Generation Bubble

Pilot, back, I need my squadron
I was flying before D-Day
Now I’m warning you of falling
I’ll tell you when you’re going down.

– Gary Numan, “The Aircrash Bureau”

The Hindu epic the Ramayana includes among its many wonders the “pushpaka vimana,” a splendidly ornamented and plush flying machine — the pimped-out ride of the devas, you might say. The invention of Viswakarman, architect of the cosmos, the pushpaka vimana becomes the coveted object of the treacherous Ravana, also known as Dasagriva (“The Ten-Headed”).

And who could blame Ravana? The stately appointments and nimble performance of a craft like the pushpaka vimana are enough to turn anyone’ head (indeed, even all ten of them at the same time). “The fabled vimana had pillars of gold,” the Ramayana reads:

its arched doorway was made of vaidurya [either diamonds, emeralds or lapis lazuli] and padmaraga [rubies]. Nests of pearls covered its dome, and inside were trees of the most pristine strains, which bore ambrosial fruits in every season. The ship of the sky assumed any form its master chose, and it flew anywhere in the three worlds at his very wish.

The original (100 series) Boeing 747 passenger jumbo jet was a glorious machine in its own right, a contemporary approximation of the pushpaka vimana of ancient Hindu myth. What it lacked in deluxe features — it certainly had many, but nothing like pillars of gold, doorways encrusted with precious jewels or an orchard of succulently fruited trees — it made up for in sheer size. Among the world’s most recognizable aircraft, its body reached over 231 feet, and its tail alone dwarfed a five-story walk-up in Brooklyn. The total wing area was larger than a basketball court. When pressurized, it carried a ton of air. 3,400 pieces of baggage could fit snugly in the cargo hold located below 452 passengers sipping vodka martinis, happily masticating Salisbury steak and calmly leafing through the in-flight magazine. And the entire global navigation system weighed less than a modern laptop computer.

My first time on a 747 was simultaneously a terrifying and wonderful event. It was a Lufthansa flight from New York to Frankfurt, and I was all of three years old. I can only remember that they served steamed peas to all the children on the flight and that sometime between the in-flight movie and the last twenty minutes before landing I got lost. My parents, distracted by one too many free bottles of Bailey’s Irish Cream, neglected to notice that I had left my seat and wandered into first class, where I encountered a gouty older man who, because he resembled Santa Claus, seemed like he might know where my parents were located. I asked, interrupting his meal of chicken or fish (I couldn’t tell which), only to have him tell me that, in fact, he didn’t know where my parents were, or even who they were.

It was at that precise moment that I was struck by the sheer immensity of the machine in which I was hurtling through space. It seemed quite conceivable that I’d never see my parents again. I felt like Pip, the young ship’s steward of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, who upon falling into the great, blue sea is driven mad by its seemingly infinite expanse. Tears welled up in my eyes, threatening to spill onto my cheeks, but the timely intercession of a friendly flight attendant in a smartly tailored blue uniform spared me the embarassment of a lost-child’s scene-making. The attendant herded me back to coach and into the arms of my by then drunkenly ebullient mother.

A glorious machine indeed, that luxury liner of the sky that goes by three simple numbers. So glorious, in fact, that one Anthony Toth decided to recreate the 747-100′s first-class cabin in his garage. According to an article appearing in the October 26, 2009 edition of the Wall Street Journal, Mr. Toth “has built a precise replica of a first-class cabin from a Pan Am World Airways 747 in the garage of his two-bedroom condo in Redondo Beach, California. The setup includes almost everything fliers in the late 1970s and 1980s would have found on board: pairs of red-and-blue reclining seats, original overhead luggage bins and a curved, red-carpeted staircase.” Mr. Toth’s visitors, who call frequently to enjoy all the perks of high-class travel without the … er … travel, can enjoy “beverages from the long-defunct airline’s glasses, served with Pan Am logo swizzle sticks and napkins, plus salted almonds sealed in Pan Am wrappers. They can even peel open a set of plastic-wrapped, vintage Pan Am headphones and listen to original in-flight audio recordings from the era, piped in through the armrests.”

Mr. Toth, who is a global sales director for United Airlines, has spent more than twenty years on his unique project, traveling the world to find Pan Am memorabilia in such places as airplane graveyards in the Mojave desert and scrapyards in Bangkok. Though his accomplishment is certainly astonishing, approaching that of the great architect Viswakarman’s own, it does upon further reflection disturb me a bit.

