Tag: Hijacking

“The Skies Belong to Us” #3

I can’t decide if The Skies Belongs to Us is like a good layer cake or a good lasagna.

It’s possible that I’m thinking about food metaphors because the school year has started (cries) and my mind is on teaching students how to organize compelling essays. Or maybe it’s because I read a good portion of Skies while eating the last pieces of my birthday cake (cries and weeps). Comparing it to cake might make it seem as if the book shouldn’t be taken seriously, that it’s more like dessert than something substantive. That isn’t the case. For all of the zaniness of the different hijacking plots, this is a book that invites us to think of how national crises manifest themselves in a country’s citizens—especially those citizens whose feelings of disenfranchisement chip away at their sense of moral duty. Still, I’m leaning towards cake over lasagna.

Dom wrote in her last post: “my incredulity has been tempered by compassion, and a bit of sadness.”
She’s is thinking about Holder (she refers to him by his first name):

On page 122, there’s an excerpt of the note that Roger had started to write to the captain of the plane, but which he gave up on when he couldn’t keep his thoughts straight. It’s completely incomprehensible; a word salad from someone who is clearly not in their right mind. Reading it broke my heart a little. Here was a man who had witnessed (and committed) unspeakable horrors, and yet, because of a mistake he made while trying to deal with that, he was sent back into the regular world with no help or support whatsoever.

I felt this way at a different moment. The mention of the other black guy on Holder’s flight made me sad and uncomfortable. As the crew and passengers try to figure out who among them is a threat, he is considered a suspect—for no other reason than a shared racial marker. He must have been as frightened and frustrated as the other passengers, and yet he had another burden to shoulder.

But back to the cake/lasagna that is this book.

Writing 101 teaches the structure of a good essay: the hook, the argument, the evidence, more evidence, some analysis, conclusions. You can see this in good writing everywhere. An op-ed, long non-fiction piece, or blog post begins with some anecdote that’s meant to stand in for the piece’s larger issue or theme. I do this in my literary criticism, start with some salient (or salacious) part of the text and then hang my argument on it. It’s a great model; think of it as the comfort food of writing. I thought Koerner was doing this and had sort of eased into the lasagna of his book: personal/historical/political,personal, historical/political, personal/historical/political. For roughly the first half of the book the personal focused primarily on the hijackers, either the motivation behind their attacks and/or what happened around the hijacking (NB: when parachuting out of a plane carrying your loot, don’t wear cowboy boots).

I liked that structure and the rhythm of it. It made the history feel more intimate and kept the focus on the people. I think it might be how Koerner avoids slipping into preaching (I’m fascinated by the absence of moralizing in the book thus far). But when we get to the Holder-Kerkow hijacking, Koerner starts mixing it up, adding layers within layers, and then it’s like an amazing novel, and I don’t know what’s going to happen next. Or, actually, I kind of know what’s going to happen next but I don’t know how it’s going to happen. I love that. As someone who grew up reading detective novels and who spends her time reading canonical British fiction, I’m pretty good at anticipating what’s going to happen next and, in some cases, how events will unfold. It means I’m usually reading for something else (patterns, rhetoric, ideology), and get distracted by what I want to say or write about what I’m reading.

That’s not the case here. At first I couldn’t put the book down because I was so surprised by its content; now I can’t put it down (even for my mandatory reading for school: Frankenstein, Northanger Abbey, the Romantic poets) because it’s crafted so well. Like a really amazing cake. A good lasagna is wonderful, but it’s actually really easy to make one. It’s almost fool proof. Oh sure, you can overcook the noodles, or not season the filling properly, or use store-bought mozzarella and bore yourself to death, but it’s basic and easy to learn. Cake, especially a layered cake takes skill.

Take my birthday cake for example: lemon cake with lemon curd and vanilla cream icing (it’s called Brooklyn Sunshine and you can get it from Heavenly Crumbs, but you have to order it a few days ahead). Perfectly layered with icing that didn’t leave an aftertaste or that slimy post-icing feeling in your mouth. Just when you were enjoying the cake, a bit of lemon curd would get in there and the icing is pretty and thick enough to let you know you’re eating cake for a special reason but not so thick as to overpower the cake the way the icing on those dry monstrosities that Magnolia Bakery calls cupcakes does. For me, the heart of this book is the national crisis, and Holder and Kerchow are the icing. I’m not quite sure why, so this analogy could fall apart at any moment, but I suspect it’s because they’re the shiny, compelling decoration that pulled me into the cake.

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“The Skies Belong to Us” #2

I’m having a lot of fun wondering what prompted my mild-mannered friend to tweet a WTF.photo-31

Is it the sheer number of hijackers?
Is it the crude capitalism of the security debate?
Or is it the hijacker in the cowboy boots?
Is she thinking of our friend Amber the flight attendant?
Or maybe the new Almodovar movie with its Glee-like musical number?*

It’s hard to say what has my eyes wide open to the point where I want to nudge strangers on the train to share my incredulity. Is it the zaniness of the hijacking capers or the tug-of-war between the airlines and a government trying to protect a public that didn’t seem terribly bothered by side-trips to Havana? I’m in awe of the “What to Expect When you’re Hijacked” articles and the proto-Dr. Phil and his cray-cray theories about what makes a hijacker. The pissing contest between Cuba and the United States. I don’t even. WTF.

