Pouring Music From a Cup

REVOLUTION, I SAY!   It’s time to stuff the profit-swollen airline swine back down into the deep dark corporate pit where they belong! Time to put the genie back in the bottle and cork it forever! Listen. Over the years I’ve flown quite a few times. Many times, in fact. I’ve flown all over the United States and I’ve flown internationally. As of this writing I’ve flown to, I think, 23 countries, plus any number of times internally in several of those countries. The most harrowing of all those internal flights was in 1986 on an Air India jet from Arusha, Tanzania, to Kigali, Rwanda. We’d only been in the air for about an hour and weren’t terribly high above the mountains when there was a sudden boom! and a great shuddering of the entire plane. For half a minute the cabin rocked and vibrated to the sound of grinding gears. It scared the hell out of me, but none of the flight crew seemed particularly alarmed— maybe that sort of thing was a common occurrence for Air India, I don’t know...

  There’s no escaping them, those bureaucratic panhandlers on every corner and intersection of our lives. You know the ones I’m talking about. It’s Ticket Master and Stub Hub charging “handling fees”; it’s your Airbnb charging a “cleaning deposit” or a “late fee” if you’re out the door just twenty minutes after check-out time; it’s the electric company charging a “convenience fee” because you pay your monthly bill online; it’s Budget, Penske, and U-Haul charging a (supposedly) refundable damage deposit up front when you rent one of their obscenely overpriced trucks. It’s “maintenance fees” on your checking and/or savings account. It’s a hundred different ticky-tack fees and add-ons that companies charge the customer as “the price of doing business” while hiding behind the mask of inflation just so they can dip their ladles ever deeper into our money buckets over and over and over again. They’re fee-festooned malefactors, deposit-fattened jackals, toll-bloated ticks, and there’s no ...