Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls - By David Sedaris Page 0,48
going down the toilet.”
“None of them want to work, that’s the problem,” the bald man with the mustache said. “All any of them care about is their next goddamn coffee break.” He looked at the counter agents with disdain and then turned his eye on the Freaky Mothafocka. “That one must be heading back to the circus.”
“Pathetic,” the man behind me said. He himself was wearing pleated khaki shorts and a blue T-shirt. A baseball cap hung from his waistband, and his sneakers, which were white, appeared to be brand-new. Like a lot of men you see these days, he looked like a boy, suddenly, shockingly, set into an adult body. “We got a kid looks like him back in the town I come from, and every time I see him I just thank God he isn’t mine.”
As the two started in on rap music and baggy trousers, I zoned out and thought about my last layover in Denver. I was on the people mover, jogging toward my connection at the end of Concourse C, when the voice over the PA system asked Adolf Hitler to pick up a white courtesy phone. Did I hear that correctly? I remember thinking. It’s hard to imagine anyone calling their son Adolf Hitler, so the person must have changed it from something less provocative, a category that includes pretty much everything. Weirder still was hearing the name in the same sentence as the word “courtesy.” I imagined a man picking up the receiver, his voice made soft by surprise and the possibility of bad news. “Yes, hello, this is Adolf Hitler.”
Thinking of it made me laugh, and that brought me back to the present and the fellow behind me in the khaki shorts. “Isn’t it amazing how quickly one man can completely screw up a country?” he said.
“You got that right,” Mr. Mustache agreed. “It’s a goddamn mess is what it is.”
I assumed they were talking about George Bush but gradually realized it was Barack Obama, who had, at that point, been in office for less than six months.
The man with the mustache mentioned a GM dealership in his hometown. “They were doing fine, but now the federal government’s telling them they have to close. Like this is Russia or something, a Communist country!”
The man in the khaki shorts joined in, and I wished I’d paid closer attention to the auto bailout stuff. It had been on the radio and in all the papers, but because I don’t drive and I always thought that car dealerships were ugly, I’d let my mind wander or moved on to the next story, which was unfortunate, since I’d have loved to have turned around and given those two what for. Then again, even if I were informed, what’s the likelihood of changing anyone’s opinion, especially a couple of strangers’? If my own little mind is nailed shut, why wouldn’t theirs be?
“We’ve got to take our country back,” the man with the mustache said. “That’s the long and short of it, and if votes won’t do the trick then maybe we need to use force.”
What struck me with him, and with many of the conservatives I’d heard since the election, was his overblown, almost egocentric take on political outrage, his certainty that no one else had quite experienced it before. What, then, had I felt during the Bush-Cheney years? Was that somehow secondary? “Don’t tell me I don’t know how to hate,” I wanted to say. Then I stopped and asked myself, Do you really want that to be your message? Think you can out-hate me, asshole? I was fucking hating people before you were even born!
We’re forever blaming the airline industry for turning us into monsters: it’s the fault of the ticket agents, the baggage handlers, the slowpokes at the newsstands and the fast-food restaurants. But what if this is who we truly are, and the airport’s just a forum that allows us to be our real selves, not just hateful but gloriously so?
Would Adolf Hitler please meet his party at Baggage Claim Four? Repeat. Adolf Hitler can meet his party at Baggage Claim Four.
It’s a depressing thought, and one that proved hard to shake. It was with me when I boarded my flight to Portland and was still on my mind several hours later, when we were told to put our tray tables away and prepare for landing. Then the flight attendants, garbage bags in hand, glided down the aisle, looking each one of us