Monday Morning Media Quarterback

Perhaps the saddest thing about the Bush administration is how little Americans have come to expect of it.  It has resulted in an orgy of incompetence that have seriously damaged first America’s image, and now our economy and very .

The current agony of more than 200,000 American Airlines passengers stranded on more than 2500 cancelled flights at America’s airports is just the latest example. 

A competent administration would have kept the FAA on the case in the first place.  A more foresighted administration would have recognized the cost to Americans and the economy of airlines like Aloha, ATA, Skybus and now Frontier failing.  And a stronger administration would have acted in the crisis, like Truman did nationalizing the steel industry or, yes, Reagan breaking the air traffic controllers union as a “peril to national safety”. 

“The buck stops here,” Truman said.  By contrast, the Bush Administration has done nothing.  Nothing.  There has been an absolute leadership vacuum. And sadly, that has come to be what we expect from it.  Consider:

• The incompetent prosecution of the war in Iraq, led by my fellow Princeton alumni Donald Rumsfeld.  I originally supported the war on the bill of goods sold us by the administration, but if you’re going to fight a war, win a war, smash the opposition and minimize casualties among U.S. troops.  In five years none of that has happened.
• Where’s Osama? How’s that war on terror going? We’re not losing in Afghanistan, are we?
• Abu Ghraib. 
• Katrina. One word.  More than 1100 people died in New Orleans (in America!)  after the hurricane.  How many have died since or had their lives shortened by stress, disease, alcoholism, and the rest?  How’s the rebuilding of New Orleans coming?
• The credit crisis, stock market crash and the foreclosure epidemic; where was government/adult supervision?  A $600 rebate to spend on Japanese electronics, vacations or, more likely, on alcohol, is supposed to help how?
• Four dollar a gallon gasoline.  If you make $8 an hour and commute 20 miles to work, it will take an hour (more after taxes) just to pay for your gas.  Very soon, the economy will grind to a halt.  Where’s that Iraqi oil when we need it?  Where’s the Manhattan Project or Apollo program to achieve energy independence? 
• Even ’small things’ like last summer’s passport crisis.  Everyone needs a passport to travel now, but no additional staffing of the passport office=long lines, cancelled trips and general chaos.  Now they’ve fully staffed the office with idiots who snoop in passport files.

And the media, distracted by its own evisceration, has done a piss-poor job of holding the administration accountable for its across-the-board failure of leadership.

LA may look like a big, ‘civilized’ city, but there are tell-tale signs of ungovernability.  Last month we had the fourth power outage in Encino in the last six months. Previously, transformers have blown up and cars have hit power poles; this last was because a cat (who survived!) got into the power equipment.

Southern California is wealthy and cultured, but sometimes the edges show.  The fires this time (to paraphrase James Baldwin) burned 509,024 acres, destroyed 1,997 homes, injured 98 and killed 7, according to the LA Times of October 28.  

“All the ingredients for disaster came together last Sunday.   A massive high-pressure system moved across the western United States, and Santa Ana winds began to howl at speeds sometimes reaching hurricane force as they squeezed through the canyons and passes of Southern California.  A year of record-low precipitation had created a tinderbox, and all it took was a spark from a downed power line or a careless welder to ignite blazes that were quickly blown into firestorms that spread across the regions.  Before the winds died down late in the week, massive blazes had charred thousands of acres between Ventura Couny and the Mexican border.”

Eighty-foot flames roared near Ramona, and Roger and Dena Bielasz survived the Witch Fire while others died by taking shelter in their swimming pool, to emerge to a house leveled by flames–but alive.

Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times

Dena Bielasz and her husband, Roger, of Escondido, sought refuge in their pool as the fires raged through their property. Roger said to his wife after they were rescued “lets promise each other that was the worst day of our lives..it can only get better from here.”

But disaster sometimes plays as hapless comedy here as well: The huge lines of people snaking through the TSA lines at our airport, beloved LAX, were recently doused by a sprinkler failure.  It sent soaked people and their wet luggage fleeing from yet another evacuated terminal.  Of course, to return they had to go through security again, costing an hour and no doubt missing their flights.

Los Angeles International Airport

Then there are those lost even before they hit bumper to bumper traffic–inexplicably, the 101 freeway, which basically runs east and west in LA, is labelled the North/South 101, leaving thousands befuddled.

In Annie Hall, Woody Allen said LA’s only cultural advanatage was making a right turn on red.  In some parts of LA, now you can’t make a right turn on green without our hated motorcycle cops giving ticket after ticket. 

Rather than find some other way to deal with protecting pedestrians, the traffic geniuses of LA decided to put up a sign, which of course drivers ‘didn’t see.’  One woman got off without a ticket because the officer gave out so many he ran out.

Have we forgotten, as Anna Quindlen charges? 

I don’t think so.  Even on the most superficial level, 9-11 has become a “where were you on” day like the Challenger explosion of February 1986, President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, and for an older generation, Pearl Harbor in 1941 and VE and VJ (victory in Europe/Japan) days in 1945. 

And in terms of how many Americans (and people worldwide) remember what they saw that day, the absolute numbers of those who remember are probably bigger than any of the other ‘anniversary’ days.

9-11 isn’t just a ‘media anniversary’, like two years since Katrina or 15 years since the LA Riots.  Even if the media didn’t remind us, we’d remember.

But memories do fade.  We saw that with the 10th anniversary of Princess Diana’s death–I remember quite well it was the summer of 1997, probably August, but I’d be hard-pressed to say what day.  (August 31, 1997, for the record; I had to look it up.)  And already, many challenge her legacy.

But artists are starting to make 9-11 their own, like Don DeLillo with Falling Man and Paul Greengrass’s absorbing United 93.  This is an encouraging development for continuing and expanding memory, even if they run the risk of trivializing 9-11, as with the Holocaust. 

The challenge is continue to honor the 9-11 dead and their families, find ways to memorialize them going forward, and learn how to say “never again” and make it mean something.  One size doesn’t fit all here, and soundbites about ’sacrifice’, ‘helplessness’, ‘revenge’ and ‘justice’ don’t say much more.