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Before resuming my media patrol after ten days in the northwest, I want to say a word about the mode of transportation that got me there and brought me back. Flying has changed. Perhaps influenced by my choice of reading material on this holiday, Camus’ The Plague, I observed that flying has become a collective misery so extreme that a collective human decency is emerging in response. Passengers are doomed to suffer, and no one — not the pilots, nor the flight attendants, nor the check-in clerks — can do anything about it, but they let us know that they care and that they’ll be suffering right alongside us. Our haggard flight attendants, for instance, didn’t pretend that the cheese snack packs they offered for $4 a pop (but in limited supply) were nourishing, or tasty, or anything but a humiliation. And as the night flight to Chicago left the Dallas airport (let’s not get into why it was necessary to fly to Vancouver by way of Dallas), one flight attendant got on the PA and admitted to the whole plane that some passengers had been asking about blankets but there were no blankets.
