飛在天上的丑陋小社會

飛在天上的丑陋小社會

The woman in 27E doesn’t have only one carry-on plus a small bag for a laptop or personal items. She has one carry-on plus a purse the size of a bassinet plus some canvas vessel for all of her electronics plus two different plastic totes for various pillows, blankets and possibly an ottoman and a coffee table. Shuffling down the aisle, she looks more like a Peruvian llama than anything human. She grunts and buckles.

坐在27E座位的那個女人，不只是拿了一件隨身行李，外加一個裝筆記本電腦或個人物品的小包。她拿了一件隨身行李包，外加一個嬰兒床大小的包包，外加一些用來裝她所有電子產(chǎn)品的帆布袋，外加兩個不同的塑料袋，里面裝著各種枕頭、毯子，說不定還塞著一個沙發(fā)和一張咖啡桌。她在走道里往后蹭的時候，看起來完全不似人類，卻像是一頭秘魯大羊駝。她哼哼喲喲，仿佛快撐不住了。

She must have heard the announcement that the flight was full and the plea that everyone not bring too much aboard, because those words blared every 45 seconds. But there’s no selective hearing loss like that of the airline passenger. She reaches her row, predictably discovers that there’s insufficient space under the seat in front of hers and proceeds to colonize the space under the seat in front of yours. You arrive to find that what little legroom you’d counted on is gone. She pretends not to see that you’re glaring at her.

她肯定聽到了廣播的通告，飛機已經(jīng)滿載，請求所有人都不要帶太多行李上飛機，因為這段話每隔45秒就會大聲播放一次。但是選擇性失聰這種問題，沒有誰比飛機上的乘客更嚴重。她挪到了自己的那一排，不出意外地發(fā)現(xiàn)，前面座位下方的空間不夠，于是她占據(jù)了你前面座位下方的空間。你走到自己的座位，發(fā)現(xiàn)這塊空間已經(jīng)被人占了，可你本來指望用這一小塊地方伸伸腳的。你生氣地盯著她看，可是她卻假裝看不見。

A tiff has erupted in Row 18. The man in Seat C has used the overhead for his jacket, which is lovingly folded there, and is protesting any and all attempts to move it. He has miles. He has status. That’s why he was invited to board the aircraft earlier than almost everybody else, and he’s hellbent on milking that privilege for all that it’s worth.

第18排爆發(fā)了一場口角。坐在C位置的那個男人，用自己的外套占據(jù)了頭頂?shù)男欣钆?，衣服在里面疊得整整齊齊。任何人、不管誰想挪那件衣服，他都會抗議。他有里程，也有地位，所以乘務(wù)員才要請他先登機，幾乎比其他所有人都早。他打定主意，要好好享受這點微不足道的特權(quán)。

I’m not describing a flight that I just took. Among my Thanksgiving blessings was an avoidance of the unfriendly skies. I’m describing every other flight that I’ve taken over the last year. I’m describing a flight that many Americans surely suffered through this weekend.

我不是在描寫自己剛剛乘坐的一架航班。我過感恩節(jié)時的一件樂事，就是可以避開不友好的飛行經(jīng)歷。我描述的是過去一年中乘坐的所有航班。我描述的這段飛行旅程，這個周末肯定有許多美國人都忍受過。

And I’m doing it not simply to rue the horrors of air travel these days, which have been rued aplenty. I’m doing it because there are few better showcases of Americans’ worst impulses, circa 2014, than a 757 bound from New York to Los Angeles or from Sacramento to St. Louis. It’s a mile-high mirror of our talent for pettiness, our tendency toward selfishness, our disconnection from one another and our increasing demarcation of castes. It’s a microcosm at 30,000 to 45,000 feet.

