Delayed at DCA: Everything is Political

Do you know what happened on Valentine’s Day at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport aka DCA? I bet you don’t (unless you were reading my Instagram stories), because almost nobody seems to have noticed. But I was there, so let me tell you about it.

Note: This post is ridiculously long, but if you get bored of DCA, you can scroll down for royal children’s fashion and snow.

I was in DC for work last week, and my flight home was scheduled for 5:00 Friday afternoon, which would get me back for a nice Valentine’s Day dinner. Of course it didn’t work out that way. I mean, DCA, Friday afternoon, 2025…what was I thinking?

The first text announcing an updated departure time arrived a little past 3, just as I was leaving the office. We were now departing at 6:21. The second arrived about an hour later, as I finished my last work call of the day at the airport. Over the next couple of hours, JetBlue sent me two offers of help, a gate change notice, and eight more departure time updates (7:02, 7:37, 7:57, 8:07, 8:27, 8:47, 9:03, and 9:30) (wondering about all those 7s, not to mention that 0/3 reversal at the end? hold that thought).

But back then, at 4:30 with my new departure time of 7:17, I was still innocent. So I wandered toward my gate, paused to look at the departures board as one does if one has congenital airport uncertainty, saw that more than half the flights were delayed, took full notice of how crowded the airport was (every seat filled at the gates, crowds thronging the halls, people sitting on the floor), and lost my innocence.

Something was not right. So I headed to the bar.

The crazy thing was that the weather was perfect: beautiful day, blue sky, sunshine, no evident reason for delays at the DC end. Maybe there was something wrong in Boston or wherever my plane was coming from. I checked the weather: it was clear from Maine to Florida and DC to Kentucky. I checked the news: nothing. I checked Twitter, which is to say X: nothing. I took a moment to be nostalgic for Twitter and resent X. Then I drank my Bellini and ate my oysters.

Meanwhile my husband, with nothing to do at home since there was no point in starting to cook our nice Valentine’s dinner, did some googling. All he could come up with was something to do with helicopters. Uh oh. Remember, this was DCA, recent site of the worst US airline disaster in decades, featuring a helicopter. Hold that thought.

Done with what was supposed to be my pre-nice-Valentine’s-dinner snack (at this point I was only at my fourth departure update and we still had hope), I went to my gate. That’s when things started getting crazy.

By now it was around 7:30 and if all was well, I would have been home in my slippers eating my nice Valentine’s dinner. Instead, I was at my gate, which was Florida central, except nobody was on their way to Florida.

There were people who had been waiting since noon to go to Fort Lauderdale and people whose Fort Lauderdale flight had just been postponed till 1:07 am, and for a while I thought they were the same people…what can I say, it was a wild night.

There were children sunk dully into screens and children careening about on their ride-on suitcases.

There were couples fighting and couples ignoring each other.

There were people on their laptops grimly determined to keep working and people with headphones and books determined to shut out the world.

There were people standing around staring into their phones with the characteristic 21st-century head-and-shoulder slump and people slumped in their seats staring into space.

There were sober people telling their stories to neighbors with whom they’d found commonalities, and drunk people telling their stories to whoever would listen.

There were remarkably patient and extremely forceful gate agents (who should have gotten hazard pay but I bet they didn’t), who were keeping us all in line, at least figuratively.

There were a few people who lost their shit, including at the gate agents, and a vast majority of people who were kind to each other, including by calming the people who were losing their shit - socially and even cross culturally speaking, it could have been heaven if it hadn’t been hell.

Materially speaking, there were no available chargers (as soon as one person unplugged, the next person plugged in), and no soap in any of the bathroom dispensers.

But we had rumors!

The rumors mostly had to do with helicopters and Trump. A popular rumor was that the airport had closed so Trump could fly in on his helicopter, which would have made sense if the delays had been for an hour, but it had been a full day of delays. Another rumor was about a new rule that planes could not fly when helicopters were in the air, which made no sense at all given the number of (airplane) flights at DCA. Another rumor was about a new rule that helicopters could not fly when planes were in the air, which came closest to the truth except it was a restriction on helicopters flying near the airport (aside from medical and police emergencies and presidential flights) and it had already been in place for two weeks.

None of this made any sense, but nothing made any sense.

And then, around 8:30, planes started arriving and leaving. No rhyme, no reason, just planes. The patient and forceful gate agents efficiently deplaned and boarded planeloads of people. My plane boarded at 9:30 for a final departure time of 10, spent an hour on the tarmac for no apparent reason (fortunately, I was asleep by then), and arrived in Boston a little after midnight. We had our nice Valentine’s dinner the following night. I hope my drunk new friend made it to her conference in Fort Lauderdale and the Fort Lauderdale cruise people made it to their boat

Doing some more digging the next day, I found that DCA had repeatedly been closed and reopened over the course of the day. The single local news article said “unspecified security reason” and mentioned that Trump was flying to Florida in his helicopter in the midafternoon. Travel and Tour World said high winds, but I’d been in and out all day and the wind was not notable. Nothing anywhere mentioned air traffic control, which served only to make me suspicious.

But I was already suspicious: Why did so many of my departure times end in 7? Was somebody making up departure times that never had a chance of happening? How could so many people be stuck at DCA without a single Twitter post? Did Elon Musk tell the algorithm to hide posts with the words Reagan, DCA, delays, helicopter, and Trump? Why did nobody at the airport appear to know anything? And what did Trump know and when did he know it??

