Chuck Schumer Speaks for Me

Among the worst things you can do in upper-middle-class, politically-correct, don't-call-attention-to-yourself culture is insult a service person. This is counter-intuitive because one of the things that is most often done in upper-middle-class culture is complain about service.

Sen. Chuck Schumer is in hot water because he seems to have muttered to his airplane seatmate, the other New York senator, Kirsten Gillibrand, a mild epithet concerning the flight attendant who asked him (politely perhaps, but more likely peremptorily) to stop using his cell phone.

The issue, we are meant to assume, is about arrogance and entitlement. He's a senator and she's a stewardess; indeed, he implied that she was stymying important business. ("It's Harry Reid calling," Schumer supposedly told Gillibrand. "I guess health care will have to wait.")

But the arrogance and entitlement of a United States senator is no more probable then the petty tyrannies, surly dismissiveness, and automaton-like manner of a flight attendant. Such contempt has only increased with 9/11-inspired laws that make looking cross-eyed at airline personnel an imprisonable offense.

There are two points here. The smaller one has to do with the idiotic notion that cell phones might interfere with airline systems, which everybody knows (or strongly suspects) is bogus. The larger one is an odd conceit...

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