A ranking officer in the FBI – I didn’t catch his name – was being interviewed by the BBC (broadcast on NPR) yesterday, and he was asked: “What do you fear the most?”
“What I fear the most is terrorists,” he said without hesitation, “specifically terrorists who have weapons of mass destruction.”
I don’t know if he said that partly because he wanted forgiveness for the American misread of Saddam and WMDs with which the Bush administration justified invading Iraq. But I thought it was reasonable that the two – Saddam as a terrorist and WMDs as atomic or chemical weapons – were linked in his mind.
But they haven’t linked in my mind since the 9/11 anniversary, and a Discovery Channel documentary about 9/11’s planning and execution. Over and over again, the documentary displayed the faces of the terrorists who took over the four aircraft, and looking at these faces over and over again stirred in me the deepest anger I have felt in a long time.
They were sickening. But Iraq was not vital in their organization. They were not operating under the Iraqi flag. Fifteen of the 19 were Saudi nationals, and all that bound them together was hatred of America, a passion for dying, and Osama bin Laden.
If Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were on trading cards, I would give you one million Saddams for one Osama. But he is at large, can’t be found, after all this time, while the Bush administration’s war on terror is headquartered in Baghdad.
And yes, as people have begun to suggest, Iraq is becoming another Vietnam. Iraq and Vietnam are bound at the hip, because again, this country doesn’t know who the enemy is, or how to fight him. Invading Saddam’s Iraq to get at bin Laden’s terrorist crew is like going to the florist for flour. Like Vietnam, our side in Iraq does not know what to do about how the enemy fights. In Iraq now, America’s big weaponry is jeopardized by small, smart bombs whose design is forever two months ahead of the Americans’ ability to recognize and neutralize them. In their newest iteration, they are triggered by infra-red devices used in garage door openers.
In the war on terror, President Bush is like Charlie Brown on an old greeting card I wish I still had. On the cover, Charlie Brown is at the plate, bat high, waiting for the pitch. He is thinking: “Just when you think you understand the game . . . “: Flip open the card, and there is Charlie Brown, bat still ready, but zipping at him is not a baseball, but a football, and Charlie Brown says, “. . . they go and change the rules.” Poor Charlie Brown. He could be Michael Brown’s dad.
In Washington, there is President Bush, setting the example for the nation, bat high, waiting for the big one, the Saddam WMD, which he is going to hit out of the park, when Osama has already slipped the real WMD past him: a box cutter.
With a box cutter, Osama brought mass destruction to our side, destruction that is still going on, with no end in sight. Iconic buildings in New York’s heart brought down on an ordinary Tuesday morning, with more than 3,000 lives lost. Destruction to industries: insurance, investments, airlines. Destruction of freedom, with the Patriot Act. Resources destruction, with hundreds of millions of dollars spent on band-aid security remedies. Confidence destruction, with a frustrated president goaded into attacking an enemy he could find, justified by evidence he couldn’t find, and probably didn’t exist. Another 2,000 lives lost so far in that action, bringing the total box cutter dead to more than 5,000. More resources destruction, with $200 billion the present price tag in Iraq. Then into that destruction roars a hurricane, whose repairs the nation suddenly can’t pay for. Four years of destruction, and counting . . . .
It would be interesting, to undertake a total accounting of the destruction brought to this country, whenever that destruction is finally judged to be ended, by Osama and his 19 soldiers armed with box cutters. I wonder if he had any idea. Listening to the FBI, I know they don’t.
September 30, 2005
September 29, 2005
Taking the road less traveled
Sad to learn that Dr. Scott Peck has gone over, at the age of 69, a time of life when he could have most enjoyed those things about life that he had worked to prove true.
Some years ago, in my 40s, I decided that the best possible life would be to have the imagination of a six-year-old and the experience of a 65-year-old. It has worked out almost exactly that way. I am only 62, but that has been enough maturity to experience experience, and to know first-hand how central it is to happiness.
A key chapter in that experience has been exposure to Scott Peck’s thinking. “Life is difficult,” he began, in “The Road Less Traveled.” Then he argued in behalf of turning toward, not away from, difficulty. He called it “the means of experiencing the pain of problems constructively.” He called this “discipline,” and provided four tools a person could use to obtain discipline in one’s life.
One tool was delayed gratification. “Delaying gratification,” he wrote, “is a process of scheduling the pain and pleasure in life in such a way as to enhance the pleasure by meeting and experiencing the pain first and getting it over with. It is the only decent way to live.”
