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People go to horror movies. We like scary stories. We obsess about certain kinds of crimes, though the odds of being a victim may be quite slim. Maybe the problem with terrorism, which also obsesses about aviation, is that we want to be scared, anyway, so it's hard to maintain the political edge. What's a radical Islamist going to do? Doesn't AQ live within the confines of a media defined world? How does Islamism win? We'll still have MSNBC and Fox, right? No revolution maintains that essential purity. Maybe bin Laden will just get a blog, Been Loggin', or something.
It's interesting that aviation intersects so well with the emotional fabrications that define the world. What percentage of our lives is now processed news? Or fake news? Whose responsibility is it, for people to find the 'real' world? It should be part of journalistic ethics that you wouldn't create a world so distorted that people have ideas that are wildly wrong. But, it isn't.
Too bad, really. People should actually get to know the atmosphere. They should get inside the air, the wind, in a smallish contraption that they guide around, as they please. To me, the real problem with the media fantasy of aviation is that it takes away the opportunity to experience something that is quite profound. Of course, there is a lot more risk flying small aircraft.
There's a mystique about flying, and rightly so. There's a mystique about giant flying machines that overpower the ground and integrate into a complex system of commercial transport with incredible precision. They talk about the 'biz jet' syndrome, where Congressman feel that power that comes from having high speed transport on a personal level, at your command.
Maybe it's because most people are excluded that the emotional reactions are what they are? How do we go from mystique to the multiple layers of fear? The media wants to put their stamp on everything. I guess any issue has been 'media-cized' when the basic reactions to it are fear.
It's odd, isn't it, that terrorists and journalists seem to share... so much?
