White Noise Used to Be Satire

What was once mildly absurd is now funny because its true.

- By Jordan Kisner

On the afternoon of the 2016 election, I took a cab directly from my polling place in South Brooklyn to JFK, where I boarded a full flight to San Francisco. In the evening, when the plane took off, the consensus seemed to be that by the time we landed, the country would have elected its first female president. I wasn’t sure, so when the miniature television that had been allotted to me came alive as we climbed to 10,000 feet, I turned it to the news.

As the sunset outpaced the plane and the dark rose outside our windows, I saw that everyone else had their television turned to the news, too. Pennsylvania and Ohio, Iowa and Nebraska, passed silently beneath us as the returns came in.

The flight from JFK to SFO is about six and a half hours, depending on the wind, so between the hours of 7 p.m. and midnight eastern on November 8, 2016, 180 televisions shone their bluish light on 180 faces arranged in rows of three, facing forward. No one spoke. Strapped in shoulder to shoulder in a metal tube hurtling 35,000 feet over the breadth of America, everyone watched the country’s electorate reveal itself on our own screens. By the time we landed, the decision had been made.

I mentioned this the next day to my mother when we spoke on the phone: the silent, dark plane; all the people quietly watching, hour after hour.

“That's just like White Noise,” she said.