Sunday, August 19, 2012

A Toast for the Flash Mobs


My favorite feminist web site is Jezebel.com.   It has introduced me to concepts such as “body snarking”, “slut shaming”, and “thighlights”.  It also frequently features celebrity news, kitten videos, and red carpet slideshows so it really has something for all different kinds of feminists.

I bring this up not because I want to discuss the fight against mansplaining or Photoshop controversies.  It is because I was perusing the site recently and saw this video of a flash mob on an airplane (I’ll pause while you watch the video):



You may remember flash mobs from the previous decade.  They are when a bunch of people with too much free time get together and dance around in a public place.  They seemed kind of fun back in 2006 or so but since then they have been commercialized, televised, and Glee-ized.  The ubiquity of flash mobs is a sure sign of a society that is on the way down.  Rome never recovered after the rise of mico vulgi in the late 470s.

“Wait”, you may be thinking, “isn’t the existence of this blog evidence that you, too, have too much free time?” Probably, but there is a key difference between a flash mob participant and myself: I am not an attention whore.  That reminds me, please tell your friends to check out my blog. But I digress.

Back to the point of this post: Please keep your flash mob off my airplane.  When I’m on a plane all I want to do is browse the SkyMall catalog, eat the $4 bag of Skittles I bought in the airport, and pray that the person next to me has showered within the last 24 hours and is a mute.  Flying sucks enough without additional distractions. Plus, it isn’t even an original idea.

The last thing I want to do is to have to deal with while being held captive at 34,000 feet is a bunch of conventionally attractive people waving their arms around and blocking the aisles.   Well, I guess it is better than conventionally ugly people doing the same thing.  By the way, “conventionally attractive” is a term I also learned on Jezebel.com.  It is kind of relevant in this case, though.  Do you think the reaction from the rest of the passengers would have been the same if the flash mob was performed by a bunch of men wearing keffiyehs?  I can sum it up in one word: diverted flight.



Did you happen to notice that poor guy trying to get back to his seat for the first 1:30 of the video?  All he wants to do is go back to his seat and reflect after a nice in-flight poop.  Instead he is forced to stand there like a boob and wait.  I suppose he should be thankful that he wasn’t on his way to the bathroom instead.  Would it have killed those dancers to pause from their self-indulgence to let him by?  Possibly.

One thing I really want to know is if they were playing the music in the cabin.  In case you didn’t recognize it, the mellifluous voice you hear on the track is that of Kanye West singing his song “Runaway”.  I actually like Kanye’s music, but I’m not sure about this particular song and whether it was the appropriate choice.  It features the chorus:

Let’s have a toast for the douche bags
Let’s have a toast for the assholes
Let’s have a toast for the scumbags
Every one of them that I know

On second thought, in this case it seems kind of fitting.

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