Key Terms: TSA humiliation ritual – Oh neat, real buttons – GeorgeCostanzaSociety.gif
In such conditions there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently no culture of the earth, no navigation nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
Thomas Hobbes
A couple years ago I spent far more money than it was worth to ride an Amtrak from these United States’ most blessed central hills to L’Enfant’s dull cosmopolitan fever dream that we call Washington DC, our stupid fucking capital. I chose the Amtrak for no good reason. I think I’ve just watched too many Wes Anderson movies and read too many Modernist novels.
Apparently, I thought it worth spending a thousand and fifty-six bucks on, but not worth writing about at the time, because like our nation’s capital, I am also stupid and self-involved. It was one of the oddest things I’ve done in the last few years, and I shrugged it off. ‘Twas a novelty, nothing more. Slapped by the monkey’s paw, I was wrong in my delusions, but I was also a little bit right.
I have flown too much in the last couple years. Soared the skies in a way that the ten years ago me would have blown a booger at and said, “Where the fuck are you flying to, dumb bitch, you’ve got the whole world right here?”
Every time that I have stood around at these airports, be it super-duper revamped MCI or the Royal Reagan Airport, I thought of that unending railroad ride. How could I not? After all, it was an unsuspecting incoming flight to Reagan where some hundred of my cross-river Kansan brethren laughed at their last doom scroll meme by the time a military helicopter run had already gone sideways and sent them on to their cold, wet death.
Even without the tales of grim death, the helplessness one feels on an airplane is almost too much. The engines get to purring, and you, the rider, become the hostage. From then until that plane reaches the ground on the other side, your autonomy is limited. Anyone who ever had a couple beers in the lounge before boarding and realized they should have used the bathroom before takeoff knows this. You are 5 years old all over again, strapped in the back of the car on the sixth hour of a road trip you barely understand, and grandpa is not going to entertain another piss stop. Even without that, air travel is atrociously degrading. We degrade ourselves, just this one time, because we just want to go home. We eat the TSA’s shit, we let them rifle our once neatly folded delicates, let them gawk at our unmentionables, we let them do and say whatever they want to us, because what else are we going to do? Make a scene? Of course not.
Most people intrinsically know this experience is fucked and weird and put up with it anyway because we’re supposed to be a super society. This is a nice world, and so many of us are nice in it. But some of us remember that we paid money, only to be treated like shit. I once even said “Thank you,” to the grumpy old cooze that thought my makeup bag looked dangerous, even though she gave it back so rummaged through that I couldn’t latch it shut and had to crouch on the floor to put it all back together while she glared at me like I was some poisoned rat.
What makes me sick of air travel is the shrinking quarters and the ass quality service staff. If I wanted the freakish Grayhound experience, I’d be surfing the highways like that Kerouac slut. And so I took my chance on the great American railways. After all, it couldn’t get any worse.
I know I could have died on the Amtrak. I guess. They have little stickers on the windows that tell you where to punch them if the whole show goes sideways. Besides that, I have a harrowing memory from an afternoon spent day drinking with some forgettable co-workers in Port Richmond, Philly. We were walking to the corner store to buy another set of singles when some Amtrak derailed a couple blocks over. Until that day, I legit had no idea that a train can still derail and violently kill people. I thought that was some awful old-timey disaster from the days when people casually coughed blood into hankies and children worked in mine shafts. Something mitigated by time and tech.
Passenger Amtrak is Motel 6 strapped to rails. But maybe a Motel 6 where people at large are not methy freaks. We are all seemingly trying to be very, very polite. And it is not hard because, pretty much everyone you interact with between east Missouri to the Alleghenies is Amish as hell. The dexterity with which those humble bumpkins dodged the Chicago Union Station junkies is commendable. I followed them. Like a scavenging bird, I followed them. They, out of all of Chicago’s Hell, were my only chance of escaping to Elysian.
Ok, about the trains. The trains as they are and not the temporal state I so wish they were. Those busted old bundles of bolts. Them, and all their whirly girly guaranteed industry shit, THEM trains.
The interiors are like what I think 1985 felt like, delusional glitter and all. Hard angles, fake wood panels, beige and brown and thin carpet. Train people are obnoxiously friendly in that John Candy kinda way. These people seem to live their whole lives on this thing, and they want to get to know you. It’s cloying. It’s enough to make you eat all those fuzz words you said about community building. At least, it was for me.
Stuck as fuck dials and push buttons are still king on the Amtrak. They don’t give you tiny ad-stuffed monitors in the back of every seat like the planes do, but you do get a radio in your roomette. No, it doesn’t seem to actually work. But the hot/cold fan works, and the outlets work so long as you never move the thing you hope to charge, otherwise plug falls out like a limp noodle.
The beds are shit obviously. I can’t imagine any person ever would expect a cot on a train to be dreamy. That said, the seats in coach and the observation cars are fabulous. Literally several calibers above the seats you get when you drop top dollars on a room. Amtrak is the only mode of mass travel where the quality of amenities sharply decline with each ascending tier of fare class. The toppest titty of an Amtrak ticket gets you nothing more than 18 inches of walkable space once the beds are down (once you unlatch the beds in a roomette, that’s the end of your floor space, it pretty much become a bunk bedded coffin), and you get your own bathroom stuff. Not a proper bathroom, mind you. It’s a hose shower and sink over in a corner and, for some god awful reason, a toilet that is literally right next to the beds. As in, one bed borders it, and whoever may be sleepily climbing down from the top bunk above better hope someone put the lid back down or their foot is going right into the mouth of the beast.
