George Monbiot’s current screed about the airplane, on the approximate centennial of powered flight, makes even Michael Moore’s latest drivel sound — well, if not sensible, at least grounded somewhere vaguely in reality.
Monbiot’s thesis seems to be that airplanes are evil, evil, eeeeeevil, used by evil men to do evil things to poor, hapless innocents around the globe.
Tomorrow should be a day of international mourning. December 17 2003 is the centenary of the world’s most effective killing machine.
And he’s not talking here about airline food, either.
The most obvious evil can be, of course, bombing. Monbiot goes on a great length about the use of bombing in various wars and imperialist aggressions over the last century. It’s not altogether clear whether his objections are over the bombing per se, or that not everyone being bombed had access to bombers themselves.
But the evil can also be that of power-mongering. See, airplanes let Evil Imperialist Masters of the World get around easily, and expand their Evil Commercial and Political Hegemony Everywhere, Everywhere I Tell You. That is, of course, why countries usually provide governmental support for airplane development and airports. It’s not for the Little People, of course, but for the Fat Cats.
This might have something to do with the fact that prime ministers and presidents use it more often than anyone else. Or it might reflect the perennial male obsession with the instruments of control.
Or maybe it’s because ordinary people want to travel places by air, on vacations to exotic locations — or to visit family and friends far away. While folks who live next to airports usually don’t like them much, people (perhaps even some of the complainants) sure seem to use airplanes a lot.
Despite almost 400,000 objections to the expansion of airports in Britain, the transport secretary will announce new runways at Stansted and Birmingham, and more flights to Heathrow. This, the government hopes, will help accommodate a near-tripling of the number of journeys into and out of Britain by 2030. By then the 400,000 won’t be the only ones wishing that Wilbur and Orville (if indeed they were responsible) had stuck to mending bicycles.
Unless Britain is planning on having a lot more prime ministers and presidents by 2030, I expect that tripling of flights will consist of a lot of ordinary folk using planes — bearing in mind that the ordinary folk of Britain are all closet capitalistic hegemonists who are really evil, too.
Monbiot ignores that, airport expansions or not, presidents and prime ministers and the powerful will (and would) always use planes, for reasons practical, political, and personal. The expansion of flights over the last few decades has come about largely on behalf of the common folk that Monbiot likes so much. Though he pooh-poohs the notion because they, as tourists, are eeevil, too.
We will be told how the aeroplane has made the world a smaller place, how it has brought people closer together, fostering understanding and friendship. There is something in this: the people of powerful nations might be reluctant to permit their leaders to destroy the countries they have visited. But commercial flights, like military flights, are an instrument of domination. As tourists, we engage with the people of other nations on our own terms. The world’s administrators can flit from place to place enforcing their mandate. The corporate jet-set shrinks the earth to fit its needs. Those with access to the aeroplane control the world.
Well, that’s certainly true of my daughter, at least judging by her attitude.
But the evils committed by frequent (or infrequent) fliers go even further, because of how nassssty planes are to the environment.
Those hijackers had turned the civilian product of a military technology back into a military technology, but even when used for strictly commercial purposes, the airliner remains a weapon of mass destruction. Last week the World Health Organisation calculated that climate change is causing 150,000 deaths a year. This figure excludes deaths caused by drought and famine, pests and plant diseases and conflicts over natural resources, all of which appear to be exacerbated by global warming. Flying is our most effective means of wrecking the planet: every passenger on a return journey from Britain to Florida produces more carbon dioxide than the average motorist does in a year. Every time we fly, we help to kill someone.
Which makes one wonder, about Monbiot’s trip in recent months from Britain to Australia, on a mission of mercy lecture and book-flogging tour. Was that a casual act of homicide over which we should all mourn, or just “the perennial male obsession with the instruments of control” that we should all despise?
(via Tim Blair)