Election politics come and go, but as a piece in the New York Times reminds us, it’s the politics of small things that stay with us for the long haul. As summer approaches, the paper examines one manifestation of a growing trend: the repackaging of basics as luxuries, in this case the option not to sit in the middle seat on a plane.
Seat politics are fraught. Manspreading on the bus or the subway never gets less enraging. (A friend snapped a photo of a guy on the subway this week, who, when confronted, told her he couldn’t close his legs on account of the width of his shoulders. Huh?) On Amtrak, it’s the rucksack on the seat accompanied by full sensory blackout – headphones, tunnel vision, apparent paralysis of the head – to give the impression of absorption in other things, as if blocking the seat is the furthest thing from one’s mind.
The exception to this has always been air travel, wherein if you hit refresh enough times 24 hours before flight time, you were pretty much guaranteed a window or aisle seat a decent stretch from the toilets. Now, with demand for air travel in the US at an all-time high and in line with the demise of free bag check, that preference is about to be monetised.
The grimly clever aspect of this is price point. Airlines in the US are asking passengers to pay only fractionally more to check in early and get a choice of seat – in the case of Southwest, $15, which is high enough to be irritating, but not so much that you would rather risk sitting on a cross-country red-eye between two people with access to corn snacks.
Delta now has a “basic economy” fare, to distinguish it from types of economy with more seat choice, and American and United are threatening to follow suit later this year.
The only hope passengers have is to redouble their creative excuses. The Times digs out people who lay claim to all sorts of “medical” reasons as to why they can’t occupy a middle seat, among them long legs, panic attacks and puking, the most reliable free-pass being for “the threat of gastrointestinal distress”. When I was pregnant, I would tell check-in staff that, while I didn’t mind a middle seat, the person next to me mightn’t be happy when I got up to use the bathroom 35 times. Then I would smile martyrishly and wait to be reassigned.
I probably wouldn’t get away with it now, as economy passengers are begrudged the very air that they breathe. As commercial mindsets go, we’re not far off first class getting first dibs on the life rafts.
Fanfare for the common man
No one expects much of the New York Post these days, so its endorsement of Donald Trump, who it described as “a potential superstar of vast promise” and a man driven by “common-man passions” (a reference, presumably, to his $100m New York apartment), barely raised an eyebrow.
More dispiriting was his endorsement by the New York Observer, once a good title, now in the throes of a nervous breakdown, as expressed in its description of Trump as a man of “purpose and opportunity”.
The Observer is owned by Jared Kushner, who is married to Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, so the endorsement shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Still, it was a shock to see the title actually going through with it, like betrayal by an old friend, or the news that a beloved high street pharmacy has been ill-serving its customers.
Barbie-d criticism
With the second season of Tina Fey’s The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt released on Netflix this month, fans are scouring the script for in-jokes. The most fruitful so far seems to be an oblique reference to Taylor Swift, with whom Fey and Amy Poehler had a spat at the Golden Globes in 2013. Long story short: in episode nine Fey seems to compare Swift to a Barbie doll, which is either bad feminism, good feminism that calls out Swift’s bad feminism, or – yegads – just a joke.
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