I read those words for the first time in 1988. I forgot most of the passage, but a few of the words stuck, and have been with me since: “It is the only decent way to live.” They have guided me in ways Peck may not have intended. To live decently, I reasoned, one must do decent things. What does it mean, to do decent things? In many cases, I discovered, it meant to do things the opposite of, or at least quite different from, how I had done them before.
And the words have been reward in themselves. A year ago, I met the woman I am soon to marry. In the course of a now-forgotten (and I hope not too high-minded) conversation, I said the words: “It is the only decent way to live.”
“Scott Peck,” she said immediately, and went to her bookshelf to show me her copy of “Road Less Traveled.” Pleased to have struck a chord, I trotted out another phrase I remembered: “Love is nurturing another’s spiritual growth.” She found it on Page 81 of her text and read to me the entire quote: “I define love thus: the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.”
Whatever else this woman discovered about me as we came to know each other, at her bookcase she learned that I held an active, practicing definition of love with which she agreed, and I am positive it has made a difference. We have years of nurturing and growth ahead, and truths about love to be discovered that as yet we can only imagine.
In its obituary, The New York Times used this quote from Peck: “I make no distinction between the mind and the spirit, and therefore no distinction between the process of achieving spiritual growth and achieving mental growth. They are one and the same.”
To me, that was affirmation. It meant spirituality wasn’t the dogma of rigid belief, but dynamic, and alive, and growing. My spiritual life continually brings me, when I am spiritually and mentally ready, to a new door, which I open, and step through into a space of virgin light and unbreathed air so pure that it is awhile before my heart is calm enough to let me see and breathe again. These rooms are not created for me, but already exist, destinations in place at this moment, but I don’t know what the next one is, or the next, and I won’t, until the day I arrive. By this argument, the last room must already exist, and probably God is waiting there, but I can’t know that, or Him, until I arrive.
In every new room, sooner or later, life is difficult, just as Scott Peck said. In my experience, happiness has also been in every room, as long as I turned toward the difficulty, and not away. It always seems the decent thing to do. It truly is the only way to live.
Some years ago, in my 40s, I decided that the best possible life would be to have the imagination of a six-year-old and the experience of a 65-year-old. It has worked out almost exactly that way. I am only 62, but that has been enough maturity to experience experience, and to know first-hand how central it is to happiness.
A key chapter in that experience has been exposure to Scott Peck’s thinking. “Life is difficult,” he began, in “The Road Less Traveled.” Then he argued in behalf of turning toward, not away from, difficulty. He called it “the means of experiencing the pain of problems constructively.” He called this “discipline,” and provided four tools a person could use to obtain discipline in one’s life.
One tool was delayed gratification. “Delaying gratification,” he wrote, “is a process of scheduling the pain and pleasure in life in such a way as to enhance the pleasure by meeting and experiencing the pain first and getting it over with. It is the only decent way to live.”
I read those words for the first time in 1988. I forgot most of the passage, but a few of the words stuck, and have been with me since: “It is the only decent way to live.” They have guided me in ways Peck may not have intended. To live decently, I reasoned, one must do decent things. What does it mean, to do decent things? In many cases, I discovered, it meant to do things the opposite of, or at least quite different from, how I had done them before.
And the words have been reward in themselves. A year ago, I met the woman I am soon to marry. In the course of a now-forgotten (and I hope not too high-minded) conversation, I said the words: “It is the only decent way to live.”
“Scott Peck,” she said immediately, and went to her bookshelf to show me her copy of “Road Less Traveled.” Pleased to have struck a chord, I trotted out another phrase I remembered: “Love is nurturing another’s spiritual growth.” She found it on Page 81 of her text and read to me the entire quote: “I define love thus: the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.”
Whatever else this woman discovered about me as we came to know each other, at her bookcase she learned that I held an active, practicing definition of love with which she agreed, and I am positive it has made a difference. We have years of nurturing and growth ahead, and truths about love to be discovered that as yet we can only imagine.
In its obituary, The New York Times used this quote from Peck: “I make no distinction between the mind and the spirit, and therefore no distinction between the process of achieving spiritual growth and achieving mental growth. They are one and the same.”
To me, that was affirmation. It meant spirituality wasn’t the dogma of rigid belief, but dynamic, and alive, and growing. My spiritual life continually brings me, when I am spiritually and mentally ready, to a new door, which I open, and step through into a space of virgin light and unbreathed air so pure that it is awhile before my heart is calm enough to let me see and breathe again. These rooms are not created for me, but already exist, destinations in place at this moment, but I don’t know what the next one is, or the next, and I won’t, until the day I arrive. By this argument, the last room must already exist, and probably God is waiting there, but I can’t know that, or Him, until I arrive.
