Just Plane Ridiculous

It appears that airlines are now adding to their role in the fight against terrorism by seeking out and capturing fashion terrorists.

On June 15, US Airways kicked a 20-year old man off a flight because he refused to pull up his baggy pants. The man’s pants, according to the report by the air carrier, were “below his buttocks, but above the knees, and his boxer shorts were showing.” First, let’s get the important legal issue out of the way so as not to be distracted by the fashion issue. He was black. It's too easy to get into the stereotype of a young black man with dreadlocks wearing saggy, baggy pants. I won't except to say if US Airways was picking on him, they are US Assholes.

I wasn't there, so my view of the circumstances is limited to my computer screen. What I gather is a flight attendant, whom I'm guessing spends too much time during layovers reading Glamour Magazine, did not feel the young man's pajama pants were sitting properly at the waist. When asked to pull them up, the young man declined. The captain got involved, evacuated the plane, and - I'm cutting to the chase here - had him arrested. A response from a spokesman defending the airline's action stated the captain was within his rights to have the man removed from the plane because the man's refusal could lead the captain to think, "What if he refuses something else in the air?" Like what? Stay calm if the flight goes down?

It's kind of a stretch for me to see not pulling up your pants as an indication that maybe you won't put your tray table up if told, or not fasten your seat belt when the light goes on. Maybe the attendant was offended. Maybe some passengers were. If that was the case, I thought, maybe there was some merit in the flight crew's request for him to be properly attired. I thought that maybe the crew was protecting small children from a visual image they shouldn't see until they at least reached middle school, or until they got home and fired up Grand Theft Auto on their PlayStation. That's where my thoughts were taking me.

His dream to be a runway model was 

fulfilled when he got Runway 7L/25R at

Sky Harbor Int'l Airport in Phoenix.

My thoughts and I didn't travel for very long, however, because the next airline story we read was about US Airways letting a male passenger fly dressed in women's underwear. Same airline, six days before the baggy pants incident. Again, let’s get the important legal issue out of the way so as not to be distracted by the fashion issue. The man was white.

The unidentified man, middle-aged and apparently stunning in heels, claimed he's a "frequent flier" (wink, wink) and he often boards airplanes dressed in women's underwear and thigh-high stockings - probably the kind one would find in, oh, I don't know, Glamour Magazine? His outfit, according to airline personnel, was acceptable because it didn't expose any offending body parts. No, didn't expose any parts, but certainly highlighted a few. This man suddenly became the validation for the black man's complaint, and in my view, every black man's complaint going back to the 60's. The man allowed himself to be interviewed by the media on the condition of anonymity. I'm guessing by the time this blog gets posted, he will have ironically fucked that condition up by talking to the media.

In my lifetime I’ve watched pants make a slow, southerly migration from above the navel, so it’s not surprising to me they’re as close to the knees as they are now. Every generation since I was born has complained about the newer generation’s clothing style changes. No doubt the next generation will make fashion strides that will cause a previous one to cringe. I’m not a big fan of the sagging pants, myself, but I get it. It’s the style. My teenage son sags his pants, albeit in a white, middle-class, conservative way. He’s not showing the crack of his ass, nor does he walk around bow-legged with a hand crimping the waistband to keep his pockets off his ankles. I’m okay with that. More okay with that than him wearing his sister's stockings. If I had to choose, I'd rather sit on a plane next to a kid in his baggy pajamas than a middle-aged white guy wearing chick's underwear. Or a dude who hasn't showered for a couple of days. Or a fat woman doused in some after-bath armpit douche.

US Airways has no dress code, but they enforce one. The airline industry has set standards for just about everything, and my experience has been they enforce the actual rules with the same narrow-minded subjectivity as the do the non-rules. There are other things they should be giving their attention to instead of how we're dressed. They come up short in one area that needs regulating - kids - and here are some rules I think should be put in play:

Enough is enough! I have had it with these

 motherfuckin’ kids on this motherfuckin’ plane!

1) Parents with children between the ages of "potentially annoying" and "need to be smacked" should be required to pay a security deposit for their kid's behavior. If the kid disturbs the passengers during the flight, the parents forfeit the deposit.

2) If a child cannot walk onto the plane with his/her own two stubby little legs, the munchkin counts as a carry-on item.

3) If the kid counts as carry-on and doesn't fit inside the sizer at the boarding gate, the kid gets checked.

Rules like that make it a win-win flight for everyone. The passengers get a flight without a few brats messing it up, and the airlines generate more fees. And God knows, they need more fees. A 2011 report came out that the airline industry made only $3.8 billion on luggage charges and other fees in the first six months of the year. Go ahead, wipe the tear from your eye.

