bags, so easily disposed of. There’s no such thing as a free snack.
Recently at the drug store, I passed the Easter pop-up section, with all its trinkets and candies sold to fill plastic, pastel eggs. Further down the aisle were the small toys, conveniently Easter basket friendly as well: Pretty Ponies, Hot Wheels, and a host of unbranded princesses, robots, and animals.
All these small toys reminded me of some from my own childhood: the bagged Lego sets that came in McDonald’s Happy Meals in 1989. This was a series of eight speedy vehicles, a dozen or so pieces each, simple but elegant in their aerodynamics. Two airplanes, two cars, two helicopters, and two—hovercrafts? The hovercrafts add a Miami Vice lifestyle vibe to the set—amphibious maneuvers discordant with prop planes, copters, and the track-bound scope of the race cars.
In addition to its rear-mounted turboprop, one of the hovercrafts sports yellow jet engines. While building Legos with my son, I often stumble upon one of them, and I momentarily forget what set it came with. A yellow jet engine? Who does that?
The 1980s, that’s who. Just look at the official names of these small toys: Gyro Bird, Turbo Force, Swamp Stinger, Lightning Striker, Land Laser, Sea Eagle, Windwhirler, Sea Skimmer. What do these names say? Maximum speed, weaponized mobility, brassy alliteration—is it any surprise? The age of excess was ramping up, replete with all the hyperbolic promises of eternal growth in newly-unregulated industry.
And now we are feeling the burn. Our most popular would-be politician (hated or revered) is essentially a hypostatized version of a Happy Meal Lego set. Donald Trump first floated the idea of a presidential run in 1988, as those little toy vehicles were making their way around the country. Pay attention to the boisterous rhetoric and fast moves whirling around the current election cycle, and you’ll see the patterns: grandiose claims, incendiary language, and results guaranteed to be as easy as a 15-piece kit. For all the complex issues and real human lives at stake, the whole thing also resembles a wild hovercraft ride in miniature, destined to ephemera. In this year’s season of small toys, the toys aren’t so small any more, at all.
In a video that has been praised as “breathtaking” and “sweet,” Audi advertised its 205-mph Audi R8 V10 Plus during Super Bowl 50.
The commercial depicts a resigned, aging astronaut deep in the funk of nostalgia: namely, for the golden era of manned spacecraft, moon-bound in all their glory. He seems destined to chronic melancholia, until a younger man—his son, most likely—decides to jar him out of his stupor, interpellating: “Okay commander; come with me.”
Walking out the front door, the younger man holds up a car key, offering the latter-day astronaut the driver’s seat. Yet this is a purely symbolic gesture of control—the automobile key has of late been castrated, turned into a “keyless entry remote.” The curvaceous gray car bolts away from the home and careens around an ocean-abutted, moonlit highway, and the forlorn astronaut’s face at last creases into a restrained grin.
As a GQ article helpfully explains, the vehicle is “rekindling his love for sustained acceleration which he picked up from Apollo rocket launches.” A montage of spacecraft memories—boarding capsule, firing engines, shaking cockpit—is intercut between the primary scene of the two men, basically night driving.
As David Bowie’s 1972 tune “Starman” bursts into its familiar chorus, the screen goes black, and we read these bold words: “Choosing the moon brings out the best in us.”
This commercial is curious to consider in light of Bowie’s very recent and final music video, “Blackstar,” which opens with an eerie image of a tattered astronaut reposed in a rocky landscape, whose sun-shielded helmet is opened only to reveal a blackened skull. In the bizarre world of the music video, this starman’s journey has ended hauntingly in strange ritual and uncanny fetishism.
It’s clear that the Audi R8 commercial is tugging on predictable heart chords: aging 20th-century heroes, parent-child bonding, and the old standby of a really fast car. But what else is going on here? There is the not-so-subtle correspondence drawn between aerial velocity and road speed. This equation is a well-worn trope, but in this case, acceleration obliterates both space in front of us and time behind us: Our astronaut is returned back to another (better?) time. In regarding the lost age of space exploration, we see the aging starman relegated to the ground. In his gas guzzling coupé, the aged astronaut hurtles into a future that he seems utterly uninterested in.