In every new room, sooner or later, life is difficult, just as Scott Peck said. In my experience, happiness has also been in every room, as long as I turned toward the difficulty, and not away. It always seems the decent thing to do. It truly is the only way to live.
The Press and the Public
If a city - San Diego, for example - had a better newspaper, would the city have a better government?
San Diego government, if you haven’t heard, is in a bit of a mess. The mayor resigned, two councilmen indicted and resigned, a special mayoral election under way, huge treasury deficits. The San Diego paper, the Union-Tribune last Sunday ran the last of what it called a “Watchdog report, digging into City Hall’s money mess.”
In the week-long series, it ran stories about the Fairbanks Ranch Country Club’s “sweetheart” lease with the city; the “murky business” of selling city property; overstated assets by the city in fiscal 2002; accounting of city real estate “in disarray;” and what the newspaper called a “debacle” at Brown Field.
If these watchdog stories had run a year ago, or three years ago, or five years ago, whenever the sweetheart lease was made, and the murky business and overstating were going on, would there have been any need for the series last week? If the newspaper – or any other media in town, for that matter – had dug into disarray when it was accumulating, or a debacle when it was building, would the city have been stirred to set matters right at that time, to the good of all today?
I would like to think so. It certainly seems possible now, and people have credited Voice of San Diego, the new and earnest online newspaper in town, with stirring the serene Union-Tribune to unfamiliar action. When the U-T broke the Duke Cunningham story, it was hard to tell which amused the readers more, the evidence developed against Cunningham, or that it was the Union-Tribune that not only developed it, but published it.
But the question isn’t that simple, and that is very interesting. Newspapers in America – the media in general, but newspapers specifically, because they are where the depth is – have basically unlimited freedom to do their work. Here is the First Amendment to the Constitution:
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”
There is an amazing breadth of freedom in that guarantee, but we are interested in just the one: “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of the press.”
The key word in the guarantee is “abridging,” which means “to reduce in scope, intent, etc.” It means the Founding Fathers knew that freedom of the press already existed in the pre-United States. The Constitution did not create freedom of the press. The First Amendment acknowledged that it preceded the Constitution and was as fundamental to a free democracy as water is to blood.
The First Amendment gave the press such power that a body of protections, defamation law, sprang up through the courts to protect citizens from potential abuse.
Yet with all that power, citizens, corporations and institutions have still gotten away with some pretty tyrannical things, partly because the press has a history of getting lazy, or chummy, and partly because people sometimes don’t pay attention to what the press says could happen, until it actually happens. It is absolutely possible that the U-T in fact published some of these “watchdog” stories as they were happening, and City Hall didn’t respond because it knew nobody was paying attention and things would blow over.
There is no institution the press examines more thoroughly than the seat of government itself, in Washington, D.C., and the most famous and responsible person in that government, the President. At that level, particularly after Watergate, the institution knew the press wouldn’t go away, and letting things blow over was dangerous, so the institution developed spin.
The current administration is masterful at spin, but takes its respect (in the sense of “dreaded adversary”) of the press a giant step farther. Last year, a reporter said to President Bush: “Is it true you don’t read us, don’t even watch the news?” The President said that he did not. The reporter asked: “Well, how do you then know, Mr. President, what the public is thinking?” Mr. Bush said: “You’re making a powerful assumption, young man. You’re assuming that you represent the public. I don’t accept that.”
It was an inspired play, an end-run around the First Amendment, to disenfranchise the press through the back door. But it won’t work, because the President is wrong, and he knows it. The press represents the public in Washington, D.C., and in San Diego, California. We are the public’s watchdog. As long as the press remembers that every day, the public has a fighting chance. If it pays attention.
San Diego government, if you haven’t heard, is in a bit of a mess. The mayor resigned, two councilmen indicted and resigned, a special mayoral election under way, huge treasury deficits. The San Diego paper, the Union-Tribune last Sunday ran the last of what it called a “Watchdog report, digging into City Hall’s money mess.”
In the week-long series, it ran stories about the Fairbanks Ranch Country Club’s “sweetheart” lease with the city; the “murky business” of selling city property; overstated assets by the city in fiscal 2002; accounting of city real estate “in disarray;” and what the newspaper called a “debacle” at Brown Field.
