Andrew Leonard just put up a post at Broadsheet about an encounter on an airplane with a guy that I’m sure we all know too well–the sort of person that is grateful children exist because they give him an excuse to relive his glory days of being a hall monitor in junior high school.
I’m settling into my window seat on JetBlue Flight 101 from New York to Oakland, when a man sitting in the aisle seat on my row points my attention to a teenager taking off her sweat shirt on the other side of the plane. Underneath the sweat shirt, she’s wearing a T-shirt that states, in large colorful letters on the back, “FUCK THIS PLACE.”
The man mutters to me an almost inaudible sentence that ends with the words “grounds for deportation.”
I’m not sure if I am hearing him correctly. Did he say “that could be grounds for deportation” — making a wry reference to the woman who was thrown off a Southwest flight a few months ago for wearing a T-shirt with a picture of Bush, Cheney and Condoleezza Rice and read “Meet the Fuckers”? Or did he say “should” instead of “could”?
Upon discovering that the FBI is not actually a set of vengeful angels that he can call down upon any random young woman who offends him, this guy finds his excuse to ruin the airline staff’s day.
He is not. He continues to mutter to his wife, who is seated between us. I return my attention to my own children, an 8- and an 11-year-old, who are in the row directly behind me.
As the plane starts rolling down the runway, the man, who looks to be in his late 30s or early 40s, calls a flight attendant over and tells him about the teenager’s shirt. He makes reference to “all the children on the flight.” It is true, on this post-Thanksgiving flight there is a horde of kids. None of them, however, are paying the least bit attention to the dreaded teenager. The attendant, attempting to be polite, says he’ll notify the captain but warns that the airline most likely won’t do anything.
After liftoff my seatmate goes to the bathroom. While in the back of the plane he reiterates his complaint to the attendant, who then is forced to make a phone call to the captain. When my seatmate returns to our row, he is glowing with the pride of a successful tattletale. The captain has been informed, he tells his wife. The machinery of justice has been engaged.
Unfortunately for the overgrown tattletale, Andrew is not pleased to have his children be used as an excuse to punish teenage girls for insolence and he gets into a spat with Senor Asswipe. The whole thing reminded me of a classic Lance Mannion post about the conservative mindset and the use of authority.
I think, though, that something in addition to a double-standard is at work here. It’s a kind of double-think on the part of conservatives. What Santorum is calling for isn’t really more government spending of the kind Liberals want, although they want it spent for everybody. What he’s calling for is more government policing!
Santorum and conservatives of his ilk aren’t being hypocritical because calling in the cops is an old tradition of theirs. That’s what they think government is for. They have always wanted strong armies and strong police forces—to protect them, their property, and their privileges from the riff-raff.
Government’s job, according to them, is to keep the lower orders in order.
What Santorum wants the government to do to protect the family is to start banning things, outlawing behaviors, censoring art, music, television, and movies, criminalizing whatever bad stuff isn’t already illegal and increasing the penalties and punishments for whoever gets caught doing bad stuff that is already criminalized.
He wants to call in the cops.
Emphasis mine.
There’s a lot of things that jump out of me about this particular encounter, but the number one thing, as the regular readers can imagine, is that the man wasn’t just offended at the word “fuck”. This encounter is riddled with entitlement issues, on who gets to define how others behave. Both the teenage girl and the middle-aged asshole are being obnoxious, demanding attention, and generally being unfair to the people around them. But while the middle-aged asshole’s behavior is much more irritating and attention-demanding, if for no other reason than his whining creates problems for the airline staff, which could trickle down to messing with everyone on the plane’s day if the staff has to waste valuable time to cater to this guy’s demands that he not have to tolerate a teenage girl he finds insolent, only one person was considered socially worthy of calling “the cops” on. So the question is–is the “crime” really the word “fuck” on a t-shirt, or is the “crime” more about a social inferior refusing to pay the proper respects to her social superiors?
(For the record, I’m not endorsing wearing a t-shirt that says “Fuck This Place” on an airplane. It would be hypocritical of me to say I’m against the word “fuck” on t-shirts in general, but there is a time and place for them, and crowded airports ain’t it. But I do find it telling who’s considered controllable in public spaces and who is considered not controllable.)
43 Responses to “Reliving the glory days of being a hall monitor”
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The kids these days, with their fucking and their T shirts! Why, when this man was a youngun, teenagers rebelled in wholesome ways, like stripping nude and dancing in the mud ad at rock concert.
Seriously though, while both the asshole and the teenager are anoying, only one has a right to be: the teenager. By the time you’re in your thirties or forties, you kind have to just let it go and be the adult, instead of acting like a stunted adolescent.
