I know I have been writing about George Will quite a bit lately but that man gets right up my nose. When I saw the title of his column today I thought that he had suddenly found humor. It is called “Inundated by a river of words”.
At last! I thought, the bespectacled, oft bow-tied pompous windbag has looked in the mirror at his work and is starting to have some self-deprecating humor! Finally a faint sign of humanity from someone who had been auditioning (badly) for an evil Vulcan for decades!
Alas it was not to be. I should have known better, really. What I got when I peeked into the column, was George’s whiny screed about the announcements at airports. Yes, that is right gentle reader, with all that is going on in the world, both good and bad, George Will decided that he must joust against that most pernicious of enemies, the airport public address systems.
I read it anyway, and what I found was another crystal clear example of how Mr. Will is a privileged nit-wit with hot key to his on-line thesaurus.
He complains about the voice at the end of the moving walk way; he complains about the fact that an announcement tells you that smoking areas are outside and away from the doors; he complains that the flight attendants tell you that flights are non-smoking; he complains that they remind you, gently, to take all your belongings with you when you leave the plane; he complains that the trains in Denver tell you that a train is arriving; and he complains that there is an announcement about not leaving your bags unattended.
Let’s start with the obvious which covers most of these “problems” that Will is so spun up about. There are, every single day of the year, in every airport in the nation, people who have never flown on a plane.
I know to someone like Will who has probably clocked more hours in the air than most people have had hot meals this is incomprehensible, but it is true. In order to make the whole process of getting to a destination by air more efficient, it is worth telling these folks what is going on. There is also value in reminding people who last flew several years ago of the current state of affairs.
As for the reminder to take your possessions, I know it seems like something that is not needed, but is there no room for kindness in Will’s vision of America? He makes an exceptionally lame joke about checking the clothes that one is wearing in response to this, but given the number of devices and other items (books, sun glasses, etc) that one might bring on a plane this is just a courteous thing for any airline to do.
The one that really got under my skin was his compliant about the moving walk way and the trains at Denver International Airport. Again for someone like Will this might be annoying but what about blind passengers? They can not see the train nor the end of the walk way.
Should they just be denied the basic information they need to navigate these modes of transport? Or again, how about those folks who have never flown? It not beyond reason that someone who is negotiating this experience for the first time might be nervous and need a little more attention and direction than an experienced traveler. But because it is repetitious and annoying to Will, he has decided to denigrate it in 800 or so words.
This being a George Will column he, of course, has to take a swipe at some liberal group and today’s target is trial lawyers. Will says:
Perhaps some silly warnings are “necessary” to fend off the Fourth Branch of government, a.k.a. trial lawyers. But this merely underscores the fact that all this noise is symptomatic of modern derangements. Solemn warnings about nonexistent risks, and information intended to spare us the slightest responsibility for passing through life with a modicum of attention and intelligence — these express, among other things, an entitlement mentality that the nanny state foments: If something bad or even inconvenient or merely annoying happens to us, even if it results from our foolishness, daydreaming or brooding about the meaning of life, we are entitled to sue someone for restitution.
This is as good as a bit of prose gets when one is looking for a nomination for Douche-Bag of the Decade (an award that Will has been in the running for almost since his conception). As I pointed out above the reason for these warnings and such is not to remove liability, but to help those who have disabilities or have not flown 100,000 miles in the last two years.
Which is really where the annoyance factor with this fetid little column comes into focus. All these things that Will is complaining about can only be a major annoyance if one flies weekly or monthly. In order to do that you must either be exceptionally wealthy or have a good paying job that can afford to send you hoping all over the nation or both.
In Mr. Will’s case it is both. And yet here he is having the chutzpah to complain about the needed warnings and announcements that the hoi palloi need. Not that this should surprise me or anyone else. Will has made a living by looking down his patrician nose at the unwashed masses and telling them that it is their fault they are not wealthy or successful or advantaged, like he is.
For a dedicated defender of the class system Will has missed the part about nobless oblige, where the supposedly noble are expected to be constrained in their words and actions towards the common man.
In George Will’s world that does not exist, and anything that is the least bit inconvenient for him must be the work of evil liberals and trial lawyers, and should be roundly condemned from his perch at the Washington Post.
This just goes to show the total bankruptcy of his conservative views where as long as he has his there is no need to be in this with others. It makes George Will a prime example of a mouthpiece for the 1%, even if he really belongs in the 99% with the rest of us.
The floor is yours.