我寫這些不只是為了悲嘆現(xiàn)在乘飛機出行的恐怖，已經(jīng)有夠多的人這樣做過了。我之所以寫，是因為很少有哪個場景，能像從紐約飛往洛杉磯，或者從薩克拉門托飛往圣路易斯的757飛機一樣，絕好地展示美國人在2014年前后最糟糕的沖動行為。它在幾英里的高空中，反映出了我們在偏狹小氣方面的才華、自私的傾向、與他人的疏離，以及日益明顯的等級劃分。它是飛行在3萬英尺到4.5萬英尺高空的社會縮影。

Most of the passengers start out in a bad mood, because there’s no good way to get to the airport. The thrifty, efficient rail links that exist in many Asian and European cities remain uncommon in the United States, a reflection of our arrogant and damnable inattention to infrastructure. Even in recent years, during an economic downturn that cried out for the kinds of big projects that create jobs, we made only meager investments. Our airports and the roads and nonexistent tracks around them show it.

多數(shù)乘客一開始情緒都不好，因為抵達機場并沒有什么好的途徑。亞洲和歐洲許多城市運行的那種廉價又高效的軌道交通，在美國仍然并不多見，這反映了我們的高傲，以及對于基礎(chǔ)設(shè)施可鄙的忽視。即使是最近幾年，經(jīng)過經(jīng)濟下滑，亟需這種大工程來創(chuàng)造就業(yè)，我們做出的相關(guān)投資也微乎其微。我們的機場和道路，以及它們周圍亟待修建的鐵軌就證明了這一點。

“Our infrastructure is on life support right now,” Ray LaHood, the former transportation secretary, told Steve Kroft in a segment of “60 Minutes” from one week ago. It was titled, fittingly, “Falling Apart.”

“我國的基礎(chǔ)設(shè)施現(xiàn)已病入膏肓，”前運輸部長雷·拉胡德(Ray LaHood)一周前在《60分鐘》(60 Minutes)節(jié)目的一個環(huán)節(jié)里對史蒂夫·克羅夫特(Steve Kroft)說。這部分的標題恰到好處：“支離破碎”。

Kroft noted that there was “still no consensus on how to solve the problem,” which had grown more severe because of “political paralysis in Washington.”

克羅夫特提到，“對于問題如何解決，目前還沒有共識”，這種局面因為“華盛頓的政治癱瘓”而愈發(fā)嚴重。

One of the impediments to consensus is manifest on a plane: There’s little sense of a common good, no rules that everybody follows so that nobody gets a raw deal. Instead there’s an ethic of every passenger for himself or herself. The existence of, and market for, the Knee Defender, that device that prohibits the person in front of you from reclining, says it all.

達成共識的一個障礙在飛機上就表露無疑：很少有人在意共同利益，不存在所有人都遵守的規(guī)則，來避免有人受到糟糕對待。每個乘客奉行的都是人人為己的理念。居然存在“膝蓋捍衛(wèi)者”(Knee Defender)這種東西，而且它還有市場——其用處是阻止前排的人把座椅向后仰——就充分說明了問題。

On second thought, no, this does: Immediately following news coverage of a flight that had to be diverted when two passengers scuffled over a Knee Defender’s use, sales of the device reportedly increased.

轉(zhuǎn)念一想，能充分說明問題的應(yīng)該是：新聞報道提到，有兩名乘客因為用“膝蓋捍衛(wèi)者”而扭打起來，于是飛機不得不改變航向。之后，據(jù)報道，這種小器具的銷量提高了。

Courtesy is dead. The plane is its graveyard. There’s a scrum at the gate and then another scrum in the aisle that defy any of the airline’s attempts at an orderly boarding process. There’s no restraint in the person who keeps smacking the back of your chair; no apology from the parent whose child keeps kicking it; no awareness that certain foods, unwrapped in a tight space, turn one traveler’s lunch into every traveler’s olfactory reality.