If these watchdog stories had run a year ago, or three years ago, or five years ago, whenever the sweetheart lease was made, and the murky business and overstating were going on, would there have been any need for the series last week? If the newspaper – or any other media in town, for that matter – had dug into disarray when it was accumulating, or a debacle when it was building, would the city have been stirred to set matters right at that time, to the good of all today?
I would like to think so. It certainly seems possible now, and people have credited Voice of San Diego, the new and earnest online newspaper in town, with stirring the serene Union-Tribune to unfamiliar action. When the U-T broke the Duke Cunningham story, it was hard to tell which amused the readers more, the evidence developed against Cunningham, or that it was the Union-Tribune that not only developed it, but published it.
But the question isn’t that simple, and that is very interesting. Newspapers in America – the media in general, but newspapers specifically, because they are where the depth is – have basically unlimited freedom to do their work. Here is the First Amendment to the Constitution:
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”
There is an amazing breadth of freedom in that guarantee, but we are interested in just the one: “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of the press.”
The key word in the guarantee is “abridging,” which means “to reduce in scope, intent, etc.” It means the Founding Fathers knew that freedom of the press already existed in the pre-United States. The Constitution did not create freedom of the press. The First Amendment acknowledged that it preceded the Constitution and was as fundamental to a free democracy as water is to blood.
The First Amendment gave the press such power that a body of protections, defamation law, sprang up through the courts to protect citizens from potential abuse.
Yet with all that power, citizens, corporations and institutions have still gotten away with some pretty tyrannical things, partly because the press has a history of getting lazy, or chummy, and partly because people sometimes don’t pay attention to what the press says could happen, until it actually happens. It is absolutely possible that the U-T in fact published some of these “watchdog” stories as they were happening, and City Hall didn’t respond because it knew nobody was paying attention and things would blow over.
There is no institution the press examines more thoroughly than the seat of government itself, in Washington, D.C., and the most famous and responsible person in that government, the President. At that level, particularly after Watergate, the institution knew the press wouldn’t go away, and letting things blow over was dangerous, so the institution developed spin.
The current administration is masterful at spin, but takes its respect (in the sense of “dreaded adversary”) of the press a giant step farther. Last year, a reporter said to President Bush: “Is it true you don’t read us, don’t even watch the news?” The President said that he did not. The reporter asked: “Well, how do you then know, Mr. President, what the public is thinking?” Mr. Bush said: “You’re making a powerful assumption, young man. You’re assuming that you represent the public. I don’t accept that.”
It was an inspired play, an end-run around the First Amendment, to disenfranchise the press through the back door. But it won’t work, because the President is wrong, and he knows it. The press represents the public in Washington, D.C., and in San Diego, California. We are the public’s watchdog. As long as the press remembers that every day, the public has a fighting chance. If it pays attention.
September 22, 2005
Fall arrives in California
There was never a doubt we would see the Harvest Moon rise Saturday night.
You could not see the eastern horizon because of gray haze. But I have seen that before. The California light is entering its vintage September days.
These are the golden days. Today is the equinox, and around the equinox, the light acquires a patina, no doubt just a textbook effect of physics, caused by more of Earth’s filtering atmosphere between the sun and us as it tracks farther south, a degree or two a day, toward the equator.
But we don’t see, or think, physics in the September California light, any more than we think physics when we see the patina of age on antique surfaces. We just see, and feel, the patina.
It so happens that September is the time that the patina light starts to quarter across the living room, in the morning and again before sunset. On clear days, the house is in light from the instant of sunrise to almost sunset. The house sits suspended between earth and space on the very edge of a rocky little knob of a hill in far southeast La Mesa, almost to El Cajon. The space around us is unobstructed, in a sweep beginning with Cuyamaca Peak to the northeast, all the way around to Mission Bay to the northwest.
The eastern horizon is shaped by foothills 20 miles away in some places and 30 miles or more in others. I track the sunrises along this horizon from solstice to solstice, both winter and summer, and I have identified landmark features where it rises at the solstices and at the equinox. This morning the sun rising will have completed half its horizon trek from June to December. In another month it will rise later, because it will be behind Lyon’s Peak, which splits the sunrise light and illuminates hills and valleys to the south while we remain in shadow.
With the golden light of September comes the gray September dusk that settles on the land like the light afghans we take outside and throw across our knees to watch evening events. Again, the dusk is only a matter of physics and location, an ocean next to a coastal desert still trying to stay warm as the sun’s angle lowers, trying to cool things off.
