FLYING IN THE AGE OF BUSH

My guess-- and it's only a wild guess-- is that 99.9% of Americans have never flown on a private jet. Before I was running a blog I was running a corporate record label and our parent corporation had several jets, some real nice ones too. I suspect I was the only division head who never ordered one. I never; not once. Oh, I didn't mind flying on them. The convenience was almost otherworldly and that was even before the Bush Regime's authoritarian essence made the entire public flying experience-- starting with the degrading cattle lines and stripping at airports-- into a dehumanizing nightmare with kafkaesque overtones. But I always thought private jets were an unacceptable expense... comfortable but an unfair burden on the shareholders. So I would happily catch a lift on someone else's ride but I'd fly commercial, no matter how great the inconvenience-- which was never more than a tiny fraction of what the inconvenience has become since the Bush clique took over.

This last week I did a lot of flying-- from L.A. to Montreal to New York-- and there are no blogger private jets in my life. Let me hold back on the entire day wasted in an airport while the airline lied to us over and over about when the flight would take off. That was a special event related to weather, badly handled, of course, but... like I said, "special." The highhanded nature of the corporations who have license to act like our lords and masters under Bushism, however, is far from special or weather-related. What it's related to is the nature of fascism. But the thoughts on flying in the Age of Bush I had in mind were far more prosaic than the nature of fascism.

Thinking about the gross inconvenience we are subjected to and the entire dehumanizing process that commercial flying has become I realized that part of the problem is that so many of our leaders don't fly commercial. From what I've read Tom DeLay wasn't as reticent as I was about ordering corporate jets to haul his ass around the country world. And Denny Hastert had his own, courtesy of the taxpayers-- although who knew until the right wing noise machine decided to make the Speaker's fancy prerogative into a weapon with which to attack Nancy Pelosi?

Does it cost the taxpayers anything for our noble legislators to be taxied hither and thither in corporate jets? Yeah; believe me, those $50,000 cross country trips on corporate jets are not-- let me repeat: not done as a public service. Are they a quid pro quo? You bet they are, at least in the long run-- and we pay... through the nose. I don't like the idea of Congress making the rules that govern their own conduct and I don't like Congress-- let alone this monarchial executive branch-- making rules governing ours when their own rules are so completely... what was that word I used? Otherworldly. What do Cheney or Bush know about flying commercial? A lot less than Bush's father knew about a checkout scanner I'll guess.

Thursday Barbara Boxer and Rep. Mike Thompson (D-CA) announced they would be introducing an air passengers' bill of rights. I'm a little skeptical but not closed minded.

On Wednesday, hundreds of JetBlue passengers were grounded for up to 11 hours at JFK International Airport in New York as a result of snow and ice. The airline said it canceled more than half of 505 flights, but some were left on runways and could not return to gates because they were occupied. JetBlue officials apologized and called the delays "unacceptable."

In a statement issued Thursday, Boxer said she has been delayed many times while traveling to and from California.

"But to keep passengers-- which usually include infants and the elderly-- on a plane for 11 hours in the worst of conditions is absurd," she said. "If a plane is stuck on the tarmac or at the gate for hours, a passenger should have the right to deplane. No one should be held hostage on an aircraft when clearly they can find a way to get people off safely."

The impetus for this, though, is a bottom-up initiative that started as a petition drive online. Take a look at the simple petition which is even less burdensome than the nonbinding symbolic legislation passed in the House yesterday against Bush's latest Iraq escalation.

Every time I'm on one of those slow, endless lines-- like at Oakland Airport, which can be particularly heinous-- I always wonder if the end of the Bush Regime will also be the end of the draconian so-called "security measures," designed more to dehumanize travelers than to do anything about our security-- although, presumably, the fear and conformity advanced by these kinds of measures are supposed to insure job security for our somewhat self-imposed fascistic overlords.

I remember the first time I saw the train station in Milan. It is so grand and the proportions so Olympian. The station, at the end of a long, straight and similarly grand boulevard, made the individual feel small... very, very small, but perhaps part of something large. Like an overpowering, all-powerful fascist society. Mussolini did it with architecture. Bush does it on the cheap with endless rules and regulations that chip away at our humanity.