A New Era of Painful Listening
During my dizzying trip home for the holidays this year, aside from the usual panic attacks over running dangerously late to catch my flight, I encountered a new capitalist phenomenon: in-person, on-plane, airline advertisements. Sure, missing my train (twice) from deceivingly optimistic sense of time, having to convince the Greyhound driver to let me on even though I was 5 heaping dollars short of the ticket price, and being yelled at by a man who insisted on blockading anybody’s escalation on the escalator, was an experience in and of itself. But the story of hellish travel nightmares has been said and done, only really having any value in TripAdvisor reviews. What I was less sensitized to during this particular trip, however, was the mobilizing nature of visceral commercialization that manifested during my six hour-long flight.
After feeling nauseously claustrophobic from my middle seat, I scoured the aisle for alternatives. I finally found an aisle seat, and immediately felt my heartbeat retire to a steady rhythm. The five remaining hours suddenly seemed less daunting; I could do this. I was afraid reading would only trigger more nausea, so I turned to my personal entertainment screen, that was sitting five inches from my face, instead.
While enjoying a free, lackadaisical rewatch of Inception, a voice snapped me out of my daze to talk to its flight patrons all about the wonderful offers that American Airlines had in store for them. It blared so loud through my headphones I yanked them off, only to hear it echo even louder down the aisle. I started noticing a handful of people looking around for the obnoxious source that was booming through the cabin — half confused, half stunned by its inescapable nature. There was nowhere to run; nowhere to hide.
Just when I thought nothing to beat Spotify’s sobering commercials, it seemed that American Airlines surely rose to the occasion. At least with those online commercials, you can tune them out, step away from your computer, literally do anything but listen to that unnecessarily perky voices (yet with clear undertones of mundaneness) scratching into your head. But with the plane steward’s voice coming through both ends, the virtual and the physical, it felt eerily similar to a fascist propaganda being pounded into an exploited ear. We had no choice but listen, or at least hear, all about packages and rewards of American Airlines. It was during those surreal five minutes of in-person advertising that led me to truly fear the future of commercialization, of capitalism, especially as the short countdown to the inauguration of Donald Trump begins.
If I thought five minutes of American Airlines was wretchedly obtrusive, I can’t even begin to fathom endearing the next four years of constant national broadcasting of Trump’s voice, of Trump’s face. But even though advertisements can just as bleakly consumptive as listening to Trump’s corporatized, rhetoric (as it easy as it may be) their relevance cannot be so crassly compared. That is, we can’t just roll our eyes at the sound of a global broadcast of another one of Trump’s racist, misogynistic, xenophobic tweet, as we can with a steward blabbering on about how you can save tons on your next flight. As painful as it is to say, and unlike flight advertisements, Trump is now politically relevant. Our ears must remain open, so that we know how to act accordingly — fight accordingly — no matter how many times it brings us back to the worst flight ever.