But we don’t think about physics, watching the merge of dusk and horizon until all you see is gray. But we know the moon will be there. But where? We make little wagers. “Farther this way,” she says, snuggled close under the afghan. “More toward Lyon’s Peak,” I say. We wait, and a spider plunges earthward from the eave of the porch toward a place on the ground to anchor lines between which he will spin his web and then wait with us.
She sees it first. Farther that way, just as she said. An orange puddle, glowing. Then the rounded edge visible, orange to begin with and made totally so by the gray dusk. Then higher and even brighter, this amazing orange pearl culturing itself from the gray Earth. The Harvest Moon rising in coastal Southern California. A couple of miles away we can see headlights streaming east on Highway 94. Why don’t they stop, and watch?
It is time for the owls, two soundless white ghosts on huge wings, to start their evening run. What do they think about this moon? Too bright for them? Will they wait? No, there they are, gliding left to right, and then one breaking off and arrowing to a spot below us on the hillside 40 feet away, wings contorted for an instant until he is up again with his catch – a gopher, I hope – in his talons. It screams, whatever it is, a tiny noise of life and death that is played out how many times a day, I wonder, in the beautiful and violent tableau before us.
We are privileged to watch and linger and listen in consciousness of majesty until we want to go in and turn out the lights and slip into bed by the soft golden moonlight of September in Southern California.
You could not see the eastern horizon because of gray haze. But I have seen that before. The California light is entering its vintage September days.
These are the golden days. Today is the equinox, and around the equinox, the light acquires a patina, no doubt just a textbook effect of physics, caused by more of Earth’s filtering atmosphere between the sun and us as it tracks farther south, a degree or two a day, toward the equator.
But we don’t see, or think, physics in the September California light, any more than we think physics when we see the patina of age on antique surfaces. We just see, and feel, the patina.
It so happens that September is the time that the patina light starts to quarter across the living room, in the morning and again before sunset. On clear days, the house is in light from the instant of sunrise to almost sunset. The house sits suspended between earth and space on the very edge of a rocky little knob of a hill in far southeast La Mesa, almost to El Cajon. The space around us is unobstructed, in a sweep beginning with Cuyamaca Peak to the northeast, all the way around to Mission Bay to the northwest.
The eastern horizon is shaped by foothills 20 miles away in some places and 30 miles or more in others. I track the sunrises along this horizon from solstice to solstice, both winter and summer, and I have identified landmark features where it rises at the solstices and at the equinox. This morning the sun rising will have completed half its horizon trek from June to December. In another month it will rise later, because it will be behind Lyon’s Peak, which splits the sunrise light and illuminates hills and valleys to the south while we remain in shadow.
With the golden light of September comes the gray September dusk that settles on the land like the light afghans we take outside and throw across our knees to watch evening events. Again, the dusk is only a matter of physics and location, an ocean next to a coastal desert still trying to stay warm as the sun’s angle lowers, trying to cool things off.
But we don’t think about physics, watching the merge of dusk and horizon until all you see is gray. But we know the moon will be there. But where? We make little wagers. “Farther this way,” she says, snuggled close under the afghan. “More toward Lyon’s Peak,” I say. We wait, and a spider plunges earthward from the eave of the porch toward a place on the ground to anchor lines between which he will spin his web and then wait with us.
She sees it first. Farther that way, just as she said. An orange puddle, glowing. Then the rounded edge visible, orange to begin with and made totally so by the gray dusk. Then higher and even brighter, this amazing orange pearl culturing itself from the gray Earth. The Harvest Moon rising in coastal Southern California. A couple of miles away we can see headlights streaming east on Highway 94. Why don’t they stop, and watch?
It is time for the owls, two soundless white ghosts on huge wings, to start their evening run. What do they think about this moon? Too bright for them? Will they wait? No, there they are, gliding left to right, and then one breaking off and arrowing to a spot below us on the hillside 40 feet away, wings contorted for an instant until he is up again with his catch – a gopher, I hope – in his talons. It screams, whatever it is, a tiny noise of life and death that is played out how many times a day, I wonder, in the beautiful and violent tableau before us.
We are privileged to watch and linger and listen in consciousness of majesty until we want to go in and turn out the lights and slip into bed by the soft golden moonlight of September in Southern California.
September 21, 2005
Mrs. Bush and Prof. Olds
I have been thinking about Laura Bush for a long time.
