There's an old Seinfeld episode where Jerry and Elaine are about to board a plane and the gate attendant tells them she can bump one of them into first class. Jerry immediately takes the offer, explaining to Elaine that he's flown in first class before--she hasn't--so he knows what he would be missing. Sure enough, Jerry spends the flight sipping champagne with a supermodel while Elaine sits in a middle seat squeezed between two fat guys who fall asleep on her.
I thought about Jerry and Elaine when I heard about the Great Reclining Seat Wars that have broken out over American skies. The war has pitted those who want to recline their airplane seats against those who have purchased a nifty device called the Knee Defender, which effectively blocks the person in front of you from relaxing into your lap.
Fights have broken out over the Knee Defender, and beverages have been tossed in anger. Flights have even been diverted because reclining passengers and their non-reclining antagonists couldn't share space in peace.
Anyone who has flown a U.S. carrier on a domestic flight knows that the experience has become increasingly awful. Shabby planes, miserly service, and, of course, less and less space. Only toddlers, who on American flights must pay full fare, have enough room to sit. The experience is even more infuriating if you compare it with flying on a European airline. The difference between flying Lufthansa or LOT vs. United or USAir is like the difference between eating prosciutto and Spam.
But life for those in the front of the plane has gotten ever more luxurious, even while those of us in steerage class have been defending our knees and throwing drinks at each other. Business and first-class flying has become more and more an extension of the concierge economy of the 1 percent, only with wings. Food, drink, their own wait staff, exclusive bathrooms, and even expedited security--because terrorists only fly coach, apparently. Meanwhile, I fully expect airlines to install coin-operated toilets soon for those of us in the back of the airbus.
Surely, though, those people up front deserve all those perks, right? They paid for those tickets and you get what you pay for.
I'd like to propose a truce between the knee defenders and the knee bangers. You're both right. It is more comfortable to recline that seat and it provides a modicum of relaxation. It is also rude to the person behind you, physically uncomfortable and even claustrophobic. I don't need to get any closer to you than I already am.
Instead, let's channel that anger toward the airlines themselves. They created the Big Squeeze. They put pampering the few above providing the rest of us with a handful of pretzels.
Every so often you hear about a local judge sentencing a slumlord who has broken some law to a month of living in one of his own rat-infested firetraps. Let's have Congress do something similar: For one month every year, U.S. airline executives should be forced to fly with the rest of us. In the back row by the bathroom. In that middle seat between the two dozing fat guys.
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Steven Conn is a professor of history at Ohio State University.
Editorial on 09/18/2014