Commentary
Well, it happened again. A friend was coming to visit with a layover flight covering three major airports. It should have taken a few hours. Instead, it took 12 hours, and only with the assistance of Amtrak on the last leg. The rebooked flight would have meant another 36-hour delay, so that was out of the question. As for now, the luggage is still lost.
(Quick note: never check luggage if you can help it. If you are flying anywhere, you should figure out how to pack your life in a bag small enough to fit under your seat. Yes, it’s absurd but that’s where we are today. This is our plight.)
Why is all this happening?
Like so many others, I’ve begun to assume the worst. This is because the worst assumptions and explanations of the strange happenings all around us keep being proven to be true. The list of “conspiracy theories” that turn out to be correct based on all facts and evidence is growing by the day and the hour.
Let’s consider this subject that is deeply vexing to every American traveler: the complete unreliability of domestic airlines. Sure, there is a chance you will book a two-hop trip somewhere and it will come off without a hitch. But that chance is increasingly slim.
It’s a mark of our systematically declining living standards. Speed and reliability of travel is a mark of modernity and progress. But these days, it’s mostly something to dread. At first it was the absurdities of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), an agency that should never have been created in the first place. Then it was the masks: how preposterous was that?
No one talks about the vaccine mandates anymore but they caused a brutal purge of the whole industry. We still don’t have firm data on the number of injuries inflicted by those who acquiesced. In any case, this led to what everyone calls “persistent staffing shortages” as if it was an act of nature.
But really the current problems began with lockdowns from which the industry still hasn’t recovered. Domestic travel is still down by 10 percent from pre-pandemic levels. You can’t panic and mandate the near-closure of an industry for six months to a year and expect it to bounce back like nothing happened.
That period from March 2020 to a year later and following have proven devastating for the industry and also American life generally.
It is not nature causing this mess, despite what the crazies say. They want to blame climate change on everything. Indeed, airlines like to do that too. Your flight is canceled because of the weather they say, as you look out the window at sunny skies and the radar shows absolutely nothing going on at your destination either.
Another unmentioned cause is the flat-out incompetence of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which purports to be the regulatory cop on the beat. All it really does is throw sand in the gears, forever tightening rules, restrictions, mandates, and standards. In some ways, the FAA regards the perfect flight as no flight at all: no risk, no emissions, no uncertainty, and no work to do.
This does seem to be where the current system is driving us. We have all the knowledge, all the resources, all the demand and the supply, and yet the system is getting worse all the time. What does that remind you of? Yes, that sounds just like socialism. No centrally managed economy or industry can improve on decentralized decision-making by people with a heavy stake in the outcome and a profit motive to drive it all forward.
But let’s just pretend that a cabal of evil geniuses are secretly plotting to get rid of domestic travel via plane. They wouldn’t have to abolish it outright. They would only need to create conditions to cause enough suffering so that people gradually decline to use the service. Instead of five trips in a year, people reduce their travel to only essentials, taking cars, trains, and buses when possible.
Just think about your own experience. Remember when flying was a pleasure and you never worried about rebooking roulette or being stranded at some strange airport wondering if you can manage to sleep in a chair for the night? That was only a few years ago. These days, no one looks forward to what we will encounter at the airport. It’s simply awful.
Back to the evil geniuses. They want a world in which the planes are grounded and you are stuck where you are. How to get there? Just go slowly. Gradually degrade the experience to the point that people decline to use it anymore. The airlines lose money and go out of business. Maybe at some point, there are only a few carriers remaining and they are entirely dependent on government for marching orders.
Another great tactic to deploy from time to time: order a full grounding of all planes out of a major airport. Why? Doesn’t matter. Just do it. Make it last a day or two and then open up again. Sure, everyone will object but you can just mutter something about national security and let the news cycle push the event in the past. This kind of thing makes people less willing even to attempt to fly.
But who is crazy enough to think this is a good idea? Well, lots of people. The climate kvetchers think that grounding planes will fix the warming of the planet. That’s what they say anyway. But other people have rolled the end of airline travel into their larger ideological vision of what I’ve called techno-primitivism. This is a corporatist system ruled by an elite that gradually drives down living standards so that we all live like serfs in 15-minute cities, buying all that we need from cartelized big-box stores in our own communities.
It’s a ghastly vision but this is precisely what Anthony Fauci laid out for us in his overlooked August 2020 Cell article in which he called for “rebuilding the infrastructures of human existence, from cities to homes to workplaces, to water and sewer systems, to recreational and gatherings venues.”
If you read the entire piece, what you find is that he blames all infectious diseases and hence all problems in the world about which he was tasked to care on one thing: human mobility. He says it began 12,000 years ago. It’s been downhill ever since. Freedom has permissioned the spread of terrible pathogens that have made the world a dirty and disgusting place. He says we can’t go back 12,000 years (thank you for that, Tony) but we can “at least use lessons from those times to bend modernity in a safer direction.”
So yes, part of that is the deprecation of domestic travel. Think about this. If such an evil Fauci-led cabal wanted this, they wouldn’t have to mandate it. They would just assist in creating the conditions that gradually cause the system to crash on its own. They would do things like panic the country into lockdowns, force masks on every traveler, mandate shots for all workers, and watch as the reliably incompetent managers do the rest of the deed on their own.
As a final note, under the techno-primitivism model, not all flight is ended. The ruling elite, as always, will have full access to their chartered flights. It’s just the rest of us who will be forced to walk and ride bikes just as in Mao’s China.
On the phone with a friend yesterday—a brilliant man with a clear mind—he said that he is beginning to suspect the worst. He has come to believe that there is a deliberate plot alive in the land that is seeking the controlled demolition of everything we used to call civilization. I got a chill in my spine. I could not confidently disagree.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.