Up, Up, and Away Up Tight
Mayer, Milton
Up, Up, and Away Up Tight by MILTON MAYER ^T^hey got the man in front of us. He'd gone through the X-ray posts on tiptoe, holding his carry-on bag as close as he could. But the bells all rang and...
...It is a scheme—another scheme—to depeoplize people...
...a large screw driver which had got in by mistake...
...They—Oh...
...We also had—in Baby's carry-on, since nobody would ever suspect my Baby-faced Baby of anything untoward—a fire-bomb made entirely of plastic and set to explode over Cleveland...
...Even she is some kind of people...
...They found a nail-clipper...
...We would never get to Buffalo, where three professors emeritus and two would-be-emeritus students (one having got into the wrong room under the influence of dope) were waiting to hear me read my leaden lecture notes...
...The idiot scheme to prevent hijacking is an unidiot scheme to intimidate people, delay people, dishearten people, demoralize people, and notify people that they are nothing but quiddities shipped by electric eye and had better not carry nail-clippers if they know what is good for them...
...multifarious bottle caps, one of them on a gallon jug of Uvas Chablis ($2 a gallon down in the holler near Morgan Hill, California) ; a giant tape dispenser on unintentional loan from the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions...
...a pair of ten-ton arch supports for supporting my fallen woman's arches...
...Made it again...
...Nobody here but us clay pigeons, boss...
...It was Chicago we Were trying to get out of...
...We were next to go through the X-ray posts...
...Bombs away...
...Cleveland was spared for the sake of Cyrus Eaton...
...We were next...
...And a cast-iron life-size toy revolver which we had intended to give our grandson, George Christian Vognar, on the occasion of his birth to see him through Berkeley, but had forgotten to...
...Who stole the property the hijackers are stealing from the air lines, and from whom...
...not in hitleroid Germany, not in stalinoid Russia, and not in spiroid America...
...United Air Lines Stewardess Conversation Chart: "3a...
...a Swiss army knife (or swiss Army Knife) with fourteen blades and an acetylene torch...
...And that is something that institutionalized violence has never done and will never do...
...In Nazi Germany they said, "Jews Not Wanted Here...
...I defused it because Cyrus Eaton lives in Cleveland, and Cyrus Eaton is a great man...
...Never stop smiling unless Passenger says something not on the Conversation Chart...
...in which case, glare...
...But the bells all rang and the whistles blew and they told him that they were sorry (they're always sorry) but they would have to inspect his bag...
...Then I. No whistles...
...Neither Pat Henry's give-me-liberty-or-I'll-give-you-death nor Mike Nixon's No-Knock Entry will sustain a society that is out of No-Knock Gas...
...Smile, smile, smile...
...But there is no spotting them before the act...
...She glared...
...My brother-in-law, Pooky Tep-per, navigating the Hump in the War after the War To End War, once told me how he could see Chinese peasants shaking their fists at his camouflaged plane...
...When I was a hoodlum-watcher in Chicago long ago, where both hijacking and the word "hijacking" were invented, hijacking meant the theft of stolen property...
...We were sure to be caught...
...The plastic bomb didn't go off...
...The heavy fantastic now...
...any more than G. Harrold Mitchell's marshals can find the freaks among the blacks who, in G. Harrold's terms, would not be black if they weren't freaks...
...you don't have to swoon—of love...
...Baby was ordered to proceed...
...Anybody can blow up an AAILTON MAYER, the roving editor of The Progressive, is professor of English at the University of Massachusetts and professor of the humanities at Windham College in Vermont and a consultant to the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions...
...Off the people...
...As we boarded (or were boarded) I flashed my metal teeth at the stewardess and said, "Look what I got on with...
...Of course the violence of the poor young blacks and the rich young whites—and especially the counter-violence against them—has triggered the genuine psychopaths who are always with us but who are ordinarily deterred by their fear of a society that is determined to sustain itself and united in that determination...
...airplane, and there is no way to stop it...
...We were carrying two carry-on carryalls containing (inter many and many an aliud) the following metal objects: two full-length barber's scissors (actually, one scissors and one thinning shears) and a full-length barber's steel comb...
...Women and children first...
...They didn't know whose it was...
...It is not law or law enforcement that holds this or any other society together, because society is not held together by law but by a modicum—only a modicum...
...There are not enough Boys in Blue (or in Blue Serge) to go around, and there never will be...
...I defused it over Elyria—something I have always wanted to do over Elyria...
...whosever it was, it was the enemy...
...There are all sorts of ways to do away with people, besides those that Hitler, Churchill, and Roosevelt (and all their predecessors and successors) thought of...
...Baby Mayer and I were sorry, too, because we wanted (or, rather, had to) get to Buffalo and the hijacker routine delayed the flight...
...No bells...
...They wouldn't find that, because the X-ray detects only metal...
...The light fantastic has gone out all over America...
...There is nothing to do about them except to do what it takes to reestablish a society determined to sustain itself and united in its determination...
...In post-Nazi America they say, "People Not Wanted Here.'' Shipments wanted here, not people, because you simply cannot tell about people...
...a folding music stand...
...and my leaden lecture notes...
...The airplane was devised for people to ride around in, but, like everything else we have got our hands on, the airplane means first of all death and destruction and everyone wants to destroy it and go back to the Mesopotamian oxcart...
...Even Martha Mitchell must go...
...They!—went through the bag...
...Unless people want to live together they won't...
...Edgar Hoover's Gumshoes on the campus can not find the weirdos because the whole population of the campus is, in Edgar's terms, weirdos...
Vol. 34 • December 1970 • No. 12
