United Airlines committed crimes against passengers, capitalism and even words
The video of the punishment of a screaming United Airlines passenger this week contains so much evidence of wrongdoing it should be sent to a forensics lab.
The particular pain of watching the footage taken by horrified fellow passengers is that we’ve all been there in that airplane seat.
After the anxiety of the airport — weighing luggage, bagging tiny liquids, answering weird questions, surrendering phone privacy, being patted and stroked (on the crotch if wearing a minipad, and I predict tampons are next), boarding the aircraft, finding the seat, stowing the bag — it’s over.
You are safely seated. If you go passive and wear headphones, you may rule peacefully over your own little seat kingdom, its pockets, its blankies, its little snacks.
Or not. You may be selected and pulled howling out of your seat, dragged down the aisle out of the plane and left wandering dazed and bloody for the world to see.
Children sobbed. Passengers protested. As Chicago police officers behaved like club bouncers on a plane, could the captain not have declared Air Law Force Majeure and defended his peoples?
More ethereally, by violating the exchange of money and services, United committed a crime against capitalism. It sold something it owned, and then claimed it didn’t own, and physically assaulted the buyer for having bought it in the first place.
It wasn’t operating a business but gambling, hoping some passengers wouldn’t show up. It lost the bet so it punished the passenger. The house always wins.
This is why the so-called “wisdom of the market” needs government regulation and why Canada’s coming new airline rules need to include a ban on overbooking. Deregulating industries is rarely a good idea in practice. They clump into near-monopoly and quality degrades.
Airline passengers fear many things — terrorism, drunks, groping, crashing — and now they fear the staff. Good work, United, offering cage-fighting instead of movies.
Then there were United’s word crimes. “Flight 3411 from Chicago to Louisville was overbooked.” No, it was fully booked and then four United employees were inserted.
“After our team looked for volunteers, one customer refused to leave the aircraft voluntarily.” So he was not a volunteer. And United offered only $800. If you want something badly, offer more. It didn’t.
Then United Continental (they merged in 2010, still can’t stand each other) CEO Oscar Munoz said the passengers were being “reaccommodated,” as if in a hotel. How welcoming. Face, meet armrest. Guest, meet floor.
Later, Munoz sent out a memo praising staff for “continuing to go above and beyond to ensure we fly right.” Dick Costolo, formerly of Twitter, called it “one of the most tone-deaf corporate emails ever sent, and I should know because I sent some that are surely in the top 10.”
News of the assault spread worldwide, reaching 160 million readers on China’s Weibo, a kind of Twitter. The man was initially identified as Chinese, and China is highly sensitive to perceived American racism. United sees itself as the top U.S. carrier to China, the Financial Times reports. There is now a Chinese online petition to boycott United.
Then it got worse, not just for the airline but for the passenger and possibly for journalism.
It turns out he was a 69-year-old doctor, possibly Chinese and originally from Vietnam. You know, Vietnam, that small country the U.S. tried to “bomb back to the Stone Age” during the passenger’s youth, so that’s ironic.
Dr. David Dao and his wife Dr. Teresa Dao have five children, four of them U.S. doctors, and at least four quite strikingly adorable grandchildren.
Dr. David Dao also had privacy. That’s gone forever. TMZ, then others, alleged that Dao had been convicted in 2005 of illegally prescribing and selling opioids and was only last year allowed to restart a heavily restricted practice. (He is also a championship poker player, which is cool.)
This has been called the “black teenager treatment,” where the innocent victim’s name is ravaged. The tale had no relevance. I await in vain the personal stories of the cops who brutalized Dao.
Everyone has a history they might wish their neighbours or grandchildren not to know.
Had United announced that passengers who “volunteered” would have their lives forever ruined, there might have been more takers. But it demanded blind obedience from passengers so wary of airlines that they figured the “random selection” of passengers wouldn’t be random at all. (It wasn’t.)
So they sat a little smaller in their seats and hoped for a forgettable flight. Instead came the wrath of Oscar Munoz and his terrible, horrible invidious airline.
It turns out he was a 69-year-old doctor, possibly Chinese and originally from Vietnam. You know, Vietnam, that small country the U.S. tried to “bomb back to the Stone Age” during the passenger’s youth, so that’s ironic