Coach, First-class and Class Struggle

—John M. Caldwell, PhD
January 27, 2012

I have been heard to say that if the Revolution ever happens in the United States it will begin at an airport.

Nowhere, I thought, were class distinctions so clear as when we travel by air. We masses queue up at the check-in, winding our way through a labyrinth, waiting to be checked in by two over-worked agents. While we make their way forward in serpentine fashion, a lone first-class traveler walks straight up to a lone agent. They have a pleasant conversation—they have time for it, after all—and he is on his way. At the security check-in it is the same story. While we lower life forms wait in crowded lines, other travelers of privilege have an express option.

Through the check-in and security processes our first-class travelers make their way to their Admiral’s Club or Platinum Lounge until it’s time to board. I know about these places only because I have seen them in movies—quiet, insulated from the press of the world’s citizenry who find waiting places beneath televisions that provide unending news and analysis, but never a diagnosis.

First-class passengers are among the first to board, right after the “pre-boarding” boarding of infants and the wheel-chair bound. They have enough time to find their seats, stow their gear and become comfortably installed in their first-class seats. Those seats are first-class, too: wide enough for even an ample posterior with leg room enough for a giraffe. As I make my way through Shangri-La a flight attendant is offering passengers blankets and pillows. They have already broken out the champagne. I am certain that, as soon as I leave the first-class cabin, they will raise their glasses and drink to the good fortune they have in common that they are not common.

Every step of the process is guaranteed to produce simmering resentment among the plebs in coach and a sense of entitlement in the hearts of the equites in the front of the aircraft. I console myself with the thought that if by some terrible combination of bad luck, mistakes and incompetence we should fly into a mountain in the fog, at least the bastards in front will die first.

If the Revolution ever happens in the United States it will begin in an airport. At least that’s what I thought. I thought that the friction between first-class and coach would be what first struck the flames that would touch off the explosion that brought the whole system down.

But the class distinction that is visible between coach and first-class pales in comparison to two other class boundaries that are kept carefully out of sight by the shared experience of travel by airline. The fact is there are two classes of Americans who are not in view from any seat on the aircraft at all, whether coach or first-class.

The first of these is the large group of people who couldn’t dream of scraping together enough quid to buy a ticket. They are the poor, the lower middle class, or whatever other euphemism we use to describe our proletarians. Those of us who fly coach are in fact already a privileged class. I say privileged because an amazing number of us are one pink slip away from getting kicked off the plane altogether.

The other is the very small group of people who aren’t on this plane, either, because they have access to privately chartered and corporate jets. They live in an entirely different world than the one that I inhabit. Not for them is the search for parking, the long walk to the terminal with luggage trailing behind, the lines, the noise, the crowded seats and aisles, the waiting for luggage which may or may not arrive.

Someone else drives them to the other side of the airport and handles their luggage. They have their flight to themselves. They leave and arrive on their schedule. They are privileged beyond our imagination. They are the one percent.

We don’t see them. Instead we are distracted by the ones we see. We imagine that the real dividing line in American society is between first-class and coach. It is useful for the political power of the one percent that we imagine this. It is expedient for them that we are distracted by the false division between first-class and coach. It is better for them that the rest of us not realize that there are really very few of them and very many of us. It is better for the corporate jet elite that we imagine that the real limit on our lives is that flimsy little curtain between us and the first-class section.

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