Diasporic Dining XXV: This Side of Paradise

Go to the end of the Long Island Expressway (Exit 73), meaning you haven’t gotten off the highway at Route 105 Manorville leading to Route 27, which is the road to the East End of Long Island and the Hamptons. Instead you will end up in Riverhead, with its long line of retail chains and car dealerships leading to a traffic circle that shoots down Route 58 to BJ’s Club. The relief from the crowded Hamptons is belied by a road that seems like one long shopping mall. But keep going. You will come upon a big neon sign with the words Modern Snack Bar. Right away you will be able to tell that Snack Bar is a misnomer, since the gray shingled building houses a rather large restaurant that serves things like crispy roast duck, clam chowder, lemon chiffon pie and soft-shell crabs (and the avuncular looking owner will tell you just when they came in if you ask). The uniformed staff is cheerful in an almost therapeutic way, and when you see the prices and the unhurried atmosphere you might think you are reliving the famous “A Stop at Willoughby” episode of The Twilight Zone. Of course the utopia that the show’s protagonist ends up in turns out to be death, while the Modern Snack Bar is very much alive, standing on an old country road alongside farms stands and modest white cottages. It’s a matter of faith. You have to keep going. Just when you thought you’d ended up in the depersonalized hell of consumerism, you come to a little piece of yesterday that, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s words, is “this side of paradise.”

Paris Journal II: En Avion

The screen reads Kennebunkport, Lawrence, Fall River, Gulf of Maine. A toy plane follows a red line across the Atlantic Ocean to Paris, Nice, Algiers, the Celtic Sea, the Bay of Biscay. It is 1:26 New York time and 7:26 in Paris. Over three thousand miles have been traveled, translating to over 5,000 Kilometers. The plane heading into the sun is suddenly filled with blinding light. This is the miracle that we all take for granted. Joyce’s Stephen Daedalus is the symbolic son of Icarus, who flew too high, but is the triumph of air travel a form of hubris for which nature intermittently rises up in vengeance, in the form of  mechanical failures and terrorist incidents that humble the awesome mechanical birds? During the Pleistocene era, huge pterodactyls filled the sky. Are jets the distant relatives of these prehistoric creatures, who fell victim to the asteroid that created the  ice age out of which the early forms of man, Homo habilis and Australopithecus, would eventually rise? For all the modernity of the contraption and the way it’s taken its place in the repertoire of modern consciousness (remember the innocence of St Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince?), there is something frighteningly primitive about the way these flocks of man’s invention fill the skies. The screen in the cabin is a cartoon of defiance against the laws of gravity. Will modernity someday face the equivalent of the International Criminal Court in the Hague, now trying crimes against humanity? If it is true that laws of nature are made to be broken—and time will tell the extent to which our carbon footprint has been formed by fuel consuming conveniences like air travel—who will answer for these crimes and what will the sentence finally be?  

Joe Egg Sunny Side Over

Infanticide is a horrible thing, but the toxic mixture of an imperviously garrulous parent and a screaming child on a crowded plane is a bona-fide WMD. Generally, airlines try to stick these creatures towards the back of the fuselage, in what is known to many travelers as Zone #3, but is more aptly designated the Terror Zone. If for any reason a traveler suspects he may be lodged in the Terror Zone, it is imperative that he rush off to one of those concourse bookstores to purchase a copy of Swift’s A Modest Proposal. You remember the famous essay arguing that one solution to the hunger problem in Ireland would be to eat the babies. In the case of the Terror Zone, which some might argue calls for an even more modest proposal, solutions range from pepper spray to an impromptu staging of the bloody climax of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (no M.F.A. required). But please, spare the irony. The modern plane only flies when it has been stuffed like a fois gras-producing goose, with unsuspecting passengers in the role of the goose’s innards. Nowhere to run to, baby. Nowhere to hide. Thoughts of muzzling, encouraging acrobatic activities for which the autonomic nervous system is not prepared, sending the urchin into an Olympic-style half gainer from 34,000 feet, start to percolate. It is terrible to think thoughts like this, thoughts that only run through the minds of mass murderers. You grow to hate the colicky thing for forcing you to become something other than the exemplary citizen that you had planned to be prior to buying that ticket for Des Moines. But would it really be so disconcerting to hear the following announcement? “We wish to call your attention to the emergency doors. Due to an excess of noise on this flight, we will be jettisoning our cargo of infants through those doors. Please unfasten your infant’s seatbelt and prepare to pass him in the direction of the illuminated exit signs.” It wouldn’t be the least bit surprising if Peter Nichols was traveling on a crowded plane when he first got the idea for his classic play, A Day in the Death of Joe Egg.

The Baggage We All Carry

Let’s talk about why Faisal Shahzad got on Air Emirates when he was supposed to be on the no-fly list. Actually, there isn’t much to talk about. Most seasoned fliers can probably provide the answers to the questions that international security services, from the CIA to the Mossad, will be asking in the days ahead, though the answers are likely to be more anecdotal than statistical. Ask how many parents of toddlers who have ordered the chicken nuggets happy meal on the flight to Frankfurt have received instead a series of kosher or vegetarian selections, including the none too happy-making hummus and baba ganoush platter. Or, let’s discuss communications regarding another star-crossed flight, the Northwest Airlines plane carrying passengers to Detroit on Christmas Day. And what about the earlier blunder allowing Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to get on a KLM flight in Lagos in the first place? By the way, Faisal’s and Umar’s fathers could join the same support group in that they are both prominent citizens, one a banker and one a former high ranking Air Force officer, in their respective countries. They would inevitably have something to offer in a discussion about how lives of privilege lead to Taliban membership. Come to think of it, it would make a great Oprah. But we are digressing. Any investigation that deals with why people who shouldn’t are getting on planes must go back to asking the question of why certain pieces of luggage are not getting on planes when they should.  Why have so many of us found that our luggage has inadvertently made it onto an unintentional no-fly list? Let’s talk about checking a bag from Kennedy to Nice with a stopover in Paris. Let’s talk about the valiant Alitalia baggage personnel in Florence who located said bag as it was refused entrance to yet another country. “The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the stars,” but in the baggage we carry. Discover all the lost bags that never made it on planes and you’ll find the explanation for all the terrorists who did. And what about the baggage we all carry around even when we’re not flying?