$3.8 billion. Billion. With a “B.” And they did it in six months. That’s close to $21 million per day, or considering that a person blinks their eyes an average of 23,040 times per day, about $910 in the blink of an eye. The airline industry can make $5.7 billion in the time it takes a woman to ultimately push out a baby. Talk about getting screwed.

$3.8 billion. With that kind of profit I'd think the airlines could post a Blackwell or Cojocaru at the boarding gate. Hell, dig up Joan and Melissa Rivers and throw them out there, too. Lay some red carpet down the gangway, glow it up with some low angle spotlights. Set up a panel of judges. Encourage us to put on our best duds and strut our shit. Winner gets a free upgrade to first class! Or...

Spend some of that money teaching your employees that unless they can reasonably articulate why an issue is a safety concern, then their opinions are like assholes and expressing the former risks making themselves look like the latter. They need to understand that you can't regulate fashion sense because, like common sense, there isn't any.

Yearbooks

On the news this morning I was treated to the anchor's pre-commercial sound bite about a high school that was recalling its yearbook because the yearbook contained "child pornography." That was it. No additional information. No clarification. A high school yearbook contained child pornography.

I immediately came to the conclusion during the commercial break that some demented pervert of a photographer wasn't satisfied enough with legitimately taking photo after photo of boys and girls under the age of eighteen, he had to insert into a school's yearbook some disgusting pic of a half-naked, hairy, fat man rubbing lotion on a similarly unclothed young boy. I thought it had to be something along that line. Maybe he was a former student of the school who was teased and taunted because he spent more time in the A.V. room than on the football field. Sweet revenge...he comes back to the very school that destroyed his adolescence and sabotages the book that captures for eternity the youthful, unsullied memories of these unsuspecting teens. That bastard!

Then the reporter came back on and washed that filth from my mind. Sort of.

The story progressed into one in which a photo of a school dance contained a boy and a girl allegedly engaged in a "sexual act." The kids are in the background, out of focus and unidentifiable, and most reports I heard or read indicated you had to be looking for it to see it. To the trained eye, however, something was going on that looked like a hand going up a skirt and the conclusion was that it was inappropriate for a school yearbook. School officials subsequently called for students to return their yearbooks for editing, which I can see as a reasonable response. Where the story took a turn for me was when the school and law enforcement officials, quoting the letter of the law, said any student not returning their yearbook could face the possibility of criminal charges for possession of child porn.

Okay, first of all, a teenage boy with his hand up the skirt of a teenage girl at a school dance - however inappropriate that is, and as a father with a daughter, it is - isn't child porn. Calling it child porn is gratuitous, misleading, and flagrantly irresponsible reporting for the sake of ratings. Second, any reporter, any cop, or any lawyer or judge who has been to high school has either a) been a party to this type of activity, b) attempted to be a party to this type of activity, or c) was too much of a dweeb to do or be a party to this type of activity, wishes they had been, and now condemns this type of behavior out of spite. Third, as soon as the first kid gets charged with possession of child porn the entire school faculty and yearbook staff involved with the yearbook project should get charged with distributing child porn because they made it and sold it. My personal opinion is that the school administrators, upon realizing they didn't do their job, are now using the threat of criminal sanctions against the kids to save their own asses.

Enough said. Almost.

Naturally, I did what I suspect many people did when they heard about this story. I pulled out my yearbooks and started skimming the pages looking for porn and other inappropriate, offensive pictures. Here's what I found:

Needless to say, I was shocked to find a picture of a

pussy in my high school’s yearbook. I’m still 
waiting for the vice principal to call me.

A boy in a unitard mounting another boy in a unitard from the rear.

A boy holding a girl in a headlock and simulating shooting her in the head with an imaginary gun.

The Thespian Club.

A football player with his hand on his crotch with the caption, "I must have fumbled it."

A shop teacher with his hand on the thigh of a very hot, very blonde, cardboard cutout of a woman advertising Blue Nun wine.

Four shirtless boys sitting on the edge of a swimming pool - and I can't see if they are wearing swim trunks - with five more shirtless boys in front of them in water above their waists - and I can't tell if they're wearing swim trunks nor can I see their hands, but all five have big smiles.

And...a photo of a school dance which has, in the background, an unidentified boy engaged in a sexual act (kissing) with an unidentified girl. And I guarantee that as close as the other boys in the photo are dancing with their dates, they're sporting various degrees of wood.

