It was in a waiting area at the Miami International Airport that I finally found religion.
I am not talking about seeing my savior in a plate of cheese nachos or suddenly deciding to heed the voice from above–from the fuzzy intercom, in fact–and check out what happens in one of those airport chapels.
I’m talking about finally tuning in to a complaint readers have been sending my way for years, the growing feeling that television no longer knows its place.
I knew, of course, what they were talking about: The one-time electronic hearth moved first from family rooms, where it more or less belongs, into kitchens and bedrooms.
Then, like a teenager testing boundaries and deciding to indeed go bad, it left the house and stayed out. Bus stations, sports bars and laundromats were part of the early wave. Airports were too, and even such spots as supermarket checkout lines and grammar-school classrooms became blessed with whether-you-like-it-or-not television programming.
Now you can find TV sets turned on in the best restaurants and best minivans. Fans at a pro football stadium watch their portable TVs at least as attentively as they watch the on-field action.
I recognized in my mind that readers were right when they groused about this tubal ubiquitousness, that the trend had moved beyond occasionally annoying and into often offensive. Who, after all, was a checkout-line TV serving, people for whom the Enquirer is too intellectually challenging?
But, like the treasure hunter at the beginning of the movie “Titanic,” I hadn’t really taken the story in.
Not, that is, until this past Sunday in Miami, where the airport seems deep into an elaborate research project on the operational implications of chaos theory.
I was returning home from a family vacation in Costa Rica and had to switch planes there, which also meant claiming bags and going through U.S. Customs.
Finally making it through the Darwinian thicket of Customs and rechecking our luggage, we arrived at our gate to discover the flight to Chicago listed at 7:15 p.m. from D6 was actually the delayed 6:40 p.m. flight, and we would need to return to concourse E, where our 7:15 flight, now delayed till 8:45, would depart from gate E7 (I think).
More walking, much more. Then discovery, at E7, that our seats, confirmed four days before travel, had been reassigned, and my wife and I were no longer seated side-by-side.
This is not, remember, simple traveler kvetching about the unnamed, but very American, airline involved, but rather an important backdrop to my tale of conversion.
The seating blunder did get fixed, but as we settled in to kill the 90 minutes–my highly developed sense of social propriety had me reading an airport novel–I quickly became aware of a din coming from across the room, insistent and unnatural sounding.
It was a television set, whining away like a potentially malarial mosquito as you lie in bed.
At first, as I have been able to do in the past, I tried to ignore it and get back to reading. But with the precision and effectiveness of a virus, it kept forcing its way past my travel-weakened defenses.
The set was perched, icon-like, on a pedestal and encased, as if in defense against my thoughts, in a protective laminate housing.
The sign on the laminate suggested it was part of something called CNN Airport Network, which I recalled having read is CNN news excised of bad stuff about air travel. The unrelenting drone grew louder and more aggravating during what seemed the one commercial, an interminable pleading on behalf of the nearby duty-free shop. “Your favorite cigarettes” is the absurd phrase that sticks with me.
Half a dozen fellow travelers were watching, which kept me from going closer to see if there was a way to turn the thing off. But it was only that many heads out of easily 200 in hearing distance.
I was angry at this particular airline, which had already served me powder-stale bread, bad rock ballads throughout the cabin before takeoff on a 6 a.m. flight and anarchy at its post-Customs Miami check-in counter. But other airlines also employ TV-like Muzak in their waiting areas.
What brain dysfunction, I pondered as I sat there, leads airline and airport executives to think it is a good idea to make TV watching optional on the plane but mandatory in the waiting area? To ban smoking but to inflict on passengers another habit that is best practiced with specific consent? To force a service so few seem to enjoy and so many, in my experience, find drives them to thoughts of violence?
Even my normally less irritable spouse was bugged, I could tell, because she was more amused than chagrined when I marched to the counter to complain about the TV.
I forget the words of scornful eloquence and overwhelming logic I summoned up. The attendant did not do what I had hoped, which was rush to turn the thing off.
But after initially seeming stunned that somebody would get worked up about TV, she did say she would pass on the complaint. That’s something. Rather than hold my breath for the effects of that, I’ll also write to the airline’s airport manager. That’s something else.
And if enough of us let the tube pushers know that we’d like to keep TV in its place–that public sets convey the opposite of an effective commercial message–then maybe, just maybe, we can start to change things.
This revolution may not be rapid. It definitely will not be televised.
