Celebrating Utopia
Where We Find It

Introduction

So here I find myself on a 40 hour sojourn to the Area of Bays. Getting to JFK turned out to be a tad stressful despite for once having left home on time, since traffic on Atlantic Avenue was utterly terrible. But just like a couple of years back on my trip to Prague, it worked out to a degree of perfection never obtainable by plan, only chance. In short, thanks to the combined powers of business class and TSA Pre✓, I breezed through check-in and security only to arrive at the gate with maybe two minutes to spare before boarding started.

For the second time now in my life, that made me that mysterious passenger who shows up at the very moment everyone else has finally gotten into position for the storming of the plane née Normandy and then proceeds to fabulously sashay past all of them to board first. “Look at that douche with the fancy purse wearing his collar up high,” they whisper, “we want to be just like him.” If only they knew that this seeming triumph of style, attitude, and privilege is not only utterly fleeting. It also makes manifest divine warning that tomorrow will bring only age, disease, and death. But that is a topic for another day. This distinctly is not the second paragraph of an apocalyptic vision. Quite the opposite: This is the second paragraph of a celebration of utopia.

Now, utopia reveals itself unexpectedly and in detail long seen yet much overlooked. It generally fares best when left to its own devices, living in the wild. In particular, it should never be farmed or otherwise curated, as that inevitably results in particularly severe dystopia, i.e., something best left for another day. Yet it distinctly was today that I was settling into my seat and relaxing to the sumptuous soundscapes of DJ Koze. Just then Delta’s Welcome Onboard video started playing and I found myself utterly absorbed by a utopian vision miraculously revealed right in front of my very eyes. Once anchored in manifest reality, utopia may just extend itself through time and space. Hence, it’s not just today’s version of the Welcome Onboard video that fascinates me. It is every version ever screened on an airplane. And it’s not just Delta’s version of the Welcome Onboard video that fascinates me. It is every version ever made by an airline. See utopia is already taking hold.

Musical Utopia

But now that we are considering an entire genre of the bright and the light, we must acknowledge that there probably is only one other genre of cinematographic storytelling that has a similarly positive outlook on our now and then. That would of course be the musical, that uniquely Jewish German American gift of intense feelings, bright colors, and never-ending song and dance to brighten a dull, bleak, and monotonous world. The musical, however, has a nemesis who not only vanquished it from the silver screen but also reduced it to eternal niche status on overpriced stages in Manhattan’s Midtown and in subversively brilliant television shows about shirt stains and weird cheeses. In contrast, the Welcome Onboard video has no known nemeses or predators, making me cautiously optimistic for its continuing health and growth as a genre.

Lest we forget, the musical’s fabled nemesis is a certain Barbra Streisand whose ego is so outsized it cannot possibly be captured even with 70mm film stock. So she ended up single-handedly pushing Hello Dolly to such extremes that American audiences suddenly became self-aware in the latter half of the show and noticed themselves enjoying an utterly fantastic, positively unhinged, musical movie. Next thing we know is that they preferred to be dreary puritans after all. It must be acknowledged at this point, however, that not all hope is lost because India‘s Indians — thanks to some unspecified influence of nature and a very specific effect of nurture in form of 89 years of official British rule and occupation — have developed an innate resistance to that puritan failsafe and are happily overindulging in musicals with continuously continuing wild abandon.

We’re All Gonna Die!

I can tell, you are getting impatient wondering what could possibly be so utopian about this genre of corporate videos whose primary objective is to impress on viewers what to do when an airplane, as it invariably will, gets stuck in deep shit, metaphorically and literally. On this all safety videos, to use the more technically correct term for the genre at hand, all safety videos agree: We welcome inevitable catastrophe with competent equanimity and earnest levity, gracefully taking care of those who are not in a position to do so themselves first and thereafter cheerfully meditating in preparation of meeting our maker. Anyone who has ever been through even a minor crisis on board of an airplane knows that this calm and centered vision of how to react to a series of unfortunate events in the friendly or the not so friendly skies is very much utopian. If that minor crisis involved any number of over-entitled Western people, you might even use coarser language and describe said vision as bullshit, plain and stinky, since we are all going to fall down to earth and die. Again: We’re all gonna die!

To show grace under fire is an admirable trait — and to a degree also a learnable skill. The fact that every single airplane safety video features more than plenty of that trait and skill in face of overwhelming odds against us, now that is positively utopian in the most positive sense. I mean: What are the chances that our pilot is Chesley Sullenberger? They would be exactly zero since Mr Sullenberger, having achieved the unthinkable by landing a damaged airplane on the Hudson river, wisely retired from his position as an airplane pilot. And I wouldn’t want to have to rely on the odds that Mr Sullenberger just happens to be a passenger, the actual pilot not only knows about his famous passenger and former colleague, but Mr Sullenberger has been practicing miraculous landings every day while in retirement, and steps in yet again to save the day. Even in utopia that would count as a utopian dream!

But ultimately there is another aspect of airplane safety videos that marks the genre as the pinnacle of utopia. The exotic locations where many airlines nowadays shoot their safety videos certainly help stir that romantic longing for some tropical paradise long lost to us inhabitants of a postindustrialist society that somewhere and sometime between industrialization and deindustrialization lost all concern for fellow wo/man and just looks away when some of us wander forlorn amongst the ruin. By now, we seem to be getting a hang of it: Utopia cannot exist without dystopia. When we decided that we can reform wo/man for the better, that we can be like gods and create paradise on earth, just at that moment, we also called forth the demons from hell and let them loose on earth. We even managed to bottle both as pills — those would be opioids, which mark wo/man’s greatest triumph over the pain of living. Albeit they also unleashed forces we have no idea of how to put back in the pill bottle again. Instead there may just be a lesson somewhere in that pill bottle.

Utopia Reveals Itself

It finally is time for the big reveal. This story has an ending and that ending leaves me positively speechless thanks to its practiced utopianism. My last hint is the observation that each and every one of these safety videos, at least in the United States, features the airline’s CEO greeting his paying customers. Now that image is a bit ludicrous since it seems to imply that the CEO might just fly on those same scheduled flights as us mortals. To add insult to injury, that CEO invariably is a middle-aged straight white man, the one class of humans so oozing with privilege they can’t possibly cope with any less of it. But it actually is a brilliant and necessary feature of the airline safety video that only underlines how unprecedented the rest of the cast is: Every skin color, faith, gender, sexual orientation, age group, and economic stratum happily comes together to welcome us and help us understand the safety features of today’s flight. Nowhere else on earth have all these divisions been as successfully erased as in the utopia of a video preparing us for an eventuality that usually realistically ends in death.

That is doubly striking to this member of the original African diaspora. Genetics paints a picture beyond reproach: We pasty Europeans, like all other humans, stem from Mother Africa. Our ancestors left the cradle of humanity during the last major dispersal roughly 55,000 years ago and migrated along the northern route through the Nile delta and Sinai into Asia Minor and on to Europe. Along the way, they mingled a bit with the local yokels — what Neanderthals they are — who themselves left Africa during a previous dispersal predating Homo sapiens. A good 1% of our genetic make-up sources from those brutes. But we are children of Mother Africa first and foremost, and no delusion of ethnic white superiority can change biological fact. And the sooner we acknowledge that reality, the sooner we can make the utopian vision of airline safety videos more part of manifest reality. Mind you, not as some paradise on earth because, as we now understand, that also unleashes hell on earth. But as lived reality that respects every human as just that. I know. I am a dreamer. But somebody has to do it, so that we can move forward into a brighter future. Who would have thought that airlines are already there?