National Insecurity

As part of my work in arts education, I spend a lot of time traveling to conferences and meetings in other cities, which means I spend a lot of time in airports. I love flying, but like an albatross, I’m fine up in the air, but all too often have an awkward experience on the ground. My departure gate is frequently moved at the last minute to the far other end of the airport. If I have a layover, I end up waiting for the shuttle bus to my connecting flight (boarding in a few minutes - the last flight of the evening), wondering whether it is going to show up at all, let alone on time. When my flights are delayed, re-routed, or canceled, I become a hostage of the airport, placed in fluorescent custody.

So I’ve begun thinking about the aesthetics of airports, wondering 1) what is it about airports that makes so many of them such unpleasant places to be stuck in, and 2) why the food has to be so damned expensive.

As I pondered, more questions followed: Why do some airports have free wireless, while others make you pay through the nose for the privilege of getting some useful work done while you are held captive? Why do some have cushy rows of adjoining seats that allow weary travelers to lie down and take a much needed nap, while others have rigid armrests that enforce perpetual sitting-up-straight? Why do some airports make you take off your shoes AND belt (causing me to shuffle barefoot and clumsy through the metal detector with my pants slipping down about my ample posterior), and some just don’t? Why is there the exact same Tie store at almost every airport worldwide?

You’d think that the air transportation industry, concerned about the mounting fury of frustrated customers, would work to make our prolonged, unplanned visits to airports as pleasant as possible. But maybe, just as the animated universe portrayed in the feature length cartoon Monsters, Inc. is powered by children’s screams, airports are in fact secretly fueled by our collective irritation.

And why are airports almost always taupe, with flecked terrazzo floors?

Finally, I identified my two pet airport peeves:

Access to Electricity: Airport electrical outlets were not designed with iPods, cell phones, or lap-tops in mind. Whenever my flight is delayed, my computer battery can be counted on to go out the moment I sit down to work. I begin the ritual of searching for a place to "plug in". Usually there is an outlet every few hundred feet, at ground level, each dominated by a diferent cross-legged gen-Xer, sitting on the floor, monopolizing both outlets. I hover over him or her, pouting and feeling very put out, hoping that my whiny body language will move my young colleague to warmly invite me to pull up some institutional gray carpet and share in the electricity. This never happens.

Science Fiction Announcements: As a young man, I was thoroughly spooked by science fiction movies like “Soylent Green”, in which disembodied voices utter bland, somewhat threatening, but strangely upbeat commands to slightly roboticized, controlled societies. But that is exactly what the endless security announcements at airports sound like. “Report unattended baggage and suspicious behavior”. “Personal belongings may be treated as a danger to the facility”, “Inappropriate remarks or jokes concerning security may result in your arrest”. A culture of surveillance.

These announcements are heavily freighted with two highly contradictory subtexts: 1) “Be scared- aliens are comin' to getcha” and 2) “Feel safe – everything is being taken care of for you. Just don’t ask how”.

But what is most frightening to me is observing my own gradual loss of healthy paranoia. I’m starting to think of this fearcasting as normal. I am becoming the proverbial torpid frog, happily parboiled while splashing about in a pot of water being slowly heated by a raising flame. Today, in the Houston airport, during my layover on my way back from an arts education meeting in Merida, Mexico, I could swear I heard the announcer say: “The threat advisory level today, as established by the Department of Homeland Security, is BORING”. Of course, the taped warning actually said “Orange”. (It’s always “Orange”, though who the hell knows what “Orange” means.) But these announcements ARE boring. Verbal wallpaper. To use Hannah Arendt’s pitch perfect phrase, they exemplify the “banality of evil”. And one has to wonder how the featured voice artists, usually women, are auditioned to best communicate this lulling, cosseting, Orwellian message of unending threat.

One chink in the armor occurred to me, however. The star aliens of Homeland Security’s warnings are, of course, brown people who look Islamic, with second billing going to brown people who look Latino. But in the Houston airport, these warnings were made in English AND IN SPANISH. We are truly becoming a bilingual nation, united in fear. Spanish speaking people may be treated as second-class citizens, but at least they now have equal access to free-floating, government-sponsored anxiety.

Later, when I was in the air on my way back to Chicago, it was announced that if anyone wanted to watch the movie, they should remember: “English, Channel 1, Spanish, Channel 2.” That little quote, paradoxically balancing acceptance and marginalization, seems like an apt metaphor for the nation at large.

Arnold Aprill
Founding and Creative Director
Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education (CAPE)
www.capeweb.org