We may have the $175,000 Audi sports car, but we no longer have the old promises or futuristic fantasies of space travel. Deep space may still hold mysteries and opportunities for discovery, but they are more likely to be deeply humbling and existentially unsettling—more like Bowie’s Blackstar than Audi’s Starman.
Up in Michigan for the holidays, high winter winds knocked out the electricity for a couple days. A family friend offered her “Blue Apron” meals to my parents. I’d never heard of it: Blue Apron is a gourmet dinner subscription service that sources local ingredients, then packs and delivers dry-ice cooled meals ready to cook. All you have to do is follow the directions.
They prepared the meal at a nearby cottage that still had power and brought the food over in pots and pans. Next thing I knew, we were wolfing down decadent platters of tail-cut salmon fillets topped with dollops of a spritely horseradish sauce. There were garlic mashed potatoes and grilled brussels sprouts. I opened a Bordeaux, and we supped by candle light. The power would not come on for several more hours. It was Christmas.
Over the next two weeks, we tried two more Blue Apron meals: a chicken dish (the details escape me), and orange glazed meatballs with brown rice and bok choy. My mother, who is a plenty good cook on her own, followed the instructions, opening little plastic cups and curiously sized baggies of accessories and pouring them into mixing bowls and pans in the specified order. The whole experience was shameful; we all turned our eyes downward as the modular meals came together. There was something slightly embarrassing about snapping together these prearranged, picture-perfect meals.
Because, we like to cook. When we visit family in Michigan, we have access to an extensive vegetable garden and get a weekly share through a nearby farm. Homemade basil and parsley pestos adorn our evening table; my father massages freshly picked kale with olive oil and sea salt, until it melts in the mouth. At home, we frequent the local farmers markets. Living in New Orleans means learning the unique ingredients, flavors, and combinations that define the cuisine (and culture) of this city. It means introducing our small children to the tastes and technics of New Orleans eating—crawfish, okra, red beans, and more.
But here’s the thing about dinner: it’s often a disaster! The children bicker; someone’s in a bad mood and just doesn’t want to talk about it; the petite tender goes a minute too long and gets chewy; a bowl of penne gets thrown onto the floor from a highchair; you can already tell the wine is going to give you a headache. Usually dinner is a scramble, and sometimes it’s a debacle.
Blue Apron does something funny to dinner: it turns it into a predictably good thing to make and consume. It seems to come out just right, every time. This is profoundly weird, if you think about it: the idea that every meal should be perfect. What life is this? Blue Apron is just a few steps away from Willy Wonka’s three-course meal stick of gum—and you may recall how that turned out for Violet Beauregarde.
Blue Apron is worth trying, especially if it gets you actually cooking and experimenting with new vegetables, herbs, and spices on your own. But do not be fooled, or lulled into complacency: Dinner isn’t perfect—it’s not supposed to be. It’s a thing, like any other, fraught with difficulties, nuances, spills, and surprises.
Last week, Ian wrote about the strange economy of gift giving. He suggests that part of what is so unsettling about the splurge of Black Friday is its flirtation with less calculable formulations of exchange and expenditure.
The following day I found myself at my local independent bookstore for Small Business Saturday, signing copies of my new book The End of Airports (okay, maybe I only signed one single copy, for my mother-in-law who was sweet enough to stop by and patronize the shop). As I talked to shoppers, I thought about an old quip: how a book is “a gift that keeps giving.” This slogan was first used to sell phonographs in the 1920s, and subsequently it was adopted to shill any number of goods and services. It’s reached a point of saturation such that it can now be applied ironically to unwanted things: Herpes, the gift that keeps on giving.
A good book is read only to be reread (sooner or later), or better, circulated in short time among friends or family members—read by many people, maybe even discussed at the dinner table or in a book group. Sometimes such circulation occurs until a book’s pages are falling out of the binding, its cover long lost.
One of the minor joys of my job is seeing the old tattered copies of books that students bring to class when we are discussing literary works such as Frankenstein or Lolita. Whether these books get transferred by campus bookstores for a modicum of profit, or among friends in bursts of passion or frustration, they are doing their job—giving, and giving again.
