I muse over the fact that at this very moment in fashion history millions of women the world over, in Japan, England, the entire North American continent and Africa too are all exposing their bellies to show off fashion sense. Oscar Wilde once remarked that fashion was so hideous that it had to be changed every six months. The showing off of your bellybutton trend has been with us at least some five years, though for all I know about fashion it could have ended a while back and we are now only witnessing its whiplash.
Bellybuttons are always interesting and fascinating, they are after all the thing that connected everyone of us, except perhaps Jesus Christ, Adam and Eve for they were a trio apparently conceived from a father or a hip; but the rest of us are all tied to mother through the umbilical chord and that harmony resonates through us all, and so when we see each others bellybuttons, well we know we are not Adam or Eve or Jesus but that we are all mammals.
Chickens don’t have bellybuttons, dinosaurs (are they mammals?) didn’t have bellybuttons, dolphins probably have belly buttons, I don’t really know that but I am not going to look it up, I should just be able to guess that they do. The matter is that anyone with a bellybutton could in theory participate in the bellybutton fashion show of oneness.
There is however one odd thing about fashion sense, African women and the women of India and Persia, have been exposing their bellybuttons for thousands of centuries so they are not so much participating in the fashion sense of the day; for a belly dancer is a cultural icon and her dress code has been defined as it has been for thousands of years; a genie doesn’t dress for the times. and so you could imagine a part of the world, for sure in India and Africa and Persia where exposing one’s bellybutton cannot be defined as fashion sense, instead it becomes an unconscious act, people from these places do not know that they are being fashionable because for them it isn’t fashion as much as it is tradition, and in order to be fashionable you have to be self-conscious.
Recently, democratic elections were permitted in Egypt, and wouldn’t you know it, of the seven possible candidates the one that they are most likely to elect is the same dictator they have had for decades, Mubarak. Not unlikely, in Russia, Vladimir Putin the head of state, a man that, according to the constitution cannot run for reelection, would undoubtedly win a democratic election even as he has acted to concentrate power and indeed rules as a benevolent dictator. And in my own country, Colombia, we have a democratically elected president, Mr. Uribe, who is actually more a dictator from the Harvard School of Business; and he is philosophically hopeful that a modified constitution will allow him an uninterrupted reign; for us Colombians only have this one man that can rule our country. At the periphery of Colombia is Venezuela where Hugo Chavez has been democratically elected to lead a Bolivarian revolution that will, if successful, make Uribe redundant. Chavez has facilitated his reign by making healthcare and education a national beneficence thus making himself popular enough to militaristically dictate over the affairs of his own country and its oil production.
You can see a pattern in politics much like you may see a pattern in fashion and the pattern here is that a people, democratically ruled, or ruled by dictators or kings, or parliaments are usually being ruled by the person or persons that they would have as their rulers!
Democratic states always pride themselves on the fact that they put their politicians up for popular nomination by their constituency. The assumption being that only a vote, a public and monitored vote will produce a true representative of a people. This is of course a fallacious assumption as we have seen throughout political history that countries, be they democratic, parliamentary, republican, dictatorial, militaristic and or monarchistic will invariably elect and promote similar political dynasties; and these dynasties tend to represent the “national character.”
The Russians have always liked absolutist tsars to rule them because the average Russian considers himself a serf and is his own worst enemy; as admirers of theological and monarchical theatrics they suffer the disease of blood relations and when it comes to war they love to bleed like the hemophiliacs that they are; but more they bleed because they believe that bloodletting heals the family tree.
South Americans have a tendency to love populist dictators or fatherly types because Latin men cannot bring themselves to leave their mothers and cease fearing their fathers; and Latin women have not learned to steal their boys from their mothers and become wives, but rather remain daddy’s little girl.
Italians like to be ruled by a mosaic of inconsistencies that are possessed by fanatic objectives.
The English have always liked their rulers to have higher aims with lower causes that can only be objectified by indifference and is superimposed by a brilliant disguise of witticisms.