I’m truly not a conspiracy theorist, but like I said, something was not right and somebody must have known why, the only people who cared were those of us stuck in the middle of it, and all we had was each other. Which was better than not having each other, but hardly enough.

Or, as Tressie McMillan Cottom, stuck at an airport today as I was writing this post, said in a reel, “When this country stopped being able to move people from point A to point B, we should have known we were in trouble.”

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The Way We Live Now

Perhaps the most visible four year old in the world today is X, the sixth of Elon Musk’s 12 living children. Instead of playing with the sand table at preschool, X is currently serving as his father’s presidential photo op accessory. He is essentially a human Birkin bag, and his father dresses him accordingly.

My favorite Elon-X-Trump photo is the one where X picks his nose and Trump glares at him, but this one best shows off the outfit. With his camel overcoat, button-down shirt, crewneck sweater, trousers, and child-sized leather dress shoes, X is clothed in nearly full-bore imitation of the Sons of Cambridge. Princes George and Louis make their public appearances in button-down shirts; shorts till they are six or seven, then trousers; crewneck sweaters or blazers or overcoats as appropriate; leather shoes; and ties when necessary. But not gold chains, which is X’s exception to the royal rules.

About a week after X picked his nose, two other little boys appeared in public clad in royal juvenilia. In the respective arms of their mother and nanny, RZA and Riot Rose Mayers attended the assault trial of their (subsequently acquitted) father, A$AP Rocky, Prince Consort to their mother, Queen Rihanna of Music, Makeup, and Fashion. You’ll find the outfit in the seventh video in this post. As befits a toddler following royal rules, RZA wears a topcoat, shorts, white ankle socks, and what appear to be buckle shoes (which George and Louis also wore when they were younger), but no gold. That day, Rocky wore an elegant tailored suit, wire rim glasses, perfect corn rows, and gold earrings, because he is a rapper, not a toddler.

Of course many rappers drape their children in gold and diamonds, with Cardi B at the head of the parade (here’s her daughter Kulture in full-body gold). But Cardi, like Rihanna and Rocky, knows her fashion rules. In court, she too plays it high-fashion respectable (though she leaves her children home).

Meanwhile, the Cambridges have recently leaned into casual, especially on social media. The boys now get to wear jeans, shorts, polo and t-shirts, and sneakers, while Princess Charlotte, freed of smocked dresses and cardigans, is allowed shorts, leggings, sneakers, and even a cheeky denim skirt.

But the critical similarity between these families, whether they are dressing up or down, is that they know the fashion rules, which means they know both how to follow them and how to fuck with them, which actual royals never do and rap royalty does with skill and respect for what they care about.

So let’s get back to X’s gold chain. The analysis is simple. As always, Elon Musk wants to have it both ways: royalty and rapper, government contractor and government inspector general, head of DOGE and not head of DOGE, devoted father who ignores the majority of his children. And of course top breaker of shit, including rules.

But fashion is not Musk’s game and, unlike Rihanna, Cardi B, and Kate Middleton (I tried to write “the Cambridges,” but does anyone really think William has anything to do with his children’s clothing?), he does not know the rules. So while his fans may think X is adorable, the child is actually pretty ridiculous (and yes, you can turn that sentence into a Mad Lib: While Musk’s fans may think noun is positive adjective, noun is actually pretty negative adjective.).

And you know who else knows the rules? Trump, who obeys them scrupulously (albeit with his own consistent little twists, being the twisty guy that he is), because he knows that fashion is a power game. He wears a (baggy) blue suit, white shirt, and red tie to be presidential; a white golf shirt (with his own logo) and khaki or blue trousers on the golf course; and you won’t seem him in anything else, except, if absolutely necessary, black or white tie, the ultimate rule-following power looks.

If fashion is a power game and you only win if you know the rules, whether you follow them or fuck with them, Kate and Will, Rihanna and Rocky, Cardi, and Trump are going to keep winning, as they already are. Meanwhile, Musk is going to keep thinking he’s winning until the day he goes down hard, when all he will have is his money and his minions, and it’s not going to be enough.

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Because we still deserve nice things…

I know this is going to be controversial, but I’m going to say it anyway: we still deserve snow! And I’m going to make the case that snow itself is a nice thing.

My disclaimer is that I am on vacation this week in a place with ridiculous amounts of snow where all I have to do is enjoy it: gape at it (from a warm house or in weather-appropriate clothing), ski in it, walk down plowed roads alongside it, appreciate the many ways in which it is beautiful: glowing in the cloud-laden pre-dawn dusky blue, capping branches, spreading across fields, sifting down from the sky, glittering up close. So, yeah, we all deserve optimum snow, whether we prefer to watch it, gallivant in it, or both.

Unfortunately, snow often has consequences, some annoying (shoveling, wet feet, snowsuits), others that ramp up to catastrophic (heart attacks while shoveling, scary driving, power outages, highway pile-ups, roof collapses, airplanes that overturn upon landing). That said, when places that should have snow don’t, the result is often drought, which is its own catastrophe.

Taking all of the above into account, here is my claim:

Although snow can generate many perils, those perils are not themselves snow; snow, the actual white stuff that comes down from the sky, is both joy and necessity, which qualifies it as a nice thing.

The corollary of my claim is that in the dying days of snow, at least in New England, we need to appreciate the snow we get, for we won’t know which snowy winter will turn out to have been the last of its kind until there is no longer snow and we miss it.

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This post is for Mary, who I hope made it home before I did! If you enjoyed reading, feel free to click on the heart, and if you have thoughts, please comment - I want to hear them.