After finishing a book recently, I didn’t know what to make of it. It kept me up at night—I wondered whether it was this or that kind of book. Why did it make certain stylistic moves? Who was its intended audience? There’s something simple and generous about these nagging questions: the book has given them to me to ponder. Books give even after they are given. A new idea; unresolved feelings about something (or someone); a glimpse of a new place through descriptive prose…these are just some of the gifts waiting inside the wrapped covers of a book.
As our attention increasingly is directed toward new media modes of reading and consuming text, especially in the frenzy of holiday shopping, it is worth pausing to consider the older form of the bound book, a special kind of gift—a gift that gives in special ways.
A photo posted by Nikki Burg (@countrybumpkin6218) on
Fishing shirts are not just for fishing anymore. Or perhaps they never were. They are a modification of the travel shirt, a many-pocketed button-down shirt that looks vaguely like a Oxford-cloth business casual staple, until you get up close—then you see the details: vents, mesh underlayers, patch pockets with accordion folds and pleats, key loops, utility tabs, expandable collars for sun protection … the list goes on.
What do these shirts offer, whence their popularity, beyond the conceit of actual fishing?
Look around next time you travel, and observe the drab drapings of these high-tech shirts as they make contact with plastic seats and press against plate glass windows. And then consider how these shirts are robustly described by their purveyors:
The Columbia PFG (Performance Fishing Gear) “Tamiami II,” perhaps the most ubiquitous and eerily identifiable fishing shirt, offers a “Modern Classic fit” and is “designed for cool comfort and functionality over the long haul.” The “cool” does double duty here, assuring us that we will look fashionable while also evincing the functional venting technology of this shirt. No wonder it is called a “performance button up,” as it must skate an awkward path between the noble pursuits of modernity and the banal realities of endless office work.
Patagonia’s “Island Hopper II” promises “a superlight long-sleeved shirt in an easy-care, organic cotton, recycled polyester blend.” Consider here the tension between “easy-care” and the implied responsibilities of organic cotton and recycling: environmental consciousness dances on a razor’s edge between calm and crisis.
Meanwhile, ExOfficio’s “Air StripTM Shirt” is marketed as “the ultimate in technical apparel.” At the same time, it assures a “comfortable yet modern silhouette”—by now a familiar formula, this vow to balance utility with elegance.
And isn’t this what is so attractive—and so galling—about the fishing shirt? It pledges to spirit us through the world with foresight, durability, and protection; but it also nestles blandly into the consumerscape numbly taking place all around. It beckons at trout unlimited and adventures untold; and it seamlessly facilitates herds of shuffling travelers and routine labor.
It’s everything about modernity we’d wanted—packaged in all sizes and colors, and made for every occasion. Why teach anyone to fish, when everyone can just wear a fishing shirt?
Occasionally aircraft lavatories burst into the news: an aging actor doesn’t make it to the lav in time, and pees in the aisle; another actor, a bit younger, slams the lavatory door in a huff and gets kicked off the plane; terrorists may use the privacy of the lav to assemble cruel devices or hint at their presence; an artist repurposes one for a curious exhibit on a trans-Pacific long-haul flight. Most of the time, though, lavatories fade into the background.
While airlines go to great lengths to sell the experience of flight as individuated, personal, and endlessly customizable—the lavatory is the only truly private place on normal commercial airliners. And yet—here’s the rub—it’s also the only place that is shared by everyone on board. It’s a paradoxical place, and one that we don’t really want to think about too much.
Taro Gomi’s classic potty training book Everyone Poops works by showing young children all the different shapes and sizes of various animals’ excrement (“an elephant makes a big poop, a mouse makes a tiny poop,” etc.). The book culminates in a child’s bowel movement, with gentle encouragement to do it on the toilet. But the unavoidable premise of the book is that humans are put on the same plane as camels, racoons, fish, and worms. We’re not so different, when it comes to our business.
Isn’t this what is finally so embarrassing about the lavatory? It exposes the grand project of flight as so much animal activity. We are less a suave set of individual travelers, donning antimicrobial fishing shirts and maneuvering sporty roller bags. We’re more like a migrating collective, not so unlike a wobbly V of Canada Geese cruising overhead—another day, another long journey. The lavatory reminds us that everyone poops, and that we are not so special as our job titles or status as frequent fliers would make us believe.
