This week in Patrick Smith's ASK THE PILOT:
BOREDOM IN THE AGE OF TERROR: MARTIN AMIS ON 9/11
ALSO, PILOTS AND AVOIDING THUNDERSTORMS
TERROR:
“…Amis sees the impact of United 175 as the "defining moment" of September 11th. “Until then,” he writes, “America thought she was witnessing nothing more serious than the worst aviation disaster in history; now she had a sense of the fantastic vehemence raged against her.” Not quite, I think. In my mind, that threshold wasn’t crossed until the actual fall of the towers. Had the buildings not fallen, I suspect that our September 11th hangover, which rages to this day, might not have been so prolonged. From my book, “Ask the Pilot”…
“As I stand awestruck in this ....-hole airport restaurant in South Carolina, the television shows the towers of the World Trade Center. They are not just afire, not just shedding debris and pouring out oil-black smoke. They are * falling down. * Had the airplanes crashed, blown up, and reduced the upper halves of those buildings to burned-out hulks, the whole event would nonetheless have clung to the realm of believability. But it was the collapse -- the groaning implosions and the pyroclastic tornadoes whipping through the canyons of lower Manhattan -- that catapulted the event from ordinary disaster to pure historical infamy. The sight of those ugly, magnificent towers collapsing onto themselves is the most sublimely terrifying thing I have ever seen…”
AND BOREDOM:
“…Of all of modern life's many rituals, none are marinated in boredom so much as air travel. "Flying" is what we call it. How misleading. We don't fly so much as sit and stand around for interminable amounts of time. Nowhere is this endured more painfully, need I point out, than at the security line. We collectively spend millions of man-hours each day, waiting in queue to have our belongings scrutinized, in a serial of meaningless pomp, by a lackey in a blue shirt and a phony badge, whose primary job it is to confiscate non-dangerous items.
More than any clash of civilizations, tedium is the legacy of Mohammed Atta. And we're stuck with it, I fear, at least for the foreseeable future. The legacy of that palindromic Egyptian killer cannot be easily undone, even by the fresh thinking and clearheaded sensibilities (so it seems) of our newest president-elect. The terrorists have won, goes the refrain, and we can say that much. It isn't quite what they *hoped* to win, but they've won it nevertheless…”
Full story here:
http://www.salon.com/tech/col/smith/...askthepilot298
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