Well the World's favorite reality show has finally come to an end. An on-going nine and a half year narrative – with a deep and tangled back story – culminating in a daring late-night raid on a fortified compound; a blatant and calculated assassination. Brilliant. I think a lot of us forgot that narrative, or rather pushed it into the background, into the semi-conscious, to get on with things. Heads down, move forward: progress, progress, progress. This killing brings about a full stop - finality.
Death is sobering. In this case, folks are celebrating, going crazy, rejoicing that this plane of existence has been freed of a certain bodied energy that had spread a taint onto everything. The hangover is coming. The reality of what has been done – everything that has been done, will set in soon enough. Now we remember: the good, the terrible, the inconceivable – the waste and loss and the human suffering for no real reason; for ideologies and borders; boundaries, rules, religions, resources... (resources are real, sure enough. I'm not sure a war has ever been fought that didn't involve resources. I mean, really, what would be the point?)
Anyway – life goes on. We'll pick ourselves up, shake off the blood and the sweat, experience our psychological trauma. For a second we will empathize with the dead, and then we will get back to the act of being alive.
Flying in a Jet Airplane
I'm going to brave the intense security of our state's capitol airport and fly down to Los Angeles this weekend. I was hoping that the recent damage discovered on an assortment of Southwest Airline jets would result in a reduced fare. Maybe it did, Southwest appears to still be the cheapest airline – but the fares are not cheap, not even reasonable – they clock in right around the tail end of “barely affordable.” But it is this, or to drive my 1989 Toyota pick-up over a thousand miles in a handful of days – risking break-down on the side of the highway, death smeared along one of the L.A. freeways, or just die of pain and boredom somewhere on a tired stretch of I-99. Not worth it; and the gas and necessary beers would probably set me back more than the plane ticket – assuming the whole thing went off without a hitch.
Not that I have such great faith in air travel. I heard Ron Paul talking today about the “moral hazard” created by government programs and protections. His way of thinking explains that, because there is an FAA, or whatever governing bodies, that exist to find fault – it takes some of the pressure off of industry to regulate itself, and to expect and demand a higher level of safety and efficiency. It sounds great on paper – I am ready to sign up; but then that cynical part of my brain kicks in and says: “hey wait a minute – if the markets self-regulated, then why did we ever need these governing bodies to step in in the first place?
Anyway, my chief reason for confidence in flying doesn't lie with the airlines, or the planes, or the pilots. No, to my way of thinking, one of the chief benefits of flying is that, if I should go down in a fiery wreck, at least my family would be compensated for my death. It doesn't get much better than that, these days.
madbob@madbob.com
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