How the Iran war is hurting travelers, airline industry

The papers speak of a fuel shortage, and the fashionable world is in despair over its summer plans. One might think the world had ended, rather than merely postponed. They speak of inconvenience as though it were tragedy, and tragedy as though it were inconvenience.

I confess I find it all rather amusing. The modern obsession with travel has always struck me as the triumph of motion over meaning. We rush about the globe to prove we have been places, not to understand them. And now, when the machinery of our restlessness falters, we behave as though the universe has committed a personal affront.

They call it a blockade; I call it an intermission. Perhaps we shall rediscover the art of conversation in our own drawing rooms, now that we cannot flee to someone else’s. There is a certain poetic justice in it: we who have treated the world as our playground now find the gates temporarily closed. And what do we do? We complain about the price of admission.

The true crisis is not that we cannot travel, but that we have forgotten how to be still. A man who cannot be interesting at home will not become so in Persia. Though I suppose if one must be dull, it is better to be dull abroad - it lends the appearance of depth.

How typical that a war should be measured by its effect on holiday plans. We have perfected the art of missing the point with precision.

Well, I see the boys in Washington have gone and stirred up another hornet’s nest over there in the Middle East. Now they’re telling us it’s hitting folks right where they live - or rather, where they can’t afford to fly anymore.

They shut down that strait like it was a saloon on Sunday, and now jet fuel’s scarcer than an honest politician. I reckon those European tourists will just have to do what we Americans have been doing for years - look at postcards and pretend they’re there.

It’s funny how wars always start with big speeches about freedom and end with folks counting their pennies at the gas pump. They say it’s about principles, but I notice it’s never the principles who have to pay extra for their summer vacation.

I flew into New York last week and the ticket cost more than my first horse. Course, that horse never made me take my boots off at security neither. These days, between the wars and the shortages and the prices, traveling’s about as pleasant as a toothache.

But I guess we’ll all keep right on voting for the same fellas who keep starting these messes. Like my old dog who’d bark at the same fence post every morning, forgetting he never did catch it yesterday.

The headlines speak of a crisis, of shortages and soaring prices, as if these were natural disasters like a flood or a fire. But this is not nature. This is grammar gone wrong. We have built a world where the movement of bodies across continents is treated as a right, a fact of life, rather than a complex, fragile arrangement of fuel, politics, and trust.

Look at the word “travel.” In one context, it means the simple act of going from A to B. In another, it has become a commodity, a line item in an economy, a thing to be secured. When the Strait of Hormuz is blocked, we do not say, “Ah, the conditions for this particular language game have changed.” We say, “There is a shortage.” We look for the missing object, the missing fuel, as if the problem were merely physical. But the confusion is deeper. We have forgotten that the meaning of “freedom to travel” is not an abstract ideal but a practice. It is the practice of booking, of flying, of arriving. When the practice breaks, the word “freedom” loses its grip. It becomes an empty sign, hovering in the air, demanding satisfaction that cannot be given.

I feel a sharp irritation at the anxiety. It is the anxiety of a tool that has been lifted from its toolbox and placed on a pedestal. We are trying to use the word “normal” to describe a state that was never stable, only convenient. The jet fuel is not the essence of travel; it is the condition. When the condition fails, we do not need a new philosophy of travel. We need to see that the game has stopped. The fly is not trapped in the bottle because it is unlucky; it is trapped because it keeps trying to fly through the glass. The glass is the expectation that the world will remain arranged for our convenience. The dissolution of the confusion comes not from finding more fuel, but from recognizing that the demand for uninterrupted movement was a grammatical illusion all along. The pain is real, but the metaphysical outrage is misplaced. We are not losing a right; we are losing a habit. And habits, when broken, leave us staring at the empty space where the tool used to be.