Wednesday, June 08, 2005

Into Reagan

One of the two Washington D.C. airports is named Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. It used to be named simply Washington National Airport. That was until the Reagamaniacs at the Ronald Reagan Heritage Project pulled some Congressional strings and got the airport renamed as part of their "Everything Reagan" project. I refuse to call it that, continuing to refer to it as "National Airport."

If you are a liberal, or even a moderate, the flight from that airport to Houston is your ideological nightmare. You take off at "Ronald Reagan National Airport" and land at "George H.W. Bush Intercontinental Airport." Which is what I had to do today for an afternoon meeting in downtown Houston.

What's interesting is that I got a flavor of the politics of the flight crews based on how they referred to the airports. On the way into Houston this morning, the pilot called the airport "Houston Intercontinental Airport." He referred to the airport numerous times, and never once mentioned Bush senior's name.

Conversely, on the way back to D.C. tonight, the pilot kept calling it "Reagan Airport" or various other Reaganish iterations. My favorite moment was when he said, "Our flight time into Reagan will be two hours and forty-two minutes." I was wondering of this was some sort of "Being John Malkovich" moment, where we take off in Houston and become Reagan for a short while. I doubt that being Ronald Reagan would be as interesting as being John Malkovich. Probably a lot of riding horses and forgetting shit.

3 Comments:

Blogger Earl Cootie said...

My parents live outside of Houston, and one of the things I really dislike about visiting them is having to fly into that airport. Haha.

Here in Washington state, there's a Rails-to-Trails, uh, trail properly known as Iron Horse State Park. Some jokers somewhere decided that it should be called the John Wayne trail or somesuch. Most of the signs on the highway even refer to it as that. But my partner and I both hate(d) John Wayne so much that we refuse to use that name. (Ugh. I even feel dirty having typed it.)

So I guess I'm saying, umm, I can dig it.

6:27 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I NEVER call National by that old fool's name. My father often points out the irony of naming an airport after the person who fired all the air traffic controlers.

9:37 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I can think of several several abyssal rift canyons that we could name in honor of the current White House squatter.

12:23 AM  

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