5:43 PM ET, Pittsburgh International Airport. “Caution: Moving walk is nearing its end. Please watch your step. Thank you. Caution: Moving walk is nearing its end…� This repeats, incessantly, in differing voices and tones (for maximal annoyance), as the seconds tick by until United Airlines flight 5543 from Pittsburgh International Airport to O’Hare taxis into gate C51. The lines are long, the ticket prices high, and so far everything’s as I expected it to be. This is my first flight since my brain formed the necessary neurological infrastructure for long-term memories, but nothing’s a real surprise so far. Having passed through security, Giuli comments that we’re treated like common criminals. My laptop is separated from its carrying case; our shoes removed and scanned (though I’m wearing sandals), all to produce the illusion of safety that justifies the existence of the state.

Such is the state of air travel in America, at the end of 2005. My laptop’s battery drains away, and though Mac OS X automatically finds and connects to the unsecured “FlyPittsburgh� WiFi network, I’m slightly surprised (and slightly irritated) to find it has no internet access. So, I’m left writing this locally, rather than on the website directly. With luck, you’ll be able to read this by the time this trip is done—when we have made it to our hotel in St. Louis, Missouri, yet many hours from the authorial present.

Once upon a time, air travel was a marvel. The former Pittsburgh International Airport is a far way from where I am now. This is a newer airport, on a new site, built in the past decade more as a shopping mall than anything else. The former airport was one of the first of its kind; the hub of U.S. Airway’s national transportation network at the height of Pittsburgh’s glory as an industrial center of the world—a time when, at the height of World War II, Pittsburgh alone produced more steel than the entire Third Reich. That airport was a temple to human invention and ingenuity. One was nearly awed by the scale of it. There was an air of the secular made sacred. It laid bear the truth, that since the splintering of the Reformation, gods and churches no longer form our religion. Religion—in the ancient sense—is what unites a society. Obviously, there is no such creed to be found among the beliefs of gods and angels. No, our common creed—the belief that binds us together—is our faith in technology. Ingenuity is our savior; invention is our messiah. Whatever ills face us, the triumphs of science and reason must overcome them. These are our gods now. The Enlightenment is our religion.

In those days, an air flight was a luxurious, pampered experience. We have come a long way from those days. In-flight meals and movies are vestigial. They are a pale, commoditized shadow of their former glory. The commercial air flight has fallen from the sublime, to the routine. What was once the greatest achievement of mankind—the expression of all our hopes, and our best chance of salvation—has become a commodity. The greatest technical marvel involved now seems to be the ability to buy your tickets ahead of time, online, from a talking garden gnome.

The magic is long since worn away; what was once triumphant has now become a chore. The new Pittsburgh International Airport echoes that. Gone is the palatial sense of the sacred. No, nothing could be more secular than this. Everything is a pleasing shade of gray or pastel. The most impressive part of the structure now is the diversity of the “AirMall.�

Perhaps such transition is inevitable, as a technology becomes more a part of our everyday lives. Or is it? What was more mundane to the medieval knight than his horse and sword? And yet, to the very end, they maintained the mythic overtones inherent in the mysteries of their crafting. Yet, air travel has become a mundane part of our normal lives—a chore to be endured, rather than a wonder to be experienced.

On 21 May 1927, Charles Augustus Lindbergh set The Spirit of St. Louis down in Paris, France. He had taken off the previous day from Roosevelt Airfield on Long Island, New York and flown through the night for thirty-three and a half hours to make the first non-stop, trans-Atlantic flight. In so doing, Lindbergh won the Orteig Prize of $25,000, and became an American hero. He came home to a ticker-tape parade down New York City’s Fifth Avenue; he was Time’s very first “Man of the Year” in 1927; he was presented with the Medal of Honor in 1929. Roth’s novel, The Plot Against America researched how easily Lindbergh might have taken over the country, had he an interest in doing it–to say nothing of his connections to the Führer.

Lindbergh personified an American ideal; a young, brave, rugged individualist setting himself against nature and fate to blaze the trail for our Manifest Destiny–even if it lay in the clouds themselves. With every great adventure like Lindbergh’s, the world became a little bit smaller. Today, non-stop trans-Atlantic flights are of little note, and the 3,000 mile gap that once defined America apart from its erstwhile European rulers by its isolation, no longer served to isolate quite so much.

The closing of the map may be the single most important defining characteristic of the modern world. The globe is shrinking, and there is no place on earth left that is so far away as to be beyond the reach of the capitalist enterprise. There is nowhere to run; nowhere to hide. International trade has created a network of organizations that weaves itself between–and above–the traditional divisions of the nation-state, and, as Jeff Vail discusses in his essay, “The New Map: Terrorism in a Post-Cartesian World,” constitute an inherent challenge to the fundamental notions upon which the nation-state is built.

