Simmering passenger revolt
means liberals won't rule forever

By TOM BRENNAN

The problem for 24-hour news channels is there just isn't 24 hours of news every day. There aren't that many significant things happening in the world, so the round-the-clock newsies give intensive coverage to stupid stuff.

Brennan

Take the jock-itch scandal that occupied hours of intense focus last week. The big story involved an openly gay lieutenant on the New York Police Department who was charged with lewd gestures by two male heterosexual sergeants.

The lieutenant said he was rubbing his crotch because he had jock itch, but he was found guilty of sexually harassing the sergeants for dealing with his problem in front of them. They felt he was being suggestive.

I watched the scandal unfold while waiting for breakfast at a pheasant hunting lodge in South Dakota. When the female anchor giving the news said she didn't know anything . . .

(cont'd from front page) about such problems, one of the hunters in our lodge yelled "That's not what you said last night."

The lodge is actually a converted roadside gasoline service station, one where the big-screen TV seemed to be on all the time. So the hunters were exposed to a lot of 24-hour news and the jock-itch incident was one of the highlights of the news week.

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This will be my last column at The Voice of The Times since we are folding our tent on Friday — ran out of money before we could get enough advertising going. I'll miss my little soapbox here, though I have a lot left to say and I'll be saying it.

I have a new book coming out after the first of the year, a novel about Alaska seceding from the union. The title is "The Snowflake Rebellion" and it will be widely available in the Northwest, but can't be ordered yet. The distributor deals haven't been cut, but you can usually find my books everywhere from Carrs Safeway to Barnes & Noble.

I also expect to write at least a few columns for The Alaska Dispatch, an online journal about life in Alaska, and will probably have a Web site featuring my four books and a couple more I plan to write.

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The trip home from South Dakota was like something out of Animal Farm, George Orwell's satirical allegory about Soviet totalitarianism. From Minneapolis/St. Paul to Anchorage, I was on a Northwest Airlines 757-300, a plane way too small for the rows-of-six seating crammed in there. The 757 is a narrow-body aircraft and the passengers were so tight together, if we were chickens Friends of Animals would have sued to set us free.

The notion of free-range passengers would scare the hell out of airline executives, but I'm thinking it may be an idea whose time has come.

On that flight, I had a tray table the size of a two-dollar bill and used it when the flight attendants came around at feeding time. Paid 10 bucks for what was supposed to be a sandwich, pasta salad and candy bar. Everything in the box was frozen solid so I flagged down an attendant (not easy because they run real fast so passengers can't catch them). I asked if they had a microwave on board and could thaw out my sandwich, at least.

The guy left and came back with another sandwich which had a warm spot on its top where a microwave had penetrated the surface, but that sandwich was frozen too, like a turkey-flavored snow cone. So I gave up and decided to eat the candy bar, but it had slid down into the dark miasma below the seats, a place resembling the space under a chicken cage. There wasn't enough room for light to penetrate to the floor — and since things were shifting around beneath my seat, I wasn't sure I even had my own trash anymore — so I gave up and threw my food way, ten bucks wasted.

A woman in the seat ahead of mine stood, moaned and asked me what time it was. I raised my arm to look at my watch and the arm of the guy next to me came up with mine (we were virtually entwined because of the space.) When I told her the flight had four more hours to go, she moaned again.

Then a look appeared on her face, the same one William Holden had on his face when he waited for the Japanese guard to look away, lit a cigarette and whispered though the smoke, "We go under the fence at midnight. Pass it on."

People don't take to enslavement very well; witness the American and French revolutions and (soon) The Snowflake Rebellion. Nothing came of the fomenting break-out in the airplane's coach section, but the rulers in Washington, at airlines and a lot of other places need to know that one will come someday.

Right now the news doesn't look too good. Trophy hunters from the U.S. Justice Department may target more Alaska politicians, airlines may jam passengers into too-small airplanes, The Anchorage Times may be soon dead, liberals will rule the nation and their candidates may be able to refer to the Anchorage Daily News as "Alaska's leading newspaper."

But none of those things will last forever. Times will change. Pass it on.

Tom Brennan is an editor of The Anchorage Times. His e-mail address is This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it