禮貌已經(jīng)逝去，飛機就是它的墳?zāi)?。人們在登機口推搡，在過道里又會推搡，完全不顧航空公司維持登機秩序的各種努力。總是磕你座椅靠背的那個人毫無節(jié)制;孩子總是踢你的靠背，父母卻不會道歉;而且人們也意識不到，在封閉的空間里，某些食物打開包裝后，會讓一名乘客的午餐，闖進其他所有乘客的鼻腔。

And nobody really communicates. Conversation between strangers becomes rarer as gadgets get better, enabling everyone to hunker down with his or her own music and own movies and own video games, to shrink the world to the dimensions of a smartphone’s or tablet’s screen, to disappear into a personalized bubble of ceaseless entertainment and scant enlightenment.

而且沒有人會真正地溝通。陌生人之間的交談也愈發(fā)罕見，因為隨著各種設(shè)備越來越好，所有人都能專心致志地聽自己的音樂、看自己的電影、玩自己的游戲，把世界的緯度縮減到一臺智能手機或平板電腦屏幕的大小，在娛樂不斷卻鮮有啟迪的個人化泡沫里渾然忘我。

ON the plane, as in the economy, most people are feeling squeezed. Financially, every flight is a death by a dozen cuts. There’s the baggage fee, the meal fee, the wireless fee. All the base price gets you is a perch that’s tighter than ever and getting tighter still. In The Daily Beast two days before Thanksgiving, Clive Irving described airlines’ sophisticated, inch-by-inch stratagems to “engineer you out of room,” and they sounded like experiments in orthopedic torture. What the rack was to medieval times, Seat 39B is to modern ones.

在飛機上就像在經(jīng)濟中一樣，多數(shù)人都會有壓迫感。在金錢方面，每次乘坐飛機都像是重復(fù)被宰，一刀接一刀。要交行李費、餐飲費、無線通訊費，如果只付基準價，就只能得到一個落腳之地。而這塊地方是前所未有地窄，而且越變越窄。感恩節(jié)的兩天前，克萊夫·厄文(Clive Irving)在“每日野獸”(Daily Beast)上描述了航空公司處心積慮的計謀，通過“工程手段”一寸寸地縮小你的空間，聽起來像是在試驗矯正畸形的器械。39B座位之于今人，猶若老虎凳之于古人。

But Seat 2A? That’s a different story. A different world. The gap between first class and everyone else is writ vivid on a plane, and crossing from one side of the divide to the other seems to be growing more difficult. Frequent-flier programs are being tweaked to reward dollars spent on tickets instead of miles flown, and to give more bonus miles to people who are already at a high status than to people who aspire to be.

可是2A座位呢?那就完全是另一回事了，簡直像是另一個世界。頭等艙與所有其他乘客之間的鴻溝，在飛機上展示得清清楚楚，而從一邊走到另一邊，卻顯得越來越困難。針對經(jīng)常乘飛機的乘客的激勵計劃也做出了調(diào)整，按乘客購票花的錢回饋，而不是按飛行的里程，也就是向那些已經(jīng)地位很高的客戶贈送更多里程，而不是那些努力想提高地位的人。

“United Continental’s Miles Program to Penalize Average Fliers,” said a headline in The Wall Street Journal earlier this year. The article went on to explain that the airline was “becoming the latest carrier to shift its loyalty program to favor bigger spenders.”

《華爾街日報》(The Wall Street Journal)今年早些時候刊登了這樣一則新聞：“聯(lián)合大陸航空里程計劃懲罰普通乘客”。文章正文中解釋道，它“在調(diào)整忠誠度計劃，成為最新一家更傾向于消費更高的乘客的航空公司”。

A recent story in The Journal explored this further, noted that Delta was making similar adjustments, and explained, “People who fly on expensive business-class and first-class tickets and have top-tier status in frequent-flier programs will see their accounts flooded with miles.”

《華爾街日報》最近的一篇報道又更深入地探討了這個話題，文中提到達美航空(Delta)也做出了類似的調(diào)整，并解釋道，“經(jīng)常以昂貴的商務(wù)艙或頭等艙機票乘坐飛機的人，以及在?？陀媱澲信琶罡叩娜?，會發(fā)現(xiàn)自己的帳戶獲贈很多里程。”