Op-Ed
Leavin’ on a Jet (Aero) Plane
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If You Can Keep It
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The term, Dear Reader, is jet-setter, a derivative of jet set.
The person it describes? Why, your humble columnist, of course.
Take it away, Wikipedia: “ ‘Jet set’ is a journalistic term” — [et cetera, et cetera] — “used to describe an international social group of wealthy people, organizing and participating in social activities all around the world that are unreachable to ordinary people.”
Do go on.
“The term, which replaced ‘café society’, came from the lifestyle of traveling from one stylish or exotic place to another via jet airplanes.”
Whoa! “Came from the lifestyle,” Wiki? Tsk, tsk, tsk. Some of us are still living it, old sport — that is, unless taking off to the U.K. for Fall Break doesn’t count for anything anymore.
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
That’s what I thought.
So, as I was —
“Although jet passenger service in the 1950s was initially marketed primarily to the rich, its introduction eventually resulted in a substantial democratization of air travel. Today air travel is functional but without glory, and the term ‘jet set’ no longer has cachet.”
... I hate you.
“The faded term ‘jet set’ may still be valid today if it is understood to mean those who can afford to travel in privately-owned or leased aircraft.”
Yeah? Well I can do you one better: Air Canada tickets from LaGuardia to Heathrow purchased via Priceline, $449.94 total.
(With a layover in Ottawa.)
(And, um, Montreal. On the way back.)
“Functional but without glory,” Wiki? Bite your tongue, sir. Bite your tongue.
Yes, my beloved Big Red, it is true: last month, your favoritest Stetson-wielding correspondent ever — anxious, as always, to see a certain recipient of a certain journalistically inappropriate parenthetical aside published in his first column this term — shelled out a few hard-earned pounds sterling to join the jet set (sans cachet, apparently) and spend a week across the pond.
The journalistically inappropriate parenthetical aside just referenced, of course — for those of you who misplaced your Sun scrapbooks — was “(I love you),” its recipient none other than my girlfriend, Julia; ’twas, needless to say, that very same sweetest of hearts who, studying abroad at the University of Essex for the semester, inspired me to pay my visit to Her Majesty’s domain.
My first visit, in fact.
And, to make a long story short, it was, all of it, positively jolly good — though, with all due respect to the land of my foreforefathers, this Anglophile can’t help but admit that nothing I saw in the country on the receiving end of my -philia would ever quite compare to the beautiful exchange student who met her Texan at the airport at 6:00 in the morning on a Sunday with a cookie, cup of coffee and bouquet of yellow roses in hand.
Yep.
(I love you.)
I knew from the moment I left, however, that something — something, obviously, besides a certain recipient of now *two* certain journalistically inappropriate parenthetical asides — about the trip would inspire a column from me. What I never imagined, however, is that a lot of the inspiration for that column would come from the trip itself.
As in, the literal trip over there, personally booked for me by one William Shatner.
You see, in addition to being my first time in England, my vacation this Fall Break was also my first time in Canada.
Granted, most of that time — nay, all of it — was spent either in airports or on airplanes making their way to and from those airports; even so, it was enough time to give me some serious food for thought, not only about our neighbors to the north but about those of us in the collection of states to the south as well.
Bound for Britain, I embarked on my journey a few weeks ago with the assumption that I would be using nothing but the tongue shared by our two countries for the duration of my exploits.
I was wrong.
I had completely forgotten about the country whose airline would be getting me there and back — well, not forgotten about it, necessarily. I had just never thought of Canada as being a particularly foreign country before.
Flying on Air Canada — where everything was said, written or broadcast in both English and French — changed that.
It also made me wonder: how do Canadians see Canada? Do English-speaking Canadians see it one way, and French-speaking Canadians see it another?
Do the members of either group ever feel like foreigners in their own country?
As an American in the U.K., I found it striking how big a role language can play in making you feel, in a sense, at home. Yes, England is a foreign country — and, yes, there were reminders of that everywhere — but, all in all, it really didn’t ever feel that foreign.
My trip got me thinking about the millions of Americans who don’t speak English but live in a country where the vast majority of us do — and then about whether those same Americans feel more like foreigners here at home than I did across the Atlantic.
If so, that is a problem.
The question Fall Break left me with, however, is whether the Canadian answer — that is multiple national languages — is the right answer, for Canada, for us or for anyone else.
I can’t say for certain. But it is a question that we all need to be asking.
Mark Coombs is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at mcoombs@cornellsun.edu. If You Can Keep It usually appears alternate Wednesdays this semester.