Wow. All I can say is: wow. This is one of the most embarassing articles I've ever read. I hope and pray that anyone reading Slate in Brazil realize that you do not even speak for a fraction of Americans. 200 people die in one of the worst ways imaginable, and your response is to feel smugly vindicated for thinking that your single (rather convoluted) experience traveling on an airline in a developing country is not as smooth as you think it would be on a major U.S. or European one? Really? That's your takeaway from one of the worst air disasters of the last decade?

I'm not sure how much actual travel you've experienced, but I suspect that your idea of a real adventure is to leave your eye make-up at home. Then there's your beau, who's experienced landing on airfields that consisted mostly of grass. Grass! And I thought Navy SEALs were tough! They got nuthin' on your Adventure Boy. Do you realize that there are twice as many unpaved runways as paved ones right here in the United States? I'm a pilot myself, and more than half the landings in my logbook are on grass, dirt, gravel or some combination of the three.

And seriously, have you flown in the United States lately? Ever tried to make a red-eye connection in Detroit when the (infallible) U.S. airline forgets to assign a plane to the route? Have you been to LAX lately, which looks increasingly the way Beijing International did before they tore it down and started over?

I would love to live in your world, just for a day, where a tragedy like this one is nothing more than another source of self-satisfaction.