<Theofragen>

Hello everyone. I hope you all had a restful and happy holiday. I just got back from Jacksonville, FL (where both my wife and I are from). We had a great time hanging with family and friends in J-ville. I was sorry to leave but the semester's end beckons me northward. My parents celebrated their 30th wedding anniversary on New Year's Eve. They had a vow-renewal ceremony and it did my heart good to see my parent's so happy after three-decades of marriage--a rare feat these days. Anyway, enough of the personal stuff.

As any of you who traveled by air the day or two before Christmas know, holiday travel sucks! Originally my wife and I were scheduled to fly from Philly to Cincinnati to Jacksonville. However, with the Ohio blizzard fast approaching, my wife made a heads up call and had our flight changed to Philly-Atlanta-Jacksonville. Our flight from Philly was two hours late and so we missed our connecting flight to J-ville and got to stand in a line for two hours, only to spend the night at the airport. I bumped into a PTS buddy in ATL who I recently learned has just started a blog of his own. I hope he had better luck getting to Mississippi.

I wasn't too upset about the overnighter. My friend Adam's rendezvous with Derrida this semester prompted me to do a little Derrida reading of my own over the holidays. As I was reading into the wee hours of the morning, bracketed by intermittent walks up and down concourse A with my wife and failed attempts at sleeping on the ATL airport floor, I realized something profound about Delta airlines' personnel: they lie in intervals. Derrida got himself into trouble because he challenged the basic philosophical foundations upon which much of our thinking is built. One of his early works, challenges Plato's notion of opposites(being/non-being; black/white; life/death; etc). As Plato's heirs, via Aristotle, we make a distinction between true and false. I am convinced that Delta Airlines has made a similar Derridian move by deconstructing this basic dichotomy by lying in intervals. To illustrate: Delta employees appear highly skilled at telling just enough of a lie to get you to believe them. There is almost a hint of truth in what they are saying. Delta: "The plane will be here in a few minutes." Truth: The plane will be two hours late. Delta: "We've had a small problem with our maintenance crew." Truth: The maintenance crew didn't show up today. Delta: "You should make your connecting flight." Truth: There is no way in hell you will make your connection. Delta: "You just need to stand in that fast-moving line." Truth: You will be in that slow-moving line for at least two hours. Delta: "Your luggage should be off the carousel shortly." Truth: The luggage is still in Florida. Delta: "We will have a courier deliver your bags between 4 and 10 pm." Truth: The bags will arrive (torn) at 9:30 the following day. Delta: "You just need to drive to the airport and we will reimburse you for the bag we shattered and the contents that fell out." Truth: That remains to be seen. We will drive the 1 hour trip back to the airport this week to get our luggage fixed/replaced and reimbursed for all of the contents that fell out due to their ineptness. If I were smarter I wouldn't bother. But I am not, so I will gullibly load up the car with my torn bag in the hopes that this time Delta will actually tell the truth. If your having troubles understanding what Derrida is all about, just take a trip with Delta airlines and it will all become painfully lucid.

Deconstructing Delta

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