America This Week, October 6, 2023: "School of Crock"

My problem has to do with the airline, and I wrote a whole novel, Once Up in the Air, about air travel, and that was published in 2001. Back when it was possible to believe that a man was addicted to the pleasures of air travel. But that's no longer a valid premise.

So I get on the plane in.

So I get on the plane in Bozeman, Montana, yesterday, come to New York. And first of all, I have to endure the incredibly intricate class system that comes with boarding a plane. Now, they have about seven levels of priority for boarding, the top four of which don't include me. OK?

And then finally, I get there. I'm Sky Priority, which sounds like a big deal and would have been before ranking inflation on airlines. Now it's just steerage plus.

So I get on there full of resentment at all the people who boarded before me and a slight feeling of superiority. Or toward the people who are behind me, who are still struggling. And sit down, and as soon as everybody on this incredibly crowded plane is sitting down, as soon as everybody's buckled in. They make the announcement that there's a maintenance issue, surely one that they knew about before we all got on.

They had us all fighting each other and resenting each other for boarding priority. And then once we boarded, we find out we're all captives, that we were actually competing to enter a Parmac-bound gulag.

And so one would think that the maintenance issue that they just discovered was probably a real problem for the plane, as it was in the air half an hour before. But in any case, they announced that they don't have maintenance people in Bozeman, Montana. I guess there are airports where they don't have wrenches, and they'll have to confer with Atlanta about the maintenance problem. Headquarters. So we just sit tight.

And on Delta, they use the every five minute announcement technique to make the hours go by. So they give you the sense that you're really on the inside about their maintenance problem, and they tell you things you don't need to know. Like, you know, just got off the phone with Atlanta.

It's not a big problem, but we're doing our best. And et cetera, et cetera, so they give you this faux feeling of....

So they string you along for about an hour and, of course, every seat is filled. So I'm next to this older woman, and as the author of a novel about air travel, I turn to her and, in my frustration, say, These people are just shining us on. We're never getting out of here.

And she freaks out and I just. There's an arrogant side of me that, in a disastrous situation, wants to control it by being more pessimistic than everyone else. You know, we're here all day, is what I tell her. I can tell from the cheerful announcements that it's only getting worse. So she hates me and I'm trapped by the window, and she's trapped with me.

Anyway, after over two hours, we finally take off fly to Minneapolis. We only have very little time to make our connections. I run to my new gate and once again I go through the class system, the sorting process. And I'm happy to be one of the early people, earlier people on the top in the top 40 percent of boarders.

That's what I would call myself. That's where I've managed to get in America after 60 years.

I get my comfort plus seat, which I upgraded myself to, thinking I deserved a treat.

And as soon as we're all buckled in, they tell us that we're not going anywhere. And once again, once again, we go through the same protocol of friendly announcements from the cockpit.

The pilot, kind of our best friend, siding with us, the trapped passengers against the borg of Delta Airlines and the entire air traffic control system. This time, it's not so much a maintenance issue, it isn't one at all. In fact, it's that the luggage went on the wrong plane.

Who would want to take off in a plane that doesn't have their luggage on it? So, in other words, everybody on the plane is suddenly like, Yeah, I hope they solve this. I'm willing to be patient because I just found out that my suitcase is on another plane and I prefer that it be on this one.

You know, they deliver it to your hotel, if you have a hotel, and who wants to sit here and wait for them to sort this out? Because I can tell you that a lot of people aren't going to get their luggage anyway, OK, they're going to tell us.

You who demand that we get there with our things should buy it down. A hundred years ago, there was no guarantee you could get off the ground at all.

That would have been my Ciceronian argument to the Senate.

So then finally, after an hour, we get into the air and we land at JFK well after midnight. But what I didn't know about JFK Airport is that it only gets busy after midnight because it's an international airport. That comes from, you know where flights come from all over the world, and people are leaving bright and early in the morning from, I don't know, wherever the Middle East or New Zealand. Time zones confuse me, but they all seem to land at JFK at 12 15 a..m. And so you come out after this incredibly brutal day into a kind of, I don't know.

It's like a late night.