Africans have always preferred despots, the African heart despises politics, its ear to the ground it prefers barbarian rule and barbarian law, it sublets politics to instinct and wild passions.
Unconsciously, Japan has never wanted its rulers to change, it always selects those that will forgo change, for the Japanese samurai is based on rigor, discipline, intensity of self domination, and subjugation; politically, Japan is a fetish.
The Chinese masses promote leaders that will isolate them from the rest of the world so as to acquire their one billionth of uniqueness from the rest of us. The Chinese also prefer leaders that are patient turtles in their acts, throughout Chinese history the thread of continuity is significant: a dominant aversion to foreigners, a certainty about the completeness of the Chinese universe, and as such a country and a people that can only be changed within, while promoting eons of change through spontaneous national-soul-catharses as mandated by their ambivalence towards individualism.
It is an inherent and natural tendency for national psyches to predetermine their leaders, regardless of the means to power, by a national and coherent consensus that rigorously mandates the character of the elected one.
The Bush-Republican dynasty of America is a consequence of a national psyche that was feeling insecure in the world, and seeks a rearguard action in a desperate attempt to bring a drastically changing world under a new hegemony. Bush has impressively trounced outmoded principles with callous disregard of the possible consequences; and we must be fair to him, the cold war was over, the treaties and the diplomatic mindsets that set international relations were open to discussion, Bush simply disbanded them. That which cannot be undone must be cut!
In a sense, the collective American psyche concluded that the world had changed dramatically, from the collapse of the soviet union forward, and that whatever came next no one could know, the only thing that you could do was tear everything apart and then let what must come from it rise as demanded and permitted by the new world order. Much to their credit Americans have always understood that change is something that you cannot control but that it is something that must be done; what defines the American psyche is their willingness to go into the unknown armed with only their wits about them. By selecting a president with no prejudice towards change, by electing a man that had no sense of history and ritual, they elected to realize that the modern world had changed and that they had to put a wrecking ball to the treaties and consensus of old and let what commeth may.
It takes a lot of guts to do that and Americans are admirable for their guts. By ball wrecking the past they fast forward the unknown future and have as their advantage the fact that they are always looking towards the horizon to solve all of their problems; thus they are able to perceive and indeed acquire the benefits of change much to the envy of the French who are a backward looking people, always thinking that that they can intellectualize the world and master its poetic passions in stanzas.
The French are fascinating, besides the Greeks of old no one has thought, much to their own detriment, more than the French. The French continually administer thought to their feelings, and their feelings are continually made prudish by it. Thus, in a remarkable fashion the French are fashionable but like all fashions their impact is severely handicapped by how fashionable it is. Of course a French leader has to write poems and novels, he has to have an intrusive understanding of history and needs to posses a certain effeminate disposability of character. In America these very traits would be admonished as the means of a charlatan to acquire distinction; and indeed to a large extent French history is a verbal attribute of marmalades through the promenade; still, as we shall see, these intricacies of a romanticized existence play their role in the world community.
The French have elected, and are so appointed, to be the guardians of past eccentricities, these only look like eccentricities to us now because they are adulterated by our modern worldview, in their time many of the traditions guarded by the French had their relevance. Today the wine industry has grown globally to a large extent because the French have lost control of the wine making process. But the traditions of wine making so fervently and bureaucratically guarded by the French wine makers have atoned the consistency and largely defined purpose and essence worldwide. This distinction implies that the French guard the historical presence and by doing so create the scope by which all other precedents for winemaking sift into the aging process.
It is then true that the meticulousness of winemaking, as done in France, with its infinite varieties and glorified plots would have never made a global en mass wine industry but it is also true that a global wine industry would not have been possible had it not been so.
In much the same manner we could judge how France elects its political framers, looks to set a precise precedent that while not the type to conquer the mindsets of the world, will instead be worldly. And that worldly aspect of it will undoubtedly effect, in unknown ways, how others frame their worldview or legal premise.