Leonard has a lot of good points.
Man, I hate assholes like that. And especially when they say things like “think of the children!” They don’t give a shit about the children; they’re using the children to justify their own obnoxious behavior. Kind of the way some women will clip the backs of your heels with the stroller if you’re walking ahead of them on the street and ignore you when you glare (“I have a child! How dare you walk in front of me!”) …
…but that’s another rant.
The girl probably wanted attention and Asshole played right into it. Sucker.
I bet his kids find themselves in a perpetual state of embarassment.
Next time she travels, she should consider the feelings of those around her, and modify her dress appropriately.
I suggest a shirt that reads, “Fuck that asshole in 16-A.”
Leonard should make up a story about how FBI agents came around his house and explained to him how the tattletale was later arrested for burning crosses on michelle malkin’s front lawn.
Oooh and how he was deeply traumatised by the repug’s assholery.
So that he can then sell the whole thing to the funny papers for many riches and get onto talk shows where he discusses his traumatic airplane adventure, maybe pointing out that the guy who was being a tattletale had a really hitler-esque mustache and who was probably one of the neo-nazi skin head New Orleans police officer who was involved in that beating up of an old guy in New Orleans a while back.
I wonder … would Asswipe have been as upset if it had been a teenager of the male type? Was his problem vulgarity or unladylike behavior?
Incidentally, I suspect people who say “there’s a time and a place etc.” are more likely to be liberals than conservatives. Or, rather, the other way around. It’s people, generally conservatives, who can’t grasp that idea who want vulgarity banned entirely lest it take over. It’s other conservatives who say “I’m allowed to say it, so I’m entitled to say it whenever and wherever I choose” — who can’t or won’t distinguish between law and ettiquette.
I’m a little confused about wearing a “Fuck this Place” shirt on a plane, which is a place that has been precision engineered to keep you from falling thousands of feet to your death.
It’s the last place I’d want to fuck.
Way I look at it: having something written on your clothing is the equivalent of saying it out loud. So your shirt is the equivalent of actually saying to the person next to you “I really like Iron Maiden” or “I bought this shirt at Tommy Hilfiger” or “I’m really proud that I play football for my school” or “Fuck this place”.
Depending on the slogan, it comes off as: harmless (although different taste); shallow; slightly egotistical but basically OK; or not very bright and rather obnoxious.
This is why I almost never wear clothes with writing on them.
And, yes, the other guy should have ignored the whole issue.
So what if the girl had turned up in a “Prussian Blue” t-shirt?
Have to disagree here. Saying there is a place for such a shirt is the same as saying, “You shouldn’t”. Why not? I’ve seen this same message on a girl’s shirt in an international airport. It didn’t bother me nor any others as far as I could tell. It hurts no one.
I told my kids they could use words like fuck, prick, pussy, cocksucker or anything else they chose to as long as they weren’t denegrating anyone, but I forbid them from using words like nigger, kike, spic because those words hurt others and were mean. Funny thing was this produced children who rarely used profanity (except for shock value and/or humor) and viewed others as people who deserved respect.
“think of the kids!”
Yes, let’s think of them. Leonard was flying with his 8- and 11-year olds. Do you think that there’s any chance at all that they were unaware of the word “fuck”?
(I think most 6-year olds know that word, particularly after leaving a toy on the stairs in the dark)
Leonard should have said “Yes! Let’s think of the kids!” (turning around) “Hey kids, why don’t you tell this guy all the bad words you’ve learned! Go ahead, he really wants to know”
And then there’s the (push call button for stewardess) “excuse me, miss…could we please be reseated somewhere else? There’s a really, REALLY bad smell coming from this gentleman here, and we’d rather not be nearby. What smell? Oh, the smell of fascism. It might be just a whiff, but it’s enough to trigger a really bad allergic reaction. Could we please be reseated in a part of the plane where we can breathe free? Thanks”
SLR, that’s exactly how I’d treat the stewardess-bots.
If I were on a flight with human beings performing flight attendant duties, however, I’d think they might find it a tad obnoxius.
Hmm, let’s see. Girl wearing t-shirt with bad word on it on a plane.
Think for a moment what it’s like to sit on a plane, in coach. How many people are in your immediate range of vision? You can see your two seat-mates; you can see the person on the other side of the aisle; you can see the back and side of the person in front of him, and if you crane your neck, you can see the person behind the one across from you.
Unless you really really want to see them — like maybe they’re your travelling companions — you can’t get a good look at the folks seated behind you, or the ones in front of you.