They're expecting this streamlined experience of American competence, and they come out into this sea of like, gypsy cabs and freakers.

But at this point, I'd almost rather they not. Because the chore of synchronizing your emergence from the terminal with the car's arrival at the pickup spot is almost impossible. They keep the cars in some staging area that I can't even imagine. I feel so sorry for those poor drivers. And then they have one shot at recognizing you among the throng, at which point, if they miss you, they have to go around through the entire cycle again and come back. So I got here like 1.30 in the morning to this hotel.

That feels like a laundromat dryer because outside is times square, humming and throbbing.

And that means I'm bright and bushy, tailed and all those things for our show this morning.

I'm like, there's like one new one per year now.

Right, like, I mean, the best thing to be is a baby who's in the military. Oh right, right, right, because then you get boarded immediately. But they should eventually just stratify the entire country into like 300 million different classes.

And the last, the very last person, will be somebody named Edmund, who's always last. Given that you're feeling a bit frosty this morning, it's hard to start the show talking about something unpleasant, so let's ease our way in with something that's just sort of interesting. We had a big change in the construction of Congress. What are your feelings about the removal of Kevin McCarthy and that whole drama?

And I take every chance I can get to say I was there getting a degree from Oxford University. And one of the things that the British prided themselves on was the raucousness of their parliament, of their House of Commons. Everybody yelling at each other and booing and doing these sort of ritual harassment sounds. And that is often held up in America as a kind of refreshing, primitive form of democracy that we could only aspire to. But then, the minute something happens in Congress here that, you know, reeks of dissent or conflict, or, dare I say, dynamism, it's treated as some terrible descent into chaos and the end of democracy.

When, in fact, it's kind of to me, the hallmark of democracy that people should vote each other out. Have to justify their leadership roles and then be criticized for not fulfilling their promises, which is what McCarthy was criticized for. I mean, he made certain pledges to the harder core members of the Republican caucus or whatever. And he didn't meet them, according to their firebrand leaders, and they got rid of him. So what I mean? That is to me one of the least troubling aspects of how we're governed in this country. That there should be internecine fights over policy.

Well, they said, this is just modern life, this is progress in some ways. How can you be so hard-hearted? And the Republicans were saying, No, this is chaos, this is degeneracy on Capitol Hill.

Now the Republicans have their flurry of uncouthness, and the Democrats are saying, Oh, look at this rabble.

So as long as they're yelling at each other and not me, as an American, I'm fine with it.

I guess they filed to get the appellate court to reconsider, so the disappointment of getting CISA out of that injunction is now over. They're back in, which is great. But anyway, he was supportive of that, I don't have any particular animosity toward him.

But what's amazing was reading the coverage.

You know, suddenly you have all these people. Like Garrett, Graff was saying, No single figure is more to blame for the rehabilitation of Trump post-January 6th than McCarthy. His utter lack of honor and courage will be the defining thread of McCarthy's story in history. Now. Garrett Graff, for people who don't remember, is one of the people who was organizing the Aspen Institute. Who was at the Aspen Institute deal, where they were kind of pre. He's in the Twitter files laughing about. You know how long it took for Trump to say something? When they had predicted earlier it would take nine days, and actually only took three.

So he was one of the sort of darker figures in the Twitter files. Now he's out here saying that McCarthy is this, you know, defining radical right Trumpist.

When I thought the issue with McCarthy was that he was, that the right wingers don't like him and that he's not Trumpy enough. Like, who does he think he's going to get Garrett Graff? Now that Kevin McCarthy is off the stage, I mean, the thing that really distinguished McCarthy is that he he took the slow road to an impeachment inquiry. When you know another person in that position, a Marjorie Taylor Greene, or, you know, would have been doing it, done it from day one.

So I don't know, I thought that was weird, but it happened.

So, but beyond that.

Forced trading or something? What I love is the rumor that Trump will come back and speak.

But yeah, there are rumors going around, and Trump has even said he would be willing to help out if they call on.

Do you have to be a human being?

You see, it's my secret suspicion that chatbots are ruling us already and that people just have earpieces.

