飞在天上的丑陋小社会

飞在天上的丑陋小社会

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座位的那个女人，不只是拿了一件随身行李，外加一个装笔记本电脑或个人物品的小包。她拿了一件随身行李包，外加一个婴儿床大小的包包，外加一些用来装她所有电子产品的帆布袋，外加两个不同的塑料袋，里面装着各种枕头、毯子，说不定还塞着一个沙发和一张咖啡桌。她在走道里往后蹭的时候，看起来完全不似人类，却像是一头秘鲁大羊驼。她哼哼哟哟，仿佛快撑不住了。

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.

她肯定听到了广播的通告，飞机已经满载，请求所有人都不要带太多行李上飞机，因为这段话每隔45秒就会大声播放一次。但是选择性失聪这种问题，没有谁比飞机上的乘客更严重。她挪到了自己的那一排，不出意外地发现，前面座位下方的空间不够，于是她占据了你前面座位下方的空间。你走到自己的座位，发现这块空间已经被人占了，可你本来指望用这一小块地方伸伸脚的。你生气地盯着她看，可是她却假装看不见。

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排爆发了一场口角。坐在C位置的那个男人，用自己的外套占据了头顶的行李舱，衣服在里面叠得整整齐齐。任何人、不管谁想挪那件衣服，他都会抗议。他有里程，也有地位，所以乘务员才要请他先登机，几乎比其他所有人都早。他打定主意，要好好享受这点微不足道的特权。

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.

我不是在描写自己刚刚乘坐的一架航班。我过感恩节时的一件乐事，就是可以避开不友好的飞行经历。我描述的是过去一年中乘坐的所有航班。我描述的这段飞行旅程，这个周末肯定有许多美国人都忍受过。

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.

我写这些不只是为了悲叹现在乘飞机出行的恐怖，已经有够多的人这样做过了。我之所以写，是因为很少有哪个场景，能像从纽约飞往洛杉矶，或者从萨克拉门托飞往圣路易斯的757飞机一样，绝好地展示美国人在2014年前后最糟糕的冲动行为。它在几英里的高空中，反映出了我们在偏狭小气方面的才华、自私的倾向、与他人的疏离，以及日益明显的等级划分。它是飞行在3万英尺到4.5万英尺高空的社会缩影。

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.

多数乘客一开始情绪都不好，因为抵达机场并没有什么好的途径。亚洲和欧洲许多城市运行的那种廉价又高效的轨道交通，在美国仍然并不多见，这反映了我们的高傲，以及对于基础设施可鄙的忽视。即使是最近几年，经过经济下滑，亟需这种大工程来创造就业，我们做出的相关投资也微乎其微。我们的机场和道路，以及它们周围亟待修建的铁轨就证明了这一点。

“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.”

“我国的基础设施现已病入膏肓，”前运输部长雷·拉胡德(Ray LaHood)一周前在《60分钟》(60 Minutes)节目的一个环节里对史蒂夫·克罗夫特(Steve Kroft)说。这部分的标题恰到好处：“支离破碎”。

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.”

克罗夫特提到，“对于问题如何解决，目前还没有共识”，这种局面因为“华盛顿的政治瘫痪”而愈发严重。

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.

达成共识的一个障碍在飞机上就表露无疑：很少有人在意共同利益，不存在所有人都遵守的规则，来避免有人受到糟糕对待。每个乘客奉行的都是人人为己的理念。居然存在“膝盖捍卫者”(Knee Defender)这种东西，而且它还有市场——其用处是阻止前排的人把座椅向后仰——就充分说明了问题。

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.

转念一想，能充分说明问题的应该是：新闻报道提到，有两名乘客因为用“膝盖捍卫者”而扭打起来，于是飞机不得不改变航向。之后，据报道，这种小器具的销量提高了。

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.

礼貌已经逝去，飞机就是它的坟墓。人们在登机口推搡，在过道里又会推搡，完全不顾航空公司维持登机秩序的各种努力。总是磕你座椅靠背的那个人毫无节制;孩子总是踢你的靠背，父母却不会道歉;而且人们也意识不到，在封闭的空间里，某些食物打开包装后，会让一名乘客的午餐，闯进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.

而且没有人会真正地沟通。陌生人之间的交谈也愈发罕见，因为随着各种设备越来越好，所有人都能专心致志地听自己的音乐、看自己的电影、玩自己的游戏，把世界的纬度缩减到一台智能手机或平板电脑屏幕的大小，在娱乐不断却鲜有启迪的个人化泡沫里浑然忘我。

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.

在飞机上就像在经济中一样，多数人都会有压迫感。在金钱方面，每次乘坐飞机都像是重复被宰，一刀接一刀。要交行李费、餐饮费、无线通讯费，如果只付基准价，就只能得到一个落脚之地。而这块地方是前所未有地窄，而且越变越窄。感恩节的两天前，克莱夫·厄文(Clive Irving)在“每日野兽”(Daily Beast)上描述了航空公司处心积虑的计谋，通过“工程手段”一寸寸地缩小你的空间，听起来像是在试验矫正畸形的器械。39B座位之于今人，犹若老虎凳之于古人。

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，简直像是另一个世界。头等舱与所有其他乘客之间的鸿沟，在飞机上展示得清清楚楚，而从一边走到另一边，却显得越来越困难。针对经常乘飞机的乘客的激励计划也做出了调整，按乘客购票花的钱回馈，而不是按飞行的里程，也就是向那些已经地位很高的客户赠送更多里程，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.”

《华尔街日报》(The Wall Street Journal)今年早些时候刊登了这样一则新闻：“联合大陆航空里程计划惩罚普通乘客”。文章正文中解释道，它“在调整忠诚度计划，成为最新一家更倾向于消费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.”

《华尔街日报》最近的一篇报道又更深入地探讨了这个话题，文中提到达美航空(Delta)也做出了类似的调整，并解释道，“经常以昂贵的商务舱或头等舱机票乘坐飞机的人，以及在常客计划中排名最高的人，会发现自己的帐户获赠很多里程。”