I USED DRUG, BUSH USED DRUGS. HE DESTROYED THE AIRLINES, I DIDN'T

I must have had a lemonade stand at one time. I know for sure I delivered newspapers. I've been
a working man my whole life. In fact, the first thing I did when I BECAME a man, right after my
13th birthday, was to sign up, along with my friend Stuie Cohen, at the local schuel that was on the way to PS 197 for the morning prayer thing. In that religionist sect you need 10 men (over the age of
13; no females need apply) or God either can't or won't hear your prayers; I never asked which-- nor did I ever care, since I always saw organized religion for exactly what it is: a crock of shit for frightened dumbbells with weak minds, ladled out by hucksters looking to make a buck without working. I was willing to stop by and sit there for 30 minutes everyday on my way to PS 197 in some kind of exotic tasseled stole and wrap-around leather drag while the old men mumbled incoherently because they were paying us $5/week (each). All kinds of jobs came after that. I worked for my dad one summer at E.J. Korvette's, an earlier and smaller version of Wal-Mart where the task was to convince "schnooks" to buy stuff they neither needed nor could afford. SO not my line, that it gave me a phobia to ever walk into a department store again. I still get physically ill from the mall ordeal. Then I was an elevator operator in Bobby Kennedy's office and then I got a job with mucho retrospective bragging rights. At the time it was anything BUT something to brag about. I wound up at a farm in Millbrook, NY (upstate, which was like going to Wyoming or Alaska) for the summer digging ditches. The week turned into a complete nightmare when the ditches turned into cesspools and I was knee-deep in poop. The poop turned out to belong to Dr. Timothy Leary, not yet known outside extremely rarefied circles, who I later hired to speak at my college-- after he was known in less rarefied circles, but still rarefied enough for my Administration watchdog, Miss Couey (RIP) to not know I was getting away with something. He didn't know I had been digging ditches filled with poop on his farm but he did give me my first acid trip. I had one job where I joined a union, working in a print shop. That one I was really proud of-- a union man!!! After that I was pretty much an entrepreneur for a long, long time, first with an incredibly thriving "pharmaceutical" operation that dominated eastern Long Island for 3 or 4 years and then doing whatever it took as I worked my way across Europe, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, back through Europe, where I wound up working for almost 4 years in a meditation center in Amsterdam. I worked in restaurants (dish-washer, waiter, cook, manager), a p.r. firm, several magazines... teaching, taking photos, and so on and then started a record company. That lead to my first corporate job, working for Sire Records---> Warner Brothers Records---> TimeWarner---> AOL. A couple years ago I retired.

But I brought you all the way here so I could talk about airplanes. After I had been hired at Sire---> Warner Brothers but before I started the job, Murray, the CFO told me what my t&e (travel and expenses budget) would be. I almost fainted. I could easily live on that and save my entire salary. The t&e was more than I had ever made in my life (and the salary was more than I had ever dreamed I would make, not that I ever dreamed about making money really, but it was a helluva lot more than
my dad ever made). So anyway, Murray has knocked me on my ass by telling me I could use the company credit card to the tune of about 10 times more than I had ever made before and my head is spinning and he starts describing the LEVELS of hotels I was allowed to use and the classes of service I was allowed to fly in for international and domestic (and for limo service)... I mean ole Murray was blowing my mind. I slept on a blanket over a straw pallet for a whole winter in a mud building in Afghanistan in a tiny 2-family village where no one had ever heard of either the United States or electricity. And he was telling me I could spend more per night in a hotel than I had ever made in a week. And BUSINESS CLASS. OMG! Business Class! I never dreamed about making money but I have to admit that I did dream about business class. The first time I flew to Europe it was $99 on Icelandic Air. You had to stop in Reykjavik for at least one night to get the deal (I stayed for a week) and then they flew you to Luxemburg. I was happy to be crammed into the back of the plane with hundreds of other poor hippies like myself. But Murray was telling me I could fly in the front of the plane-- with the white folks.

It wasn't long before I was a Vice President and Business Class turned to First Class and then the President and First Class was a birthright to grumble about when not using the company jet (which I never initiated even one time... just seemed like an INCREDIBLE waste of money-- although I was always happy to tag along with any of my peers who were already using it).

I have so many frequent flyer miles that I still fly to London and Bangkok and Bali and Morocco, not to mention NYC, on first class. Murray knew better than I did (at the time) how addictive the corporate tit can become. I'm more weaned away from it than almost anyone I know. But I do love those First Class flights-- especially the British Air overnighter from L.A. to London. Or I did. Oh, I still love the one to London. But today I want to talk about domestic airlines. This week I'm doing something I haven't done since I was hired by Sire---> Warner Brothers: flying coach across country. I still have a billion frequent flyer miles but I bought a roundtrip ticket to fly from Burbank (20 minutes away from my house; no hassle parking and all that) to JFK on Jet Blue. That's what this blog is about today (and what I'm writing about instead of the smoking cannon they found in the Rove Treason case yesterday).

American Airlines, Delta and United have all turned into flying pigsties. Worker morale is so low at the companies-- albeit for VERY good reasons-- that service has fallen to a level far below tolerable. First Class is now a truncated bottom-end-of-business-class. And the ticket prices have gone up as the services have gone down. Why pay huge fares for not particularly comfortable accommodations and gratuitously rude service when you can get pretty much the same thing for much less money in the back of the plane? But all my friends tell me the classless Jet Blue is not only FAR less expensive than DeltaAmericanUnited but their seats are more spacious and comfortable and the service is much more gracious-- friendly and positive instead of sullen and pissed-off.

Meanwhile, the whole frequent flyer scam is a real joke. Do you know that Capitol One tv ad series with David Spade? The one where he plays the role of a phone operator getting requests for flights using accrued mileage and just says "NO" to every request. If you've tried to use your airline mileage you are probably aware that this is REALITY TV not a sit-com. If anything, Spade's ad is going easy on DeltaAmericanUnited. One travel talk show radio host recently exposed how Delta was bragging to investors that they had only allowed 8% of requested frequent flyer travel to go through. I'm surprised to hear they even allowed 8%!

Now you're probably wondering when I'm going to turn all this is an anti-Bush rant. I don't want to disappoint you. Bush's short-sighted national insecurity policies have destroyed the U.S. airline industry and made travel unnecessarily grueling and something everyone would just rather avoid. And his policies in favor of corporations and against the interests of consumers and the general public have accelerated the downward spiral. I never miss an opportunity to remind fellow travelers on lines at crowded airports that when we get rid of Bush, airline travel will go back towards being civilized again.