So — how many people’s T-shirts do you really get a good look at? 3? Maybe. That’s if they’re not wearing sweaters, using blankets, keeping their arms in front of them reading magazines.
So — I guess my long-winded point is, how many people are really going to be bothered by — no, even NOTICE the teenager’s T-shirt?
The guy’s an asshole. A self-important asshole.
My first thought would have been “should I tell this guy to step off?”
and my second would be “no, he controlls access to the aisle, and thus my bladder.”
“Underneath the sweat shirt, she’s wearing a T-shirt that states, in large colorful letters on the back, “FUCK THIS PLACE.”
So let me get this right. The offending words are on the back of a t-shirt, underneath a sweatshirt. I would guess that the average person spends 95% of their time on a plane sitting down. So even if she takes her sweatshirt off, people still won’t be able to see the rude words unless she gets up and they stare at her back. What a prick that guy was.
Oh, I re-read the article. It says the words on the shirt were on the BACK of the shirt.
So when she’s sitting in her seat, who sees it?
Somehow, when thinking of the complainer, I can’t help but think he’d miss the irony of Oscar Wilde’s line in The Importance of Being Earnest. “Really, if the lower orders don’t set us a good example, what on earth is the use of them? They seem, as a class, to have absolutely no sense of moral responsibility.”
Big surprise, he sought out something to be offended by. He probably saw a teenager and got all miffed.
I wouldn’t be surprised if he doesn’t have any kids.
Words are at their most dangerous when they’re hidden under sweatshirts or against the back of airplane seats. They could be ready to spring out at any moment, like potty-mouthed ninjas, to attack our freedoms and way of life!
Oh, will no one save us from the stealthy ninja prowess of “Fuck” and “Shit” and “Busfucker” and other Words of Horror and Fainting?! I mean, someone other than That Guy on the Plane?
Now, had there been groups of teenagers, perhaps of the Syrian persuasion, using the bathroom and carrying bags from McDonald’s, it would have been Terror In The Skies II and Leonard’s seatmate would have been the next Annie Jacobsen.
OK,what’s the deal?
The Asshole:A “30-to-40-something” (meaning the same age, essentially, as me.)
The scapegoat: a teenage girl wearing — HORROR OF HORRORS! — a “Fuck This Place” tee…something of the kind that I see millions of times on the Austin CapMetro bus lines…AND NOBODY COMPLAINS ABOUT IT, OR EVEN SHOULD.
These types of people should get a goddamned fucking life. Listen, parents: IT IS NOT GOING TO RUIN YOUR BELOVED KID’S LIFE TO SEE SOMEONE WEARING A TEE WITH A FUCKING CUSS-WORD ON IT. IT IS NOT GOING TO RUIN YOUR LIFE, EITHER. If you are that insecure, maybe YOU are the one with the problem.
d00d! Where’s my Neo-Victorianism?
Oh, yeah, and as a parent, I know that my six year old was always asking me about what the words on some distant person’s T-shirt, momentarily glimpsed, meant. >>>
And what’s the worst that can happen? “Mommy, what’s that mean?”
“It’s a bad word, honey. Shall we read the book you brought on the plane now?”
I guess the airline captain should be glad that guy didn’t demand cloth pants-legs draping the landing gear. That would have been a real PITA…
Auntsnow, you have to explain it in excruciating detail, and then complain that other people are corrupting your children.
And when they ask about those noises from the apartment upstairs, you show them porn, and then yell at your upstairs neighbors for exposing the kids to such filth.
But seriously, he made the FA goto the Captain? As I’ve known enough line captains, I can see it now…
CAPTAIN:(to teenybopper) Miss, I am asking you toput yourhoodie back on. I know that you are trying to make some sort of statement, but for the sake of our fellow passengers, please do so for the remainder of the flight. We will even give you a free round-trip pass to wherever we go.
He then turns around to the complaining passenger….and socks him/her square in the mouth.
Christain Hell hath no fury like an airline captain ANNOYED.
But seriously, he made the FA goto the Captain? As I’ve known enough line captains, I can see it now…
CAPTAIN:(to teenybopper) Miss, I am asking you toput yourhoodie back on. I know that you are trying to make some sort of statement, but for the sake of our fellow passengers, please do so for the remainder of the flight. We will even give you a free round-trip pass to wherever we go.
He then turns around to the complaining passenger….and socks him/her square in the mouth.
Christain Hell hath no fury like an airline captain ANNOYED.
…and no fury like a blogger ANNOYED, either. Sorry for the double-post.
Fuck this post!
So should be illegal to wear a t-shirt that says “Fire!” in a movie theater?