I didn't see the offending "porn" photo in this particular school's yearbook. To what degree it is or isn't offensive is subject to interpretation. I suspect the reason why the school presented the matter with the threat of arrest was because asking would have encouraged non-compliance. These are teenagers so, duh, there would be those students who would feel like they owned a very special memento of their school year - maybe their last school year - and not care too much about wiping off the egg that landed on the faces those responsible adults who graded them down on reports and projects for lack of attention to detail. Me thinks me sees a bit of irony there.

It's hard to say if anyone would have given a shit had the matter not been publicized. What would probably have happen to those yearbooks would likely be the same as what happened to mine...two weeks later they'd end up on a shelf or in a box and wouldn't be worth another look until that one day, thirty-plus years later, when someone points out there is a picture on a page in a yearbook somewhere of a boy and a girl doing something kids shouldn't do. And then they'll do what I did.

I got my books out of the box, dusted them off, and found pictures. And looking through my books I see pictures that today would be seen as offensive to society's morals. I see snapshots of a time when we weren't any more innocent, but we were a lot more open minded and clearly a lot less anal. Finished, the books go back into the box so they can collect more dust. Maybe my kids will eventually find them and scan the pages. They'll no doubt laugh at our hair and clothes, and probably comment about how old we look now or how young we looked then. They'll see the picture of the dance, but won't notice the boy kissing the girl. Or if they do, won't care.

The school's threat to the kids and parents, sadly, was bigger than their apology, which as I write this I haven't heard or read. Maybe those educators should dust off their own yearbooks and let the kids judge them. If they can find the box they're in. Because yearbooks, like a lot of things kids get from school, will mean nothing more in two weeks than they will in thirty years.

Unless part of that thirty years is spent in prison on a child porn possession conviction.

Words, Part 1: Bad Words

Blogger's note: "Words" is an ongoing feature in which I take a look at special qualities and misconceptions of the English language, how much fun it is to play with its words, and why it reigns as one of the hardest languages to master.

I don’t believe there are any bad words.

There are inappropriate words, and there are words used irresponsibly. There is bad grammar. But bad words? I don’t believe they exist. The choice to employ a particular word could be bad, but that just makes the choice bad, not the word bad. Bad, obscene, filthy, dirty, foul…they all imply the same thing toward words, and they’re all just as wrong in my book.

Where would we be today without

Noah Webster, the man who put

the dick in dictionary?

My book, by the way, is the dictionary. Webster’s, Merriam-Webster, New Oxford American, American Heritage. Abridged, unabridged. Hardbound, paperback, pocket, kindled. The dictionary is the toolbox of the wordsmith, and every good craftsman should be able to use every tool available. Every tool, though, has a designed use. As much as you shouldn’t use a wrench as a hammer, you shouldn’t call a retarded kid a retard. But that’s not to say you shouldn’t own a wrench or be able to use the words retarded or retard.

There were a lot of words I grew up with that were perfectly acceptable when I was a kid that now carry the stigma of being offensive. Retarded and gay, to name a couple. Here’s an actual dictionary definition for retarded: “adjective – characterized by retardation: a retarded child.” Retardation is a slowing of progress, a hindrance. It could be applied to a machine or anything else that has the capacity to be slowed in progress. But what example does the dictionary use? A retarded child. How’s that for irony? The very resource I refer to for my use of the English language provides for me an example of how to use a word in the very manner I’m apparently not supposed to use it. The dictionary can call a child a retard, but I can’t. That’s gay.

Yeah, as kids we called stuff gay a lot, too. I recall that some time ago there were commercials aired on television sponsored by the ADCouncil and GLSEN decrying the use of the word gay in referring to something being dumb or stupid, that using the word gay in that manner was apparently offensive to homosexual people. I thought, when was the homosexual community granted exclusive rights to the word gay? Gay was in the dictionary long before it was in the closet. Apparently, it came out with homosexual people and now it shares protected status with them. All things being equal, then, shouldn’t we also refrain from calling something stupid because it could be offensive to stupid people? Not that they'd know they're being offended, but that's beside the point.

There are plenty of words that have had definitions added to them due to popular usage. Ask someone in the South what a cracker is and I'll bet a number of respondents won't think saltine. Does the word "simple" mean easy, or ignorant. Let's ask some simple folk. And comedian Wanda Sykes can berate boys in a restaurant for saying gay is offensive all she wants, after she apologizes for making a joke of Rush Limbaugh's drug addiction, which to me was as equally offensive to all addicts as it was funny about Rush. If I say gay and I mean stupid, and it’s known that I mean stupid, then a homosexual person being offended by claiming I’m making a disparaging comment about their lifestyle is…well, gay. As in stupid.