Her husband does the damnedest things, and she appears not to have a problem with it. Or does she? Last winter, when the Bush Administration’s manipulation of information was big news, I wrote a blog about Mrs. Bush as a champion of books and libraries. I wrote:
“Mrs. Bush appears happy, content and assured in her well-positioned advocacy of good, reliable information. She has also, in her second term, decided to speak in behalf of providing good, reliable information to boys about their role in society and their need for good, reliable information about themselves, their fears, their hopes, their psyches, in helping them fulfill their role. This is a subject that is near to my heart. No boy should have to wait to the age of 50 finally to understand what he was missing as a man.
“So in one of those big, airy East Wing rooms, Mrs. Bush presides while a teacher reads good, reliable information from a library book to young people sitting on the floor.
“Down the White House hall, meanwhile, people who work for her husband are writing checks to journalists in return for information that they can count on as being what they want to hear. Frank Rich in The New York Times said this has happened at least six times recently, when a ‘journalist’ has been ‘unmasked’ as ‘a propagandist on the payroll of either the Bush administration or a barely arms-length ally . . . while simultaneously appearing in print or broadcast forums that purport to be real news.’
“One of these, Karen Ryan, offered ‘news reports’ explaining the administration’s Medicare drug prescription program. These reports were seen over CNN until the Government Accounting Office pulled them as illegal ‘covert propaganda.’ Another, television commentator Armstrong Williams, was paid $240,000 by the Department of Education to put a favorable spin on administration programs.
“The Department of Education? Purchasing slanted information? Does Laura Bush know about this?
“And so I wonder if I should wonder. It would be natural to wonder how Mrs. Bush could sleep at night, wanting to teach boys to be strong, good, reliable men, when down the hall men are being paid to deceive. But I have to wonder if I should wonder, because it is possible in such a world that Mrs. Bush is not who she seems, or has suspended who she is. Maybe she sleeps just fine. It just doesn’t look right . . . . “
At the time, and ever since, I have been forming the conviction that it is not the media, not the print and broadcast pundits, not the Democrat Senators and former presidents who will finally penetrate the White House bubble. The penetration will be grassroots. Most, if not all, people, understand instinctively the importance of credibility to their well-being, and their freedom, and their self-interest. Even those politically aligned with the Bush Administration are starting to sense that something is wrong when an administration is so dependent on spin that its message becomes tripped up by reality.
But the grassroots needs a way to get in, and it is not through the traditional, front-door channels. The grassroots representative Cindy Sheehan, who set up camp outside the Texas White House demanding to talk to President Bush about Iraq, was demanding to talk to the wrong man. After Katrina – well, even before – the nation had developed a pretty clear idea of how carefully the president would listen to grassroots Americans.
Now comes Sharon Olds, a poet and New York University professor. She has won a National Book Critics Circle Award and as such was invited by Laura Bush to the National Book Festival in Washington on Sept. 24, including breakfast at the White House.
Professor Olds declined the invitation in a letter to Mrs. Bush. She praised the event. “But I could not face the idea of breaking bread with you,” she said. “I knew that if I sat down to eat with you, it would feel to me as if I were condoning what I see to be the wild, highhanded actions of the Bush administration . . . . I thought of the clean linens at your table, the shining knives and the flames of the candles, and I could not stomach it.”
Is Laura Bush the one the grassroots need to talk to? Is she torn at all between good information and spin? Maybe she sleeps just fine. But it just doesn’t look right . . . .
Her husband does the damnedest things, and she appears not to have a problem with it. Or does she? Last winter, when the Bush Administration’s manipulation of information was big news, I wrote a blog about Mrs. Bush as a champion of books and libraries. I wrote:
“Mrs. Bush appears happy, content and assured in her well-positioned advocacy of good, reliable information. She has also, in her second term, decided to speak in behalf of providing good, reliable information to boys about their role in society and their need for good, reliable information about themselves, their fears, their hopes, their psyches, in helping them fulfill their role. This is a subject that is near to my heart. No boy should have to wait to the age of 50 finally to understand what he was missing as a man.
“So in one of those big, airy East Wing rooms, Mrs. Bush presides while a teacher reads good, reliable information from a library book to young people sitting on the floor.
“Down the White House hall, meanwhile, people who work for her husband are writing checks to journalists in return for information that they can count on as being what they want to hear. Frank Rich in The New York Times said this has happened at least six times recently, when a ‘journalist’ has been ‘unmasked’ as ‘a propagandist on the payroll of either the Bush administration or a barely arms-length ally . . . while simultaneously appearing in print or broadcast forums that purport to be real news.’
“One of these, Karen Ryan, offered ‘news reports’ explaining the administration’s Medicare drug prescription program. These reports were seen over CNN until the Government Accounting Office pulled them as illegal ‘covert propaganda.’ Another, television commentator Armstrong Williams, was paid $240,000 by the Department of Education to put a favorable spin on administration programs.