Global telecommunications are very much a part of this trend, but they cannot completely replace their predecessor–the intercontinental flight. As advanced as such telecom has become, it is still no replacement for face-to-face contact. It can certainly supplement an international sales relationship; it cannot supplant it.

Yet, for as important as aviation has become to our modern economy, it has fallen into great disrepair. Much of the current trouble has been blamed on 9/11. Despite government aid to the industry, sales have continued to drop. Finally, airlines are facing up to the truth: they are disintegrating in the face of higher oil prices. American Airlines–the company that took us from Chicago to St. Louis–recently scrapped 15 round-trip routes, as well as all service from Chicago to Nagoya, Japan, blaming “skyrocketing” fuel prices. Dan Garton, an executive vice president at American, was quoted by the AFP as saying, “We have made incredible progress in lowering our operational costs for over two years now. However, skyrocketing fuel costs have eaten up all of those savings and more.”

USA Today ran a story this month, with a headline that said it all: “For airlines, bankruptcy becomes business as usual.” It begins with this: “When you get on an airplane these days, the chances are better than 50-50 that it will be operated by an airline in bankruptcy. Last week, Delta and Northwest joined United and US Airways in the expanding club of struggling companies running to court for protection.”

9:42 CT, O’Hare. The farthest west I’ve ever been is Richmond, IN—for IshCon. Until this moment. Sitting here, in a barely cushioned seat at gate K-19 at O’Hare, I exist at a point further west than I have ever been before.

The flight was a strange mixture of wonder and discomfort. As I had said, I have not flown since the forgotten days of my youth. We flew coach, naturally, in cramped seats fashioned decades ago sitting far too close to one another as the plane contorted us in ways the human body was never meant to move. The sensation of lifting bodily off the ground is something my bones had forgotten—to say nothing of my stomach. To watch the ground peel away and feel the thrill of flight is a sensation to which the human mind is not terribly well adapted. I could not let that interfere with the marvel of it, though. Yes, David Lewis-Williams is almost certainly correct when he concludes that the universality of flight in shamanic experience is due to the structure of human neurology—yet knowing that only makes it more sacred to me, not less. To experience that physically—to share that experience with the waking mind—it is almost to touch the Dreamtime, without dreaming. Yet all around me were sober faces, more annoyed than wondrous, and the pressure to conform—that adaptive function of the brain that suits us to our tribes as surely as our tribes are suited to us—made me slightly embarrassed that I yet found such child-like wonder in what was, for all of them, the most mundane experience of the international businessman’s life.

We descended into Chicago after a flight that felt shorter than I had expected (though that may also have been affected by the fact that we actually did arrive 15 minutes early), with cookie-cutter houses forming a vast wasteland of unthinking conformity as far as the eye could see in every direction below us. My stomach churned from that horror even more than from the bizarre sensation of depressurization and descent. The drastic changes in air pressure made Giuli’s ears swell and ache—she asked if it were possible that her head might actually explode. I tried to cover her ears to help the pain, but it did nothing. Only once we had landed, and taxied to the gate at O’Hare, did the pain begin to subside.

We crossed the entirety of this enormous structure, this hub of modern transportation, on foot at a fairly impressive clip. The impression is neither that of awe the old Pittsburgh airport instilled, nor the modern glamour of Pittsburgh’s new airport. Instead, the only word that springs unbidden to my mind is, “decay.�

O’Hare is an older airport, and it shows. Where Pittsburgh sported a WiFi network with no internet, O’Hare has no network for me to connect to at all. The peeling signs of age are all around us. The seat I sit in echoes a former age—a time when the airline industry was vibrant. Past the golden days of its earliest youth, like some kind of movie palace in the sky—the 1970s and 1980s, when it had settled into a regular business, and was doing very nicely for itself. No longer a luxury for the rich and powerful; no, then it was the backbone of a new infrastructure, the lifeblood of a new social reality.

In that reality, salesmen crossed time zones and continents in hours to meet with clients equally well-traveled. As the era of easily-conducted international business dawned, so, too, did the era of the multinational corporation. Of course, the precedents of such endeavors can be traced all the way back to the East India Company, but it was not until the introduction of “corporate personhood� in the wake of the Civil War (and the abuse of the 14th Amendment) that the “corporation� began its existence in the form we know today. It grew quickly to place a stranglehold on American life and culture. With the commoditization of flight, that American hegemony extended itself across the globe, to become a player on par even with full nation-states.

