An ad phrase that caught me ear the other day on the New York Times was, “Since when is an airline’s schedule more important than yours?” It was for “The New Delta” and I had to laugh, because it’s a really odd way of saying, “Things have been screwed up lately, but we’re trying to fix them.” They have a lot more to coordinate than I do—with their airplanes, luggage, pilots, crew, fuel, and little pillows and bags of nuts all having to arrive at the same place in the middle of a long day. If they are to continue functioning at all, their schedule must be more important than mine. But something about that notion is way too socialist. People really don’t want to hear it.

The funny thing is, even if their point is simply that the two schedules, mine and the airline’s, are ideally of equal importance, they still leave room for the hyper-individualistic interpretation that my schedule is way more important than theirs. I’m sure there are many who see it that way, and that’s why we are going to hell in millions of individual handbaskets, with little pillows provided through a partnership with Delta.