What is disturbing is not so much the almost Aspergers-like obsession with which he collected, since his was a child, every bit of Pan Am detritus cast off over the last thirty years, but the fact that his obsession has recreated a minute feature of our recent past which in light of recent economic and social developments seems so totally bygone as to be almost unrecognizable. When Pan Am started, the WSJ article reports, it “became the first U.S. airline to fly internationally, and in the 1970s, the first to fly Boeing 747 jumbo jets. Pan Am was once synonymous with international jet-setting, with upper-deck dining rooms and flight attendants decked out in crisp blue uniforms, high heels and white gloves. First-class travelers were served out of silver-plated martini pitchers. A parade of linen-covered food carts made its way down the aisle at dinnertime.”

Friendly skies: a fetish for first-class air travel in the 70s.

In his nostalgic compulsion to simulate first-class airline travel during a particular decade, Mr. Toth bears a striking resemblance to another collector who preceded him by a century — the archivist and critic Eduard Fuchs, whom German theorist Walter Benjamin immortalizes in an essay (JSTOR) bearing his name. Much like Fuchs, Mr. Toth stands as an example of the collector as “historical materialist,” which Benjamin characterizes thusly:

The historical materialist must abandon the epic element in history. For him history becomes the object of a construct (Konstruktion) which is not located in empty time but is constituted in a specific epoch, in a specific life, in a specific work. The historical materialist explodes the epoch out of its reified “historical continuity,” and thereby lifts life out of this epoch, and the work out of the life work. Yet this construct results in simultaneous preservation and suspension (Aufhebung) of the life work in the work, of the epoch in the life work and of the course of history in the epoch.

Pan Am’s financial woes started in the seventies with the advent of skyrocketing fuel costs, and the 1989 bombing above Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed 270 people, delivered the knockout punch, bringing about the end of the airline’s “specific epoch.” But the demise of Pan Am was not simply a matter of a series of unfortunate events. Rather, its demise coincided with certain economic and social shifts that made it impossible, had the airline survived, to continue on with its white-gloved flight attendants and silver-plated martini pitchers. Certainly some of these changes were good: The price of airline tickets went down after deregulation and the introduction of cut-throat competition between the airlines. But the business of flying suddenly became quite antagonistic, with airline employees grown surly because of ill-treatment by their once-grand employers and disheveled passengers packed into smelly, ill-maintained machines that more resembled flying buses than the proud, gas-guzzling behemoths of yore. With the introduction of a type of dirty, market-friendly democracy came a sort of acedia, a wan techno-nihilismin with which airline executives content themselves as they watch their industry fall to pieces. Those linen-covered food carts may have been reserved for the elite, but they also belonged to a world that was still forward-looking.

It seems now, in our post-9-11, post-regulation world, in which an ebbing social surplus has been diverted straight into Wall-Street coffers, that we’ll never see those days of sexy progress again. The most we can hope for when we travel is that some TSA agent doesn’t ask us to partially disrobe, or to throw away our favorite pomade because, to them, its some potentially dangerous liquid, or ask us to unpack our dirty underwear in front of strangers. We hope that our flight is no more than two hours late (because we accept that it will be two hours late) and that no one on the preceding flight has urinated in our assigned seat. We hope that plastic composite fuselages really are safer than aluminum and that a bankrupt airline will nonetheless attend to every loose rivet.

But as long as we can fly from San Diego to Denver for under $200.00, everything’s right with the world, isn’t it? Even if we have to charge that $200.00 at 29.9 percent interest.

Around Mr. Toth’s hobby one senses an air of melancholy. His garage he has transformed into a cenotaph to a technological optimism whose final death throe came when the Concorde was decommissioned in 2003 (futuristic supersonic flight is now a thing of the past). Perhaps Mr. Toth, an employee of United Airlines, chose to render immortal the glittering past of a defunct competitor because that competitor died an innocent’s death of virginal purity, never having sullied itself in the trenches of the fare wars. No, Pan Am’s eopch is one of crystalline integrity and specificity, like a beautiful insect trapped in amber, into which the materialist historian Anthony Toth seeks to breathe life into once more — at least until his condo is foreclosed on.

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