“The Department of Education? Purchasing slanted information? Does Laura Bush know about this?
“And so I wonder if I should wonder. It would be natural to wonder how Mrs. Bush could sleep at night, wanting to teach boys to be strong, good, reliable men, when down the hall men are being paid to deceive. But I have to wonder if I should wonder, because it is possible in such a world that Mrs. Bush is not who she seems, or has suspended who she is. Maybe she sleeps just fine. It just doesn’t look right . . . . “
At the time, and ever since, I have been forming the conviction that it is not the media, not the print and broadcast pundits, not the Democrat Senators and former presidents who will finally penetrate the White House bubble. The penetration will be grassroots. Most, if not all, people, understand instinctively the importance of credibility to their well-being, and their freedom, and their self-interest. Even those politically aligned with the Bush Administration are starting to sense that something is wrong when an administration is so dependent on spin that its message becomes tripped up by reality.
But the grassroots needs a way to get in, and it is not through the traditional, front-door channels. The grassroots representative Cindy Sheehan, who set up camp outside the Texas White House demanding to talk to President Bush about Iraq, was demanding to talk to the wrong man. After Katrina – well, even before – the nation had developed a pretty clear idea of how carefully the president would listen to grassroots Americans.
Now comes Sharon Olds, a poet and New York University professor. She has won a National Book Critics Circle Award and as such was invited by Laura Bush to the National Book Festival in Washington on Sept. 24, including breakfast at the White House.
Professor Olds declined the invitation in a letter to Mrs. Bush. She praised the event. “But I could not face the idea of breaking bread with you,” she said. “I knew that if I sat down to eat with you, it would feel to me as if I were condoning what I see to be the wild, highhanded actions of the Bush administration . . . . I thought of the clean linens at your table, the shining knives and the flames of the candles, and I could not stomach it.”
Is Laura Bush the one the grassroots need to talk to? Is she torn at all between good information and spin? Maybe she sleeps just fine. But it just doesn’t look right . . . .
September 19, 2005
People are reactionary
Karen, my bride to be, has 25 years experience in organizational systems analysis. I am in media. We sit side-by-side these days and have interesting conversations.
She talks about what happens in organizations that need to change, and know it, but resist. It drove her crazy to be assigned a systems analysis within an organization or institution, discover the problem and report it, then watch while nothing happened.
"People and organizations really need to be afraid, or in pain, before change can occur," she said. It makes no difference, she says, how vitally the change is needed, to avoid institutional ruin, or disasters like Sept. 11, Iraq, New Orleans and pension funds. Not until after the fact will the people in charge go back to the pre-disaster analysis, recognize the truth in it, and then do something about it.
I tell Karen how people in my business, the media, constantly call for change in our newspaper and magazine pages. Long reports have been published in the last five years about what a major hurricane would do to New Orleans, with scenarios almost identical to what actually happened with Katrina.
"You know," I said, "the media could have published an in-depth report on teenagers, culture, violence and guns, with a scenario of multiple deaths in an armed teenaged assault on a high school, and no one would have read it."
We looked at each other, realizing we were in the same business. It is our job to bring useful, even critical, projections to people who don't pay us the slightest bit of attention, until something actually happens.
Not one, but two long reports, first in Scientific American (2001), and National Geographic (last October!) described what would happen to New Orleans when the big hurricane hit. The Geographic story was almost word-for-word with the actual Katrina stories in the national media last week. The Times-Picayune in New Orleans has published countless stories about the danger of under-maintained levees and the difficulty of getting federal money to fix them.
The media could have published a story about how easily a major wildfire could get started in San Diego, and how planning, equipment and policies would be no match for it, and no one would have done anything about it until after the Cedar Fire.
That fire, in October 2003, burned 2,700 homes, killed 15 people and roared through more than 273,000 acres, from Julian down to Scripps Ranch, and since then, there have been plenty of changes in planning, equipment and policies.
Before 1978, the media could have published analyses of air traffic control patterns in the San Diego area, with no change occurring until after Sept. 25, 1978, when a mid-air collision over North Park killed 135 people on Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 182, two men in a Cessna, and seven people on the ground. Shortly after that, control patterns were changed that now send incoming airliners from the north all the way out to La Mesa before they turn around.
Presently there exists a scenario, developed and published by the state Office of Emergency Services in 1988, on the effect of a 6.3 earthquake in San Diego. I have written two stories about the scenario myself, one in this publication three months ago. So I ask readers: on what fault line is the scenario based? Where is the fault line located?