I know Holder and Ketchow are at the center of this story, but, right now at least, I’m not at all interested in them. I want to know more about the other hijackers, especially the hot Italian or the guy who hijacked a plane in order to propose (note to Dom: if a man went to those lengths to get me to marry him, I might seriously reconsider my “no wedding” policy). I credit my curiosity to the way Koerner tell us about the collection of the disillusioned and the delusional—one right after another. It’s like a slideshow you want to watch again.

Underneath the hijinks and breeziness (sorry), Koerner offers a history of the current security state we all currently live in. If Holder were getting on a plane today, a TSA agent would have the right to search his afro for explosives. Maybe “history” isn’t the right word. Maybe it’s a kind of prequel. Right now, he’s laying it out without making a lot of fuss about it. He is just telling the story and leaving it to the reader to make of it what she will. I hope it stays that way. It’s distracting when authors and/or their narrators do the work of interpretation for me. I don’t want or need anyone sitting on my shoulder and talking to me while I’m reading, unless I’m being mocked (see Jane Austen’s narrators).

Some free associations…

I’m with Dom when she reacts to politics that seem uniquely American**. I had to stop reading for a bit when Koerner describes the trauma of Holder’s youth. I also wonder if she has the same experience of being challenged about her blackness that Holder faced in his youth and I had to negotiate well into graduate school.

I’m noting how much the military industrial complex leaks into our daily lives and how the technology that begins there wends its way to civilian use.

I’m wondering if there is a connection between deregulating airlines and the current security model of the TSA. I was a kid when the airlines were deregulated and have no memory of it, but I keep seeing it as a crucial turn in public policy and our relationship to travel and, eventually, security.

I read Koerner, stop, and do other things, and I think about travel.

I remember The Flying Tigers airline that took my family from Mississippi to The Philippines. The flight attendants were extra kind to us. My Christian mother calls this God’s favor. The militant part of my black identity thinks it made them feel good to be extra gracious to this nice, squeaky clean black family. My father was handsome and sharp in his uniform, my mother was beautiful, and I was wide-eyed and well behaved. The flight attendants weren’t just nice to us on the plane. Even after we moved into our house, whenever they flew into Clark Air Base they would bring me presents—a shiny blue Flying Tigers jacket (in my size), a Flying Tiger pin, and, my favorite thing: real, whole milk. We couldn’t get that overseas, so we drank the powdered stuff (I actually only used it for my cereal or in hot chocolate). The flight attendants would bring me the milk that didn’t get used during the flight. Bliss.

Now, of course, the experience of flying overseas is exhausting and invasive.

On my way back from Amsterdam a few years ago the wand the security guard used to scan my body for explosives was triggered by the underwire in my bra. When it beeped, the flat-chested agent asked what was causing the beep. When I said it was most likely the underwire in my bra she was derisive: “why do you need underwire in your bra?” I looked at her breasts and then down at mine and then back at hers and then back at mine. I did that until she nodded curtly and let me go through.

I feel impossibly naïve to be so shocked by the degree to which all thoughts and policies about “security” are guided by commerce. I like to think I know how the world works, and as much as I attach the phrase “industrial complex” to any number of nouns (prison/education/wedding/mainstream feminist/Hollywood + see above) you’d think I know by now that Sally Bowles and the Master of Ceremonies are dead on right when they sing “money makes the world go round.”

I wonder if we will we ever buy our way back to that relative ease of travel. I know we’ll never be able to walk freely around airport and airplanes without intense scrutiny, but will the passenger’s comfort matter more than security the farther away we get from 9/11? Is there enough money in corporate travel to offset the billions earned by security?

My concerns about the writing have evaporated. I wondered at first if my first response was just me being a prickly, picky reader who was being super critical about a writer she doesn’t know, but I do think the writing gets better and smoother. I also am having a hard time putting the book down. But I am. As much as I want to know what happens next (of course, on some level I do know what happens), I’m slowing down to savor this book. I flew through Mat Johnson’s Pym a few summers ago and was bereft when it was over, wandered around like some lost puppy unsure about what to read next. Not this time.

I like what Dom says in her first thoughts about the book:

I have the sense that the “dots” in Roger’s and Cathy’s story can be easily connected from choice to choice, coincidence to coincidence, and consequence to consequence. Whether that is due to who they are, or to Koerner’s skill as a writer, remains to be seen.

*Dom is right about television. I was with her in Toronto for a week and only have some vague memory of a television somewhere in her apartment, and I don’t think it was ever on. I, steeped as I am in serialized fiction, love the whole process of falling in love with a show—especially dramas. I am very much looking forward to a well-done mini-series of this book, narrated by Samuel L. “Get these motherfucking hijackers off of this motherfucking plane” Jackson.

**I know, I know. I can’t help it.