A View of Life in Airport Hell

The Wall Street Journal

Bookshelf
A View of Life in Airport Hell
By SCOTT MORRIS
May 27, 2008; Page A19

Dear American Airlines
By Jonathan Miles
(Houghton Mifflin, 180 pages, $22)

(snip)

"Dear American Airlines," the 180-page letter begins. "My name is Benjamin R. Ford and I am writing to request a refund in the amount of $392.68." But "request," he decides, is a word "too mincy & polite, I think, too officious & Britishy." He demands a refund. The trouble, Ford says, is that the airline canceled his flight. Now, we've all come to expect being stuck in airports, and we've not come to like it. Not a bit. There is a certain rage that results from being treated like truant kindergartners, potential hijackers and dull herds of cattle. But most of us endure the indignities and swallow the rage. Not Benjamin R. Ford. The last straw wasn't so much the fact that the flight was canceled, or that he will now be spending the night – and writing a letter – at Chicago O'Hare. No, here's what really tore it for him: The flight cancellation means that he'll miss the wedding of his daughter, who has long been estranged from him. In his mind, the occasion was going to be his last chance to make things right.

(snip)

Slowly we begin to learn about the real sources of Ford's misery, in a long, thoroughly amusing and ultimately poignant howl about life's injustices – those he has suffered and those he has committed. Ford, it seems, is a 53-year-old failed poet and former alcoholic who now works as a translator. The airline won't quite appreciate what a catastrophe it is for him to miss his daughter's wedding, he decides, unless he makes clear all the failures and missteps in his life before the fateful flight cancellation. "I'm afraid you'll have to permit me my digressions," Ford writes. "Digressing, after all, is not so different from rerouting, and let's not pretend, dear ones, that you're innocent of that."

(snip)

And Ford – or at least the inspired Mr. Miles – has a knack for pinning down the sort of whimsy that pops into the head of a person who is terminally grounded. At one point Ford notices on one of the ever-present television monitors that Light Sweet Crude is up 0.31 and writes: "Dear American Airlines, I haven't the faintest idea what 'Light Sweet Crude' is but what an irresistible heading for a personals ad, don't you think?" That Ford is stranded between flights while important events are happening elsewhere serves as the central emblem of his semiwretched life. And perhaps that's what gives "Dear American Airlines" its punch. We only take the time to contemplate what we're missing – or what we've missed over the course of a lifetime – when we're stuck somewhere we don't want to be.



URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121184711628821395.html

he wrote about...what I am referring to is the coverage by the WSJ..that is all.

.... Can you imagine Fox News on the in-flight entertainment system? The pre-recorded flight safety announcements voiced by Ann Coulter?