I understand the sensitivity issues surrounding the use of some words. I don’t condone offending others, whether individually or as a group or culture, any more than I feel it’s right for others to place restrictions on me for the words I choose to use. That’s why I have rules for how I express myself verbally and in writing, especially when it comes to the use of what is commonly referred to as profanity.

Profanity, defined, is the state or quality of being profane. Profane has secular roots, a blasphemous application. A word deemed profane isn’t necessarily an obscenity, which itself is nothing more than a word deemed taboo – inappropriate – in polite company. For example, one may say to one's peers on the way to a work meeting, “I hate meeting with these assholes,” but one shouldn’t sit in a work meeting with those same assholes and ask, “How much longer are you assholes going to keep this meeting going?” Sensibility dictates that you really should know your audience and know just how far particular words travel in that company. I’ll spit fire in the cozy confines of my car at someone who cuts me off in traffic. I’ll do it in front of my wife. My kids are old enough that I’m comfortable taking the governor off my mouth and saying things in front of them I wouldn't have said when they were in car seats. But I wouldn’t walk down the cereal aisle of the grocery store pondering aloud, “How many different fucking types of Mini Wheats do we need?”

So rule number one, I take responsibility for what I say, the words I use. If I offend, I’ll apologize. I’ve been disciplined at work a couple of times for saying things that were far less inappropriate than what my peers have said on a regular basis. I didn’t say anything about the offended parties to offend them, but what came out of my mouth didn’t fit with the audience for which it was said. To whatever degree I said what I said, I was wrong. No excuses, no debate about it. Mea culpa for using the word “fucking” in your presence and hurting your virgin ears. Here’s a tissue, move on.

Rule number two, I pay attention that the words I use are in the proper context. More specifically, I don’t use language gratuitously. I know some people who interject variations of the word fuck into their speech with the same involuntary control as blinking their eyes. I'm a sniper, not a machine gunner. Using words like that dilutes their impact potential and makes the speaker sound just fucking unintelligent. (I know someone who would have added "fucking" five more times in that sentence.)

Here's the thing...a word is a word. It's a series of letters assembled to make speech intelligible, and any word used correctly and with personal responsibility should not be censored or condemned or muted. No one should tolerate being offended by language, but no one should automatically assume that a word or words rolling off someone's tongue is directed specifically at them in an offending manner unless the context of the use makes it clear that it is. I think we are smart enough to know when something is gay or retarded, and when someone is gay or retarded. If not, it's time for all of us retarded people to stop acting gay.

Why a Blog?

Three reasons. Diaries are for twelve-year-old girls, journals are gay, and I didn't spend all that time in that 7th grade summer school typing class learning how to type with five fingers and a thumb so I could hand write in a ruled notebook. It's a bonus that my delete key will last infinitely longer than a pencil eraser, and that I'm not limited to how much ink is in my pen or how cramped my fingers get.

But the answer to "Why a Blog?" doesn't explain why I'm blogging.

I need an outlet because I'm distracted. I go out in public and see people engaged in behavior that makes me wonder if there was something they drank, other than alcohol, that shorted out their synapses of sensibility. I'm not just talking about people doing dumb things. I'm talking about the blatant disregard for rules that govern everyday life, everything from fashion to courtesy to hygiene to recognizing that by definition the word "public" means you are not the only one in the room. Or in the store, or at the airport, or on the road, or...you get the idea.

I need an outlet because my cranium is full of the grainy remains of my thoughts, grainiums, trapped in a filter of personal responsibility that stops it from free-flowing out of my mouth. Concepts, expressions, opinions, expletives. Questions with answers, questions with no answers. Unnecessary questions having rhetorical answers, rhetorical questions with unneeded answers.

For almost half of my life (as of this writing) I've worked in an environment in which, much like farting, I must look over my shoulder before I speak lest I embarrass myself or offend someone else. And as childish as it may seem, a good fart can be just as funny as a well-placed, conversational "fuck." Unfortunately, either has the ability to offend. If I didn't have personal rules of conduct, I wouldn't bother looking over my shoulder when I fucking farted.

You get the tone of where I'm going.

Understand as you read this blog, I'm not out to offend, I'm out to open my mind. I want to share my humor, my criticism, my disbelief, my opinions. I'm not naming names, so if you find yourself thinking it's you I'm talking about, that's your problem (even if I probably am talking about you). So don't read me if you've got thin skin, can't take a joke or laugh at yourself, or at me. And I encourage you to laugh at me. Because I'm part of humanity, and collectively as much as individually, we're a sitcom that hasn't aired.

Because I still fall within the bounds of a certain morals clause at work, I will temper my freedom of expression until such time as it doesn't matter. That would be November 24th, 2011, when I am formally retired. Harold Camping can call that date with more certainty than the coming rapture.