I want, I want to, like, blast some kind of interrupting tone into the Congress. That would break all microwave communications and see if the people are still able to speak without their chatbot implants.

They'd suddenly all fall silent, start gibbering.

It seems that one of the big issues in McCarthy's removal, besides the fact that certain people thought he'd gone slow on impeachment, has to do with Ukraine funding. And that, you know, and some deal that McCarthy made, which I don't understand quite, to continue funding separate from, I don't know the omnibus spending bill.

Yeah, I don't fully understand that either, but yeah, well, we'll see, we'll see what happens at the end of this 45 day session. I think they're going to have a much harder time coming to an agreement. Clearly right around Christmas time, I guess, so that'll be fun.

But that happened. We can probably do a post-mortem on McCarthy and that whole situation. After they get back from whatever this week-long thing is, be interesting to find out what they're actually up to. Maybe they're just taking a week to, like, play d&d and get high somewhere.

What, I mean, what do we expect? They need a week off? Yeah, they just get back from their summer vacation. I mean, I worked in Hollywood for a while.

And I worked in a writer's room, on a TV show. And in Hollywood, they actually specialize in honoring more holidays than the rest of the world combined.

It's a multi-religious holiday place where, if anywhere in the world, some faith is celebrating. Hollywood's taking that day off. Yeah, but I think Congress is worse.

If you're not an N.B.A. fan, that's what makes sense to you. Maybe they need a load management policy so that members of Congress can sit out every other day, rest their hamstrings.

Do the Kawhi Leonard approach to governance, where you only have to actually make decisions every two or three days or so, as opposed to every day, might work?

We can click on them for things like heart rate, you know who they're talking to, the visual readout. Yeah, we need that. I think I think that would be great.

Sort of like the Van Allen radiation belt, one that they can't get out of. Once they're in, they're in and we keep them there.

I'm actually kind of I'm semi-serious. Yeah, me too. They've aimed all this stuff at the rest of us, but the fact is.

They're the ones who should be under our watchful eyes at all times. We're paying them.

We can't have live readouts of who people are talking to, and we need more programs like Signal, so that we can have communications that are hidden from everybody else. Right? I mean, that's what they would do.

How overconfident was this dude? I mean, the rest of us are like, you can reach me on Protonmail under an alias. Peter. Stroke is like, Yeah, we're going to take down the president. Don't worry about it, honey, on text messages.

C-Span Premium.

Well, we'll work on that, we'll get that taken care of.

There were some things that happened in the last week or so, we've already spent a lot of time talking about other things, but.

We just sort of wanted to, generally, I think, talk about a theme. That's kind of come up a lot in the last couple of years and seems to be happening more and more often. Which is just politicians just openly denying that they said, something that they previously said. Now, the place that we're seeing this most often currently seems to have to do with people denying that we had mandate policies. But while I queue some of these up, Walter, just your thoughts just generally on on this whole idea of openly memory-holing things again. We saw an example of it with the Canada incident, where they stood up in the middle of parliament and said we'd like to strike that from the record. But that's kind of happening in more and more overt fashion of late.

In particular with some of these Covid policies.

I wasn't. I'm not sure who the security official was this week who was claiming that they'd never, never wanted troops in Syria or something. And then we now have a case of people claiming there were never vaccine mandates.

But I look at it as a further extension of this movement, to keep you trapped in the moment.

They don't even have to memory hole it, it seems. They just say I didn't do it and challenge you to challenge them. And you might have all the evidence in the world on your side, but you still hesitate. And that represents total victory for the Orwellian elite. Because when you can prove that two plus two equals four, but you're afraid of the people who say it's equals five, you're utterly defeated.

Well, your department, or the head Start, which is under your department, had a mask mandate until late last year for two-year-olds and above. Even outdoors. So can you point to any public health benefit of that policy, right? We never forced anyone to do anything because we don't have the jurisdiction or authority to do that. Did you encourage states to adopt student vaccine mandates as you're not encouraged?

This is the former Covid Response minister, Chris Hipkins, from New Zealand.

But remember, there was an entire national protest about mandates, and he says this.