Is bin Laden winning?

The seats were never comfortable. I flew first class exactly once … from Boise, Idaho to Salt Lake City. Hardly enough to be the basis of any judgment. And there was still some waiting at the airport. Usually. “No waiting” was the big perk in flying in the company Learjet. You could just walk out, get on, and leave. It was like driving a car. But it certainly wasn’t any more comfortable inside. And there was no bathroom in that thing. A flight from the east coast back to Salt Lake was a real endurance contest.

On one occasion, I was just barely in time for a flight out of LA. I threw my luggage and a tip to the skyhop, ran down the concourse, and jumped in the plane just as they were closing the door at the end of the jetway. You don’t do that anymore!! My luggage made it back to Salt Lake too. I even made an international flight to Iceland once that way. My wife and I got the very last two seats because they had already given our assigned seats away.

There used to be a real joy in flying. I can remember the first Frontier Airline (It died and was reborn. Companies can do that.) had a “Steak Breakfast” flight between Salt Lake and Denver for fifty bucks! That flight is only about an hour long, wheels up to wheels down. I have never seen stewardesses hustle like that before or since. The show was better than the breakfast.

I had the infinite pleasure of being with my wife when she took her very first flight. The way she hugged my arm on takeoff was something I’ll never forget. SAS used to give you wine in glass glasses on transatlantic flights. We still have a pair. (We asked. They said, “Sure! We just throw them away.”)

If you’re lucky, the view of the Washington, DC mall from the flight path down the Potomac to National Airport (It will never be “Reagan” to me.) is better than any other way you can possibly see it. The view of Mt. Hood from some flights out of Portland, Oregon is pretty good too. Some views are not so good. I can remember seeing a forest fire leaping above the trees on a fire line twenty miles long west of Colorado Springs once.

Even the waiting could be fun. Remember the Krishna nuts in orange robes that would gather around the airport entrances? I do. A flight into Vienna, Austria turned out to involve a several hour wait on the tarmac in Budapest back when the Russians were still in charge. (I asked if I could visit the airport terminal. They said, “Nyet.”) I can remember watching men load luggage into a tail compartment on a Russian jet by lifting each piece over their head into a hatch above them. It was the best object lesson in why we won the cold war I have ever seen.

Time, economics, and terrorists have done for that! Last Sunday’s New York Times has an article pointing out that the terrorists are succeeding even when they fail. One of bin Laden’s goals is to stop his pure and holy Moslem culture from being contaminated by our decadent western culture. When ordinary tourists like you and me fail to visit the temples of Babylon, bin Laden is succeeding.