The wine industry is a cognoscenti reference to yet another industry that haplessly marches from tragedy to tragedy, with its own occasional fashion show of characters who trifle with the imagination: The airline industry.
Calling it the “airline industry” might be a misnomer as more money is made selling planes than is made flying passengers around the world; certainly Boeing and Airbus benefit greatly from the interesting fact that Airlines benefit from having two suppliers of Airplanes so as to reduce the risk of dependence upon one or the other; and so Boeing and Airbus are exemplars of a dual-monopoly with zero compromises. But still we talk about the “airline industry” because that is the mouth of the monster that feeds the travel industry from any angle: travel agencies, hoteliers, insurances, rental car agencies, plane manufactures, caterers, restaurateurs, conventioneers, eco hot spots, tropical islands, exotic getaways, theme parks, historical England, the royal family, Stonehenge, the pyramids, Bhutan, and the biggest rock in Australia all benefit first and foremost from the passenger-eating airline industry.
Yet even as all that is true, with all those dependencies the airline industry would, at first sight appear to be the worst run industry, the least profitable, the most strife-ridden by labor disputes, the most likely to suffer from prime material shortages or price fluctuations, and equally the most regulated of all industries and the least capable of price gouging its customers, as stiff competition sets a low profit margin, and high operating costs set stringently high load factors as the prerequisite to profitability.
In the final analysis the industry that most serves to riddle the world with immigrants and to bring businesses, governments and peoples closest together, the industry that shrinks the world continues to be an accountant’s nightmare. But then we must ask why doesn’t it just all go bankrupt and be done with it. Certainly the law of supply and demand would imply that there are far too many seats on airplanes if they are sold as such bargain rates that in the end the traveler is not paying the true cost of a ticket, upfront. That would all call for a logical free hand correction where maybe more airlines would go bankrupt, the prices could then rise, airplane seats per passenger capacity would fall, fewer people would afford travel but then the airline industry could be profitable and stay competitive.
Why doesn’t that happen? Is it because countries like Italy want to protect their airlines so that they are willing to subsidize their carriers into inferiority? Is it because bankruptcy laws in the United States are too liberal and kind to those companies that come under its protection? Is it because bankers and investors that finance the billions of dollars in airplane leases do not want to write off their losses and so they continue to renegotiate debt and reinvest hoping for a brighter day?
The truth of the airline industry is much less stark, and it is not the harbinger of bad news that the newspaper industry has made it out to be.
The airline industry isn’t an industry! It isn’t an industry because it cannot stand by itself, and more because it is not a principal in the acts of its progress. When airlines move people they always do it from a perspective of intermediaries, they are indeed what we ought call a “third-party-industry”; they are acting more as a go between than a causa célèbre or as prime mover of the thing itself. This is precisely why the airline industry does not really have high customer satisfaction and it is also why it doesn’t have high customer loyalty. You will change airlines faster than you would change toothpaste brands. You cannot feel any significant differences in airplanes, as a reason to fly this or that airline, for a modern Airbus or a modern Boeing airliner feel very much the same, first class is first class, but most of the rest of us are in cramped class, and the meals aren’t getting any better and the service is obviously not factor number one with the airlines.
If you want to know who cares about you, you just have to review their list of priorities, in the airline industry it is fuel cost, labor cost, maintenance cost, and cost per flight seat mile, then service and food, I might have the order wrong but service and food are certainly least important. So you might ask why doesn’t the airline industry care about you?
Well, don’t take it personally, the airline industry simply is not in the business of caring about you. It is in the business of moving you, your family, your friends, your business partners, your government officials, and the rest of the world’s peoples between to and fro; and this is very much like the transportation system of the slave trade, there aren’t any benefits to be gained in making you more comfortable and feeding you better, only more costs. To the airline industry the idea of you is an ephemeral idea, you exist as a piece of inventory that the longer you remain on the shelf the more you depreciate in value and thus the airline follows the old warehouse rule, first in first out and just in time inventory is what you are to them. When a plane lands gotta get you in there fast and out fast and the faster the better.