Frankly, the beds could be heaven sent and you still wouldn’t be able to sleep well on the train. Unless you’re a sailor or have some crazy sleeping pills or something. Sleeping on these things is like trying to sleep on a mechanical bull. The whole night is spent getting your cookies tossed from station to station. This is another thing that isn’t as bad in coach.
Like I said earlier, only the top dollar rooms get their own bedside toilet. For everyone else, it’s one per narrow corridor. Anywhere from 10-30 people, depending on how ~happening~ things are that night. I’d guess the hallways to be around three feet wide, and I felt like a plinko ball every time I had to shimmy down to the water closet. The bathrooms are, of course, grotesque. We could have been the daintiest, tidiest set of passengers in the world, and they still would have been grotesque. When the train’s a-going, which is almost always, there’s no standing still. The most graceful man in the world would be as much of an out of control firehose as the world’s greatest slob trying to aim at those toilets. When I went to brush my teeth I had to brace myself, shoulders pushing against one wall with my feet kicked up against the other like I was trying to split the room in two. The next morning, I took a mascara brush to the eye. I got off that train looking like I’d crawled out of a swamp.
So, why would anyone take an Amtrak? If you’re going to drive a long distance, it’s pretty decent. You don’t have to worry about operating a vehicle so you can get drunk and silly, if you wish. You don’t have to stop for gas and, more importantly, you don’t have to stop for sleep. For those who *would* consider a plane, it’s a harder sell. Amtrak is definitely a better coach ride regardless, but it’s probably especially cozier if you’re substantially oversized. You also don’t have to spend 20 minutes disassociating in order to cope with the fact that you’re letting the window lickers of the TSA degrade you with their nudie box walk of shame. Unless of course, you paid the extortion money so you could get PreCheck CLEAR and came on one of the lucky days when all the scanny machines are actually working. I wonder if whoever named that program has realized it sounds like an at-home jizz tester.
Beyond that, the train is only practical if you’re Amish, afraid of planes, or you just really like trains. Most people seem to be the first or the third. Train riding for the sake of train riding is, apparently, a thing. It’s like a cruise, but on land and there’s no pool and the food and drinks are airplane prices along with sad, plastic airplane quality, and you never go outside. They say you get step out at the station stops, but what they mean is you’ll be forced off at the four hour Chicago layover and if you step off to have a stretch or a smoke during one of the other stops, they’ll leave without you.
It’s a weird scene, but so what. Everywhere seems to be odd feeling and liminal these days. I’ve already publicly made the claim that large smears of the US are low- or no-trust societies.
That argument extends to planes, trains, and buses. Cramming people into the tin like ground tuna locks in a certain degree of good behavior, depending on which hell you choose. Last I knew, buses were the most dangerous pick of the litter, particularly those two-level monsters. Makes sense. Is there any security on a bus besides its tired old driver? Planes are probably fine because there’s no room to do anything and you can’t exactly wander aimlessly without a stewardess eventually asking you what your problem is. The train is like a hybrid of the two. More staff about than a Grayhound, but more wiggle room to get up to shit for the maliciously inclined. There are locks on the doors, but I’ve bought $2 skirts off Shein with sturdier closures than those wiggly little latches.
What happens is everyone does that subtle little dance of American niceties. That fast fading virtue of being not only polite, but courteous to strangers. Pardon me, excuse me, thank you, you’re welcome. Good manners are the cross beams that keep the social contract from collapsing, and those beams have grown ever more tenuous since 2020. It’s a simple system, and one that you know intrinsically if you were raised to not beclown yourself in public. This casual etiquette has the added value of making it much less awkward to audit the potential danger of the weirdos you end up surrounded by on a train.
When people sit down next to you, they fire off a hey-how’s-it-going that gives both parties a chance, with little effort spent, to make sure no one’s a mumbling crazy fidgeting with a knife. Assuming it’s a busy train of course. If someone sits next to you on an empty train they are a freak and deserve to be shamed for being one. If you’re one of us high rollers in the sleeper cars, there’s this sort of bird ritual with a wave and a “Been riding long?” that you go through with the person across the hall. You could be talking to a friendly kidney bandit, but the odds are low and if you’re charming enough, you may haved turned them into your friend. What kind of short-sighted kidney bandit would harvest the gizzards of a friend?
Casual manners used to be more ubiquitous. Now they’re gone from planes, long gone from most if not all buses, and definitively extinct on public transit. Everyone seems to know that polite society has been evaporating and most seem to have some favored answer for why. Tech is the common scapegoat in my circles. Polite society shut out by addictive screens and noise cancelling headphones. I don’t disagree, but I’d call it more of a symptom, a means to ignore the rot. I’ve been wearing headphones on every plane, subway, and sidewalk for over a decade now. Most of the time I’m not even listening to anything. It’s just the only way to ignore the toothless woman angrily asking you to give her a dollar, or that certain kind of dude that compulsively pesters any woman who had the bad luck to be within 30 feet of him.
Polite society is likely never coming back. Some puddles of it will gather in a few unique suburbs and small towns, but it never comes back. For the rest of the century we will continue getting meaner and meaner until most of the nation is like that city in Judge Dredd. Riding the Amtrak won’t change any of that, but, for now at least, it’s the last bastion of the old way among the mass transit options that I’ve experienced. If I ever take a multi-day steamboat ride and the people are majority lovely, I’ll amend this opinion.
If you had fun reading this, consider leaving a tip.
The Normal Times 
Leave a comment