That is a former age. In the shadow of no towers, the airline industry has struggled for half a decade now. Even government aid has done little to help them. We’re in Chicago simply as a layover—a pit stop in our journey. We came here on United Airlines; we’ll leave here on American Airlines. American’s financial troubles were outlined above, where their top management freely admitted that their service cuts were due to fuel prices. A recent article in the Seattle Times outlined the toll that United’s bankruptcy has taken, and the centrality of oil prices to its continued existence:

United has run up $7.5 billion in losses in a 33-month bankruptcy process bloated by legal and consulting fees, for a staggering total of $12.5 billion lost since 2000. Its forecast for a profit in 2006 is dismissed by some as too rosy since it anticipates a sharp drop in oil prices to $50 a barrel, from around $63 a barrel now.

Only 11% of all the crude oil we extract is used to make jet fuel, and yet, the costs of that fuel have begun to catch up with the airline industry. The first losses were blamed on 9/11 and resulting psychological factors, but the passing of years has not alleviated the airlines’ crisis. Instead, they have only deepened.

9/11 only served on one level to hasten the inevitable, but on another level, to prolong it. 9/11 obscured the truth of the matter, hiding a systemic, irreversible crisis with a momentary downturn. It led many to believe the airlines had taken a hit, but a hit from which they would recover. The truth is much more dire for the future of air travel: the airplane is lining up to be the first victim of the Hubbert Peak.

Is it the efficiency (or lack thereof) of jet fuel that makes the airlines so much more susceptible to the dramatically changing nature of the oil industry? Peak Oil is upon us now; what will determine the future now is the depletion rate. But already, the airlines are showing that they will not be able to survive in the post-industrial age.

As the price of flight increases, and flight becomes a pasttime of the rich alone, what will happen to the travel and tourism industry? Those economies based entirely on the industrialized tourist? More importantly, what will happen to the multi-national corporation? Besides the demise of the tourism industry–the end of hotels like the one I’m writing this in–we will also see the end of the multinational corporation. As the price of international sales increases, international sales themselves will see the diminishing side of a marginal return curve. Corporations willing and able to operate on a more local scale will find themselves able to out-compete enormous competitors in a thousand specialized niches. When every niche is filled by a local analog, the multinational corporation will find little room to insert itself, and justify its existence. The franchise flourished not by providing quality, but by providing familiarity to the traveler. It has no place in a world with no more travelers.

In every collapse, long-distance trade diminishes. The elements that once were united in a larger, more complex system, begin to break down into smaller organizations. I am glad we’ve made this trip, to experience this bizarre aberration of history, this anomolous blip where we could fly through the air to a comfortable hotel to spend a few days half a continent away. What we see unfolding in the airline industry foreshadows the end of that brief age. It is, in fact, the opening act of the collapse.

8:32 AM CT, Best Western Westport Park, St. Louis, MO. Once upon a time, it was my native Pittsburgh that was “the gateway to the West.â€? The westward expansion and Manifest Destiny of the 1800s made St. Louis—the city I’m in now—our heir to that title. They’ve erected their iconic arch to commemorate the honorific. We passed several streets and sites named for Charles Lindbergh on our way to the hotel. Lindbergh was the chief pilot for the first Chicago-St. Louis air mail route, based at Lambert field–the site that would later become Lambert St. Louis International Airport, where we arrived in the city, claimed our bags, and waited for a taxi to take us to the hotel. It was there that Lindbergh conceived of the idea of his trans-Atlantic flight, had a single-engine plane designed by Donald Hall, built by Ryan Airlines in San Diego, and christened it, “The Spirit of St. Louis.”

That plane is now one of the crown jewels of the Smithsonian’s Air & Space Museum in Washington, D.C., a kind of holy of holies of secular American religion. He was born in Detroit, and once he became a wealthy hero, Lindbergh went to New Jersey. Yet it is here, in St. Louis, that his spirit seems to live on most of all. What is the spirit of St. Louis–the spirit of the “gateway to the West”? If we want to glorify it, we could call it the pioneering spirit, the will to explore. And yet, that is not all. St. Louis’ most telling icon is the Gateway Arch, the centerpiece of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial Park. It is a national monument of towering granduer, commemorating the westward expansion and Manifest Destiny. Very pretty words, used to whitewash the awful atrocities of reality, to hide the fact that the foundations of our nation are bathed in the blood of the innocent. The spirit of St. Louis is an awful legacy that binds our origin, our destination, and our mode of travel between them into one horrific whole. It is the will to dominate and control nature. It is the will to expand the borders of our power and influence until they blend into the boundaries of the world itself. It is the will to power–the will to conquer–the destrudo, the will to destroy.

And yet, that will can never be fully sated. G-d has pulled a terrible trick on us by placing a terrible double-bind in our Manifest Destiny. The closer we come to fulfilling that destiny, the harder it becomes to finish it. The harder we work to see it completed, all the more it eludes us. The diminishing of marginal returns is a cold solace to one who’s entire life has been dedicated to conquest, only to discover on the eve of victory that conquest is a contradiction in terms.