Though I agree with your initial indignance, you’re a pussy for even implying that anything _printed_ on a t-shirt is going to be a problem _anywhere_. It’s a fucking printed word. It’s not inducing panic or packed with any sense of urgency. The notion that there is a time and place for a fucking t-shirt is ridiculous on its face. I suppose that reading “The Running Man” on a plane should be flagged as bad taste, if not outright banned?
So, though I enjoyed most of it, I have to give this post The Finger. Thanks for playing.
Ugh. This reminds me of something that happened to me at my local swimming pool, where I’d been swimming laps for about a year when all of a sudden they started charging $2 a swim.
Right after I got in the pool, the lifeguard came up to me and asked to see my receipt. I didn’t know what he was talking about, so he explained it to me. I got out of the pool and went to my locker to get $2. Walking across the lobby with the money in hand to pay the attendant, I was confronted by some nut who was shocked by my lack of a shirt — in the lobby of a public swimming pool! “Why don’t you cover yourself?” the asshole said.
I just ignored him and kept walking, until I noticed that the guy had actually enlisted the support of a sympathetic cop who said I should show some decency. “There are children around here!” the cop said.
The fucked up thing is there were children in the pool where I’d just been swimming without a shirt. This was in Chicago in the middle of the Summer, where one can see male nipples anywhere! The pool itself was topped by a glass dome, meaning that anyone for 1/4 mile in any direction can easy see men without shirts. The whole thing was so stupid.
So I just went back to my locker, got dressed, went home, and never went back. I seriously have no idea what it was about my uncovered upper body that provoked such a reaction.
PigeonPeas, was it your “fuck this place” tattoo?
spiritrover,
LOL. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that.
Thanks.
I would have paid good money to watch the Captain’s reaction….
Twenty bucks says the perverted asshole was checking this teenage girl out and couldn’t wait for that sweater to come off.
I was running on a paved pedestrian path alongside a playing field. This woman drives a massive car at me on the path, apparently intending to park somewhere on the sidelines. There’s no parking allowed on the grass, no driving on the pedestrian crosswalk. And she’s not turning off or slowing down. I’m not even there as far as she’s concerned. She’s too lazy to walk the hundred yards from paved public parking to her kid’s soccer practice.
She’s about to run me off the path, or perhaps run me down — and I lose it. I yell at her. I use a lot of curse words.
Her response: How dare I talk to her like that… why, she has a small child in the car!
America: we’re one fucking sick country.
Good post, Amanda! I hate assholes like that, too! They have ruined a few of my days as well ..
And while valuable time and wear on the nerves is wasted on this, people like my best friend traipse in from a vacation in Holland, bags replete with psylocybin mushroom tea cleverly disguised in Twinings Earl Grey packaging….
Saying there is a place for such a shirt is the same as saying, “You shouldn’t”. Why not?
Oldguy said it all, and better than I could. I’ve told my kids pretty much the same thing he did. I’d hate for them to get this idea that some words have magical power, when what matters is not what the words are, but how you wield them.
Saying there is a place for such a shirt is the same as saying, “You shouldn’t”.
Um, no. It’s not. It’s almost the opposite. I wish you could see my brow furrowing over the computer. Free speech, freedom in general, is dependant on the voluntary system of self-restraint inherent in ettiquette. If we don’t say “there’s a time and a place” we will have to say “you shouldn’t.”
Scrutator, for most people, violence is acceptable and sex and vulgarity are not.
Evilchemistry wrote what I was thinking- the creep was eyeing the girl or he wouldn’t have noticed. And that probably made his reaction worse- how dare his prey be vulgar!
Hershele Ostropoler
“If we don’t say ‘there’s a time and a place’ we will have to say ‘you shouldn’t'”
By whose fucking authority. NO! You do not have such authority (moral or otherwise) nor the obligation to tell me anything of the sort.
I was running on a paved pedestrian path alongside a playing field. This woman drives a massive car at me on the path, apparently intending to park somewhere on the sidelines. There’s no parking allowed on the grass, no driving on the pedestrian crosswalk. And she’s not turning off or slowing down. I’m not even there as far as she’s concerned. She’s too lazy to walk the hundred yards from paved public parking to her kid’s soccer practice.
She’s about to run me off the path, or perhaps run me down — and I lose it. I yell at her. I use a lot of curse words.
Her response: How dare I talk to her like that… why, she has a small child in the car!
You might have said “massive car,” but I’m picturing an SUV. A black Lincoln Navigator, incidentally.
And yes, that’s a good picture of a lot that’s wrong with this country.
oldguy, what do you do when you encounter a grossly obese person?