Citizenship and Air Travel

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Hello Reader,

Back this week? 

For the same blog-time, same blog-station?

In last week’s exciting episode I started out saying I was sick like a dog because of an individual misusing the aircraft individual seat air nozzle—by leaving the blasted thing turned on full blast! Then I proceeded to explore aircraft and citizenship. 

Science fiction writer David Gerrold was talking with me. He was pleased to grab two of his novels, and show me how he will start a new novel right on the same page where the last one left off. Therefore, without further chit chat, lets carry on, right from where last week’s piece stopped:

American colonists, unlike their cousins back in “the old country,” practised taking responsibility in town hall meetings. I guess each town did meetings their own way, since Roberts Rules of Order did not exist until the later 1800s. 

Robert Heinlein, in his young adult novel Red Planet, subtitled A colonial boy on Mars has a teen accompany his father to a town hall meeting, complete with loud cries of “Question!” “Question!” “Debate!” “Debate!” And a banging gavel. (Using a gun butt) Dismissing digressions by saying “The motion before the floor is.…”

In early America, the revolutionary thinker Thomas Paine —he added the e to his name as part of his enthusiasm for his new American life— said that if Americans waited another 50 years for their independence then they might not have one unified republic. But Americans didn’t wait; they struggled and earned their republic. What next? 

People wondered: Would they value security over freedom? They did not. Nor would they clump together in frightened bands of a similar religion or language or creed, at least, not enough to balkanize, not like that unfortunate southeast corner of Europe where folks would feel homesick if they ventured into the next valley. And where apparently, as recently as the late 20th century, they still believed in ethnic cleansing.

Brave immigrants, men and women, would arrive in the New World, often lacking enough funds to travel to the next valley, let alone the next state… But still he and she would become American, part of  “…one nation, under God, indivisible…” forsaking the old country, old hatreds, old ways. Like when getting married: No looking back, no pillars of salt. Besides, you couldn’t afford to go back. 

Note: Robert Heinlein wrote a book, Friday, where, in the future, the former U.S. is now balkanized, where multi-national corporations have more funds and power than small nation-states, without the hero ever musing about how such a new world order had come about. How could the people have come to value capitalism so much more, and their nation-state so much less? There is only one clue: While they still have elections, neither the hero, nor anyone she knows, has any loyalty to the traditional concept of "citizen."

Steam ships and riveted hulls… diesel ships and welded hulls… flying boats and passenger jets… Now we are affluent. But not back in the impoverished 19th century, when to return yet again across the ocean, to change back to an old culture, resume an old citizenship, was almost as impossible as changing your gender. Why even think about it? 

In my 20th century boyhood? To move to an army base meant you would soon find yourself somehow instinctively refusing to lean against lamp posts or stand around with your hands in your pockets. To move to the U.S.A. meant you would eventually find yourself, somehow, instinctively believing in human rights and non-arranged marriages. But… what if you aren’t stuck on a base or stuck in America? The pressure of feeling “still a recruit” or “still unAmerican,” like expanding steam pressure, could be swiftly vented if you were rich enough for a plane ticket, with easy access to an airport. No need, in that case, to forsake the old country. Indeed, when I dimly remember “foreign” students from my campus years, the richer ones seemed the least assimilated. Coincidence? And they were the least likely to join a protest for human rights, too.

Note: Recently, in Canada, when a very rich playboy, who could afford to travel all over Canada by plane, became the current prime minister, he then proclaimed Canada no longer had a shared mainstream culture, none. I’m sure this was news to working Canadians who were traveling by greyhound bus.

In early America, or even as recently as my boyhood, everybody would assume, if they met a dual citizen, that he or she “liked being an American the best.” But as I say, the release valve of aircraft have made the fact of dual-citizenship more and more common. Some couples, I have read, can afford to deliberately vacation in America, just long enough to have a baby citizen, then fly away, raising their baby among “foreigners” without ever telling their dual-citizen child that “America is best.” Not until it becomes convenient for the parents. 

Note: Because there is no such country as “Arabia,” I will therefore use Arabia as a filler word for any country… 

In 21st century Canada there has been some controversy: If an Arabian-Canadian, having dual citizenship, proceeds to “hate Canada” and "declare war" and terrorize, then would that mean he had forsaken Canada? Should he —terrorists are usually a “he”— be stripped of his Canadian citizenship and expected to live out his life safely away from the new world, back in his other chosen fatherland, Arabia? The controversy is because, according to an editorial opinion by a liberal party member, some liberals believe Arabia is not as democratic as Canada, and therefore no one should be forced to live there, not even a terrorist. “A Canadian is a Canadian” is how one liberal member of parliament put it. 

Meanwhile, the U.S. has carried out one or more drone strikes against dual-citizens. But there must be less controversy in the States, because, to my knowledge, no congressman has felt any need to justify the strikes by ponderously intoning, “No dual-citizen has the right to dual against America.” Maybe because morals are always simplified during wartime. (Canada has not declared war on terror) Or maybe because of America’s ancestral hatred of renegades…

Say, I have to smile: The funniest part of our age of aircraft? To me, it’s the forty thousand prostitutes that came through Canada. No one even realized they had been passing through, plying their trade, lying about loving Canada, and their customers, not until the invasion of Lebanon by the Israeli armed forces. Suddenly it seemed there were 40,000 stranded tourists, all vacationing at the same time, who needed to get home quickly. And they were very angry at the government for not instantly rescuing them. That many tourists? Who knew? 

Could they be Canadians who had somehow never come to realize how disorganized their government would be? Why not? Had they had never attended a community hall meeting? Never took a grownup interest in Canadian newspapers? And did they never raise their children to value the Canadian Constitution (Charter) over whatever laws Lebanon had?

Realistically, the Canadian government just didn’t have a clue where to even begin to start the chartering of big cruise ships and freighters, or fleets of aircraft. A member of parliament finally labeled the angry hordes in Lebanon as “Canadians of convenience.” He was too kind: They were whores. I’m glad we didn’t fumble around in futility trying to finance rescue ships for prostitutes.

“Houston, we have lift off.” We have aircraft. We have intricate alloy flying marvels, with a submarine shaped fuselage to hold pressure, complete with an individual fancy air nozzle for each seat. What we still have not managed to do is integrate these new aircraft into our national narrative, learned when to turn off the nozzles, and decided what it all means for citizenship.

Sean Crawford

Calgary

April

2018

Footnote: Here’s a good explanation of cabin pressurization (link)

  

Literary notes: 

~Thomas Paine's booklet Common Sense, which converted colonists to fight for the revolution, is still in print today. Without the wordy old fashioned prose of other books of his era, it makes for clear and fascinating reading. 

~Of course I curl up next to the microwave reading the modern science fiction masters, still, Robert Heinlein is forever my favorite deceased sf writer. In this essay I have shown him saying citizenship is not a convenience or scrap of paper, (Starship Troopers) that citizenship must be lived in action, (Red Planet) and that too much capitalism, too much “market fundamentalism,” is not good, and certainly is not a replacement for appropriate citizenship, (Friday). Yet some readers will insist from his work that Heinlein believed in fascism. Go figure.