There are many beautifully-phrased variations on the sentiment that it’s not the destination, but the journey itself, that’s the magical part of traveling.  Apparently none of those eloquent writers have experienced American travel in the 21st century.  The thing about traveling is that it usually sounds like great fun when it’s told about after the fact.  And it can be great fun to be in a different place.  But the getting to a different place has lost a lot of its charm these days. The costs of fuel and the consumption rates of our gigantic vehicles have made driving anywhere distant nearly as expensive as flying there—and of course there’s the time factor.  Most of us want to be on vacation, not spend five of our ten days off each year getting there.  And some of us are not built for long stretches of time in a car (a major source of irritation to our significant others, who are invariably the “we’re-leaving-at-three-a.m.-to-beat-the-traffic-and-we’re-not-stopping-until-we-need- gas” types).   Flying used to be the way to go for the working class: a few hours on a plane, and you step onto the tarmac of a different life for the next week or so.  But as airlines rapidly disappear from the skies in clouds of bankruptcy, those that remain have found fresh ways to miserable-ize the experience they’ re trying to market to us at ever-ballooning prices.  That’s right, more misery for your (more) money, a theme repeated from the moment you first stand in a line holding your shoes in your hand to the moment you stagger from the plane in a total-body spasm after your three-hour flight morphs into an eight-hour security delay because a vibrator in some passenger’s luggage mysteriously turned itself on and the bomb dogs had to be called.   Remember the good old days, when what you were afraid of was the flying?  Instead, air travel now ranks up there with root canals and amputations on the “Things You’d Rather Be Knocked Out For” list, and crashing is just one concern among many.  Now you have to make sure your socks match and remember to remove your mini-Swiss Army knife with the two-inch blade from your keyring (but you may now bring your knitting needles, up to 14” long, with you onto the plane, a point the FAA conceded to indignant grannies last year).   You have to be at the airport hours before your flight, hurrying up to wait, and you can’t carry on anything big enough to be useful.  It’s a mystery to me why they don’t just dart you with a tranquilizer gun when you hand over your ticket—something pleasant and reversible, like Valium or Versed or some such.  The baggage handler could just smoothly catch your falling body on a hand-cart and wheel you over to the conveyor belt, where your snoring carcass could be scanned for dangerous objects, then poured right onto the plane.  It seems to me this approach would solve most of the problems associated with taking a large number of people 30,000 feet into the air in a small container.  There’s nothing about flying that’s worth remaining conscious for, anyway--it’s mostly annoying, boring or terrifying, depending on luck, weather, and your alcohol content. And any contained group of people becomes a mindless collective of naturally increasing tension, by nature tilting toward explosion.  As Men In Black’s Agent K obseved, “…a person is smart.   People are dumb, panicky and dangerous.”   If everybody were unconscious, they could stack you like cordwood in the aircraft, like they obviously want to do anyway, and no one would complain about the crowded seating.  Heck, they could probably pile three times the number of passengers on each plane!  Profits would soar!  And no one would whine for their snack.  No beastly child would scream throughout a transcontinental flight. No one would become restless or panicky or irritated or drunk or psychotic.  No one would be awake to threaten to detonate anything. They could cart you off the plane at your destination, where specially- trained personnel shoot you up with the antidote, and you’d wake up refreshed in the airport lounge with your complimentary cocktail at your elbow.  Sweet! ###