If, like me,
you're a fan of the Financial Times weekend edition you've probably
read Tyler Brule's Fast Lane column, even if you don't approve of the
products and destinations he tends to push, or of his once-over-lightly
approach to life in general. Sometimes I'm embarrassed to find myself
enjoying Fast Lane, since Brule is mostly about surfaces - how things
look, rather than what they really are - and his mad dashes by air and
rail around the world often leave me wishing that he would sit still
and express no opinions at all.
But lately I've come to take
Brule's globalized views on consumption more seriously. For one thing,
he really does have a good sense of what's right about a hotel, city or
airline, as well as what's terribly wrong. Now, with the absurd,
Bushian overreaction to the Christmas Day terrorist attempt, Brule has
come up with a remedy for American stupidity that I find altogether
brilliant: Boycott the United States.
Nothing else seems to be
waking up the country: not electing a phony reformer as president; not
gutting the economy with worthless mortgages, reckless banking and
"free trade," not invading countries where no one is interested in our
corrupted approach to "democracy" or in our "value system." No, we need
outside pressure to save us, and Brule has offered a fine strategy.
Granted,
Brule has a narrow interest, which is comfort and ease in airports and
on airplanes. Mainly, he's responding to complaints from business
travelers who want to cancel or put off trips to the land of the
supposedly free and the home of the allegedly brave. Obviously, no one
in his or her right mind wants to endure the added hours of waiting,
the full-body searches and the arbitrary carry-on rules that the
Transportation Safety Administration has now put in effect.
A
friend, the mother of two young girls, tells me that on her flight back
to New York from a vacation in Costa Rica, she was forbidden for the
last hour of the journey to cover her sleeping 2-year-old in a coat or
a blanket, so she had to remove the cover every time the flight
attendant walked by, then put it back on. Two weekends ago, I nearly
canceled what should have been an easy round-trip to Montreal, so
fearful was I of delays by Newark Airport "security" (someone had shut
down the airport a few days earlier when another passenger observed him
sneaking into a terminal boarding area from the TSA-supervised exit
lane, evidently to kiss his girlfriend goodbye). At first, I was
pleasantly surprised that the Canadians apparently feel that they have
nothing to fear from incoming New Yorkers; I got to the airport far
earlier than necessary, zipped through security with my carry-on bag (a
bag, by the way, recommended by Tyler Brule) and used the lavatory on
my Air Canada flight just 20 minutes before landing.
Returning to
New York the next day was another matter. I was compelled to check my
carry-on (for some reason, they were allowing laptops only), told I
couldn't board with a plastic bag carrying newspapers or books and was
given a full-body frisk, front and back, once I got past the U.S.
border guards stationed in Trudeau Airport. This was time-consuming,
annoying and incoherent. Other passengers on my flight boarded with
carry-on bags, and when I complained to the Air Canada gate clerk, she
threw up her hands and said she didn't know the rules (presumably, the
"rules" were being imposed on Canada by U.S. Homeland Security).
Brule
isn't just a critic; he has good suggestions for improving airport
security, such as better pay for screeners. Not only would this attract
"brighter, more service-minded souls," but it would also build a
higher-quality team who could be educated in the rudiments of good
police work. (Brule would probably concur with a letter writer to the
FT that whatever search techniques are applied, "the only serious way
to screen travelers is at the boarding gate," since airports are filled
with low-wage, high-turnover service workers who can't be thoroughly
vetted.)
As dynamic as it is, though, Brule's radical idea "to
stop flying on U.S. airlines and to shun the U.S." is too limited. As
he correctly notes, "there's nothing like a lost commercial opportunity
to get the U.S. thinking differently," and "a crippled civil-aviation
sector is not good news for the likes of Boeing and its suppliers." But
why stop at forcing America to make jet-plane travel less unpleasant
and keep Boeing stock high? Why not go beyond the improvement of
airport security?
As everyone in our promised land must have
noticed by now, the public-school system is shot, the trains are slow
and infrequent, medical care is an expensive crap shoot and lots of
people are out of work. How serious is the crisis? Well, national
security begins at home, and the misspelling (typo, if you're
charitable) by somebody in the State Department of Umar Farouk
Abdulmutallab's name, after his father warned our embassy in Nigeria
about the terrorist danger his son posed, is emblematic of a deeper
education crisis in America that is causing "intelligence failures"
beyond the bungling of the computer match that might have revoked
Abdulmutallab's U.S. visa.
These intelligence failures are most
glaring in big, bloody, self-defeating disasters such as the American
war in Afghanistan. But they're also manifest, less obviously, in your
own hometown. These days, the worst local intelligence failure I can
think of is the proposal by New York's Metropolitan Transportation
Authority to eliminate free passes for students. Brilliant! Just when
we need more people who know how to spell, the public transit system in
the city with the biggest school system is discouraging kids,
especially poor ones, from getting to class. Not only do schools teach
spelling, but many also offer typing courses. I'll never forget my
father insisting that I learn how to touch-type fast and accurately. If
I did, he insisted, I could always get a job - presumably, even in the
U.S. State Department.
Whatever the effect of "Boycott America"
on plane travel, don't end it unless we continue free bus and subway
travel for schoolchildren in New York. The security of the homeland
demands it.