The harrowing narrowing of time between the time that the airline industry picks you up and delivers you to your destination has come under a theological constraint: the speed of sound. The speed of sound is a problem because airplanes that fly at the speed of sound make a lot of noise and people don’t like noisy neighbors. But there is a bigger constraint to it than just shockwaves, fast planes need to be small so they can slip through the air without insurmountable drag-coefficiency penalties. A larger body implies that you touch more of the atmosphere and the more you touch of the atmosphere, well, the more the atmosphere touches you, and anything that touches more costs more money to fly, that’s the drag of it.
Thus, unable to increase speed in order to make more flights within 24 hours, the next logical solution to moving more passengers in and out faster is to increase the size of the plane, fit more people in it and then you can move more people without using more planes, hence the new generation of jumbo jets that will be the equivalent of flying two planes at once, only at the cost of flying one plane, and using the flight bandwidth of just one giant plane.
But cram them and cram them has its limits too, and no one wants to think of the day that a super jumbo jet with 800 passengers crashes, but that little horror aside the growth of passengers will continue to rise for the foreseeable future so the solution of larger planes offers little hope that travel will actually get better for you and your luggage, though the differences between the two is indiscernible. Why it takes decades to expand an airport and decades to build new airplanes, and decades to understand migration and travel patterns and in decades to come oil is only going to get more expensive, so whatever the airline industry saves on consumption, through newer technologies, it will pay out as higher oil prices, due to increased demand; and that will subsume any cost benefit advantages.
You don’t get something for nothing, the airline industry is certainly proof of that and so you might say why are there airline executives even in that crazy industry, if you could be the CEO of a major airline, why would you want that headache when you could just as easily be the CEO of less cumbersome businesses? Certainly pilots love to fly and the intricacies of flying a jumbo jet have their crossword puzzle mesmerizing qualities; and certainly flight attendants love the benefits of being able to travel throughout the world and meeting interesting peoples; and for sure jet engine mechanics love drag racing; and we don’t know what to say about baggage handlers, or ticket attendants, there the glamour of the job is lost, but certainly there are plenty of people that work at an airline because they like what they do, but who would want to run an airline company, a thing three times removed from its consumer, a third-person’s perspective company?
The key to the riddle is very simple, the reason why the airline industry shows poor earnings every year, or when it does show a strong year, a rarity, it is usually one of low returns its because we measure companies on a fiscal yearly basis. This fiscal year measure works rather fine for chocolate makers and car manufactures and coal producers, as they are primal companies, thus such annual measure is more realizable than it is to measure an industry that is a third-party to everyone else’s actions; you could say it and it has been said, that the airline industry is there so that the plane makers can make airplanes; and you may extend that in any direction as it is equally true from any angle the airline industry is a third-party constituency to another industry: be it the restaurant or hotel industry or conventions or business industry etc.. the point is that as such, the basis by which we measure the airline industry should be fiscally generational, as tendencies in consumption and trends tend to be generational inflows, and thus an accurate listing of the genuine financials of a third-party type industry, as we now dare to define and claim the airline industry to be, should indicate a more precise and relevant measure of its sound or not business model. Executives that then work in this industry have not the capacity to see that there is no way to make an airline financially sound within the scope of a fiscal year but their myopia allows them to work for the industry.
In showing these various relationships some readers would argue that the same could said of the ground transport industry, or the shipping industry that are indeed basic third-party models, (and more industries such as pharmaceuticals which would seem to be fundamentally third-party-industries but that strangely also depend on ephemeral third party constructs, illnesses, diseases, viruses, governmental regulation, etc as catalysts for their own third party drug business to flourish and profit;¬¬¬) and I wouldn’t have any problem with those types of conclusions.
In brief: all types that depend on all types are fundamentally represented by their type.
RC
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