Can you hear me now?

Yes, I can hear you. I’m standing about 3 feet away from you as you bellow into your cell phone, and I think most everyone in the airport can hear you, except that they’re all on their cell phones, too.

Once, an airplane trip was supposed to remind you what a huge country this is. Today, it’s evidence that we’ve turned the whole place into a phone booth.

Or rather, a cell cell.

And we all have to hear everything our cell mates are saying.

I understand that to some degree, airports are the perfect situations for cell phones. And if you’re calling to say that your plane is late, or the serum won’t be arriving from Nome and it looks bad for little Timmy, or that you’ve decided you can’t go through with the wedding and you’re making one last call to try to explain before the plane leaves for Katmandu, well, that’s just what cell phones are for.

And at least for the last example, I’m even willing to listen in.

Involuntarily, of course, but willingly.

But hardly any of the inescapable conversations are nearly that interesting. In fact, if Justice Department agents are actually using the Patriot Act to listen to everybody’s cell phone conversations, it’s enough to make you feel sorry for them.

Most airport cell conversations don’t begin, “I have 10 seconds before they reach me to tell you where I hid the microdot.” Mostly they begin, “What’s happening?”

And everybody in the immediate gate area is going to learn the answer:

Nothing. Nothing is happening.

Hang up.

Other conversations, begun immediately before departure or after arrival, are the new color commentary of travel. Someone, it seems, has to know immediately that the caller is just about to get on his plane, or is now heading for baggage claim.

And it’s true, someone does have to know exactly where you are at every moment — if you’re Condoleezza Rice. But you — running around 285, in the University of Kentucky sweatshirt and cutoffs that you consider an appropriate flying uniform — are not Condoleezza Rice.

Cell phones, it becomes clear before the first boarding time is announced, are not communications devices but time-killers, Game Boys for adults. (Adults might actually do better with Game Boys, which give out only an occasional beep.) Talking on cell phones is even replacing the traditional way of killing time in airports, drinking.

Although, as anyone trying to watch the Cubs in an airport bar can testify, people now often combine the two pastimes.

Admittedly, there is hardly any place in America where you can escape listening to other people narrating their lives in unlimited minutes. But on the street, you can walk away; in an airport, dodging someone’s block-by-block account of the traffic on the way to the airport runs the risk of your flight to Cedar Rapids leaving without you.

This is not going to get better.

In fact, it’s about to get worse. We’re entering the peak summer flying season, meaning more people flying, more people explaining they’re now heading for baggage claim, more people calling to ask “What’s happening?” and more traffic jams on the way to the airport to be recreated in mind-numbing cellular detail.

Soon, as the cell sagas echo across Concourse C from Starbucks to Starbucks, somebody’s going to get hurt.

On one recent delayed flight, a passenger described, in tones audible from Rows 17 through 36, just how excruciating the whole experience was. Why, she declaimed, she even had to make do with plastic cocktail cups, denying her the glass needed to slit her wrists.

A flight attendant muttered under her breath, “Watch what you wish for.”

People concerned about the safety of driving while talking can now buy bumper stickers demanding, “Hang Up and Drive.” But even in the worst situation, a yacking driver can land on only two or three other people.

But a cellular singer lacking air control can poison the entire 3:40 to Houston, plus connecting flights.

At a time when air security is already a national worry, we need another priority:

Hang up and fly.