I flew into Dulles last night. America was ready for me. I saw scenes I found typical & revealing, & I will present them for your judgment. First thing you see when you come to America is rather ugly airport architecture, decoration, & technology. I guess modern architecture is supposed to be functional, to amaze by how everything works technologically, indifferent to human hopes, habits, or prejudices, but it’s precisely for that reason quite hard to bear. At Dulles, it’s not even clean, & it’s not new, & nothing works well. It doesn’t look like the future, it looks like something from the end of the 20th c. One thinks about ruins, occasionally… It’s not the retro look much in favor in entertainment now, urging people to return to the consumer capitalism of previous decades, when buying things felt like making the future happen; no, everything looks jury-rigged. America seems tired at Dulles &, at night, hopeless. It would be easy to get romantic when you see the sun setting on the great continent, but nobody stops to take a look, everyone’s got somewhere else to be…
I’m not sure the Dulles brothers deserve more than this by way of eternal honor bestowed on their CIA- & State Department-serving names, but it strikes me that Dulles is a caricature of the deep state, if anything is. One notices sovereign indifference in the staff & there’s some calculated harassment to remind people that America is run by bureaucracies that can ruin your day, to say no more. Anonymous figures in uniforms, at desks, performing tasks that don’t make much sense, don’t advertise why they are good or right, & which seem as inevitable as they are pointless. Just don’t get on the wrong side of anyone—that seems to be the message sent to the law-abiding. In that sense, it’s the opposite of the incredibly friendly face of American commerce—the American state is not about making you a deal, offering you a bargain, or even selling you something with a good helping of cheer; it’s about intimidation. For once in American life, there’s no strength in numbers, only tedium—the silly labyrinthine queues that advertise a mindless obedience, the nonsense of other people’s problems when one is trying to get on with one’s own, the utter lack of solidarity or a common cause. Individualism reaches to the edge of existential acknowledgment of pitiless mortality.
I saw a guy go through passport control: The agent at the desk was asking mildly insulting questions while looking at his passport—the suggestion was that respectability means nothing, that before the bureaucracy you’re suspect simply for showing up, deficient in some way, maybe a bad or undesirable element. I learned where the guy lives, what he’s doing, & whether he’s got cash on him, & some other things besides—is he getting any gifts for friends or family, &c., as his private life was offered up to a stranger as supplication; the stranger didn’t give a damn, maybe it didn’t sound like much of a life to him, maybe he’s heard it all before… If you’re in need of approval, in a way you can never have it. Your superiors, the agents of authority, are stuck with your kind & don’t like it; you’re stuck with them, too, & since you’re inferior, they’ll let you know they don’t like to have to deal with you… The funny thing is that the guy practicing this routine on the tourist—who apparently checked out in every invisible rubric & was allowed return to the land of the free—spoke in a rather African accent that the tourist didn’t find it easy to understand, & the tourist’s English, which was fine, was somewhat difficult for the agent of the bureaucracy, too. There was a bit of spelling back & forth going on, patient, but inevitably it made the scene even sillier, school-like, childish… I don’t know how quick the path from immigrant to agent of the state is, but I suppose it’s one model of assimilation that people simply don’t talk about enough.
Does this look like America? Does any airport? I often doubt it; I’ve flown a lot this year, seen more than a dozen places, & I can tell you, the heart sinks whenever one looks around; at Dulles I didn’t even see the big flags I saw in Dallas & a few other places.
So I was quite happy to get out; people don’t seem to like each other in airports—since everyone is compelled to notice he is among strangers to whom he means nothing &, at the same time, one must pay the penalty of being uncomfortable, which makes Americans think they are failures. Possibly, there is something slightly humiliating about the uncertainty one feels going about in an airport. Everything is supposed to be functional, but if it is, then we are all incompetent. Maybe the function isn’t human, that’s why we cannot quite navigate the place well… Worse still, if anything goes wrong, neither the gov’t nor the corporation is going to take responsibility—everyone knows it’s on each of our heads, yet we also know we’d be the last to find out that there’s trouble.
The element of chance lacks any exhilaration or pleasure that might come with surprise or novelty; not even the confidence one feels in figuring things out or becoming equal to events is available; it’s a job of work to prevent the silent contempt one feels for this malfunctioning industry to turn into self-contempt. If someone fixed the misery that is air traveling, he would do Americans the great favor of restoring to them a measure of self-respect.
Outside the airport, I felt like I was stepping back into the world of the 21st c., where one hails a ride on an app, a driver comes to pick one up, everything explained, marked, depicted, written down, counted down, accounted for—knowledge is again the power to command one’s destiny, to act rationally, to achieve one’s aim, technology again a willing servant: All the decencies, comforts, & even a certain fellow feeling surround one once more, a defense from the merciless nonsense to one which becomes willing subject by stepping off a plane. The tyranny of politics is replaced by the post-political utopia. Your driver is your best friend; people were almost racing out into the Virginia night to get to wherever they were going to be picked up, though, waiting by the doors, I didn’t see any relief or joy. It had perhaps been a long day. At any rate, I had a wonderful drive that restored my faith in the American dream. I’ll tell you about that tomorrow.
Sadly I thought the same thing when I went to DC this spring:
the subway was grungy (it used to look sleek, like something out of star wars), the landscaping at the national mall was pathetic, the reflecting pool didn't even have water in it, and I got COVID for the first and only time during the Pandemic while I was there. Thanks, DC- I will be staying in Texas from now on.
Having said that, one of my friends who works as a parole officer down here went with his family to see DC for the first time last week- and they absolutely loved it, took a thousand smiling pictures in front of its monuments, because they are patriotic Americans.
Matt Peterson on his blog talked about DC disillusionment on his podcast recently; I think the disillusionment is based in real aesthetic breakdown, having seen it before when it was better
Not a great national welcome!
I see what you mean about the difference between seeing it for the first time & knowing what's going on--I feel that way when I look at very earnest people who are just proud of America, perhaps not too unlike your friend. Would be good to be able to bridge the gap, at least to make sure we're on the same side...