The disconnect is simple. The media sees stories in events that haven't happened yet. In the Toolbox, it’s called the Threat to the Status Quo. Readers and viewers don't see stories until they happen. Or, in Karen's case, they are scared to death. How do we change that? Somebody should write a story.
She talks about what happens in organizations that need to change, and know it, but resist. It drove her crazy to be assigned a systems analysis within an organization or institution, discover the problem and report it, then watch while nothing happened.
"People and organizations really need to be afraid, or in pain, before change can occur," she said. It makes no difference, she says, how vitally the change is needed, to avoid institutional ruin, or disasters like Sept. 11, Iraq, New Orleans and pension funds. Not until after the fact will the people in charge go back to the pre-disaster analysis, recognize the truth in it, and then do something about it.
I tell Karen how people in my business, the media, constantly call for change in our newspaper and magazine pages. Long reports have been published in the last five years about what a major hurricane would do to New Orleans, with scenarios almost identical to what actually happened with Katrina.
"You know," I said, "the media could have published an in-depth report on teenagers, culture, violence and guns, with a scenario of multiple deaths in an armed teenaged assault on a high school, and no one would have read it."
We looked at each other, realizing we were in the same business. It is our job to bring useful, even critical, projections to people who don't pay us the slightest bit of attention, until something actually happens.
Not one, but two long reports, first in Scientific American (2001), and National Geographic (last October!) described what would happen to New Orleans when the big hurricane hit. The Geographic story was almost word-for-word with the actual Katrina stories in the national media last week. The Times-Picayune in New Orleans has published countless stories about the danger of under-maintained levees and the difficulty of getting federal money to fix them.
The media could have published a story about how easily a major wildfire could get started in San Diego, and how planning, equipment and policies would be no match for it, and no one would have done anything about it until after the Cedar Fire.
That fire, in October 2003, burned 2,700 homes, killed 15 people and roared through more than 273,000 acres, from Julian down to Scripps Ranch, and since then, there have been plenty of changes in planning, equipment and policies.
Before 1978, the media could have published analyses of air traffic control patterns in the San Diego area, with no change occurring until after Sept. 25, 1978, when a mid-air collision over North Park killed 135 people on Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 182, two men in a Cessna, and seven people on the ground. Shortly after that, control patterns were changed that now send incoming airliners from the north all the way out to La Mesa before they turn around.
Presently there exists a scenario, developed and published by the state Office of Emergency Services in 1988, on the effect of a 6.3 earthquake in San Diego. I have written two stories about the scenario myself, one in this publication three months ago. So I ask readers: on what fault line is the scenario based? Where is the fault line located?
The disconnect is simple. The media sees stories in events that haven't happened yet. In the Toolbox, it’s called the Threat to the Status Quo. Readers and viewers don't see stories until they happen. Or, in Karen's case, they are scared to death. How do we change that? Somebody should write a story.
September 13, 2005
Where are you, Dave?
We were talking about New Orleans and President Bush when Karen said, “Do you remember the movie, ‘Dave’?”
“Sort of,” I said. “About a guy who stands in for the President of the United States.”
But I didn’t remember how the story worked, so I looked it up in the Internet Movie Database.
Bill Mitchell is the President of the United States, and not a very upstanding one. He takes care of those who helped him get into office, doesn’t care about the rest of Americans, and he cheats on his wife (Sigourney Weaver), who can’t stand him anyway.
The president wants time alone with his girlfriends. Somebody knows about a temp agency whose owner is a dead ringer for President Mitchell. The president learns of this and has an idea. He has his chief of staff hire the look-alike to impersonate him at various functions such as luncheons and other appearances. The stand-in’s name is Dave.
One day Dave is standing in at a function while the president is in bed with one of his aides. As they are having sex, the president suffers a massive stroke and goes into a coma.
The chief of staff, who is as corrupt as the president, keeps the stroke a secret and talks Dave into impersonating the president full-time. It’s part of a plot the chief of staff has hatched to make himself president when it’s all over.
But Dave winds up liking the job, and he is good at it, conscientious and fair and good-hearted, etc. He does things that start to make the country a better place, and the country notices. Plus he starts to fall in love with the First Lady . . . .
I stopped my research there, because I want to rent the movie (Warner Bros., 1993) and watch it again. Karen liked the idea, and the concept.
“We need a Dave,” she said.
She has a point. For more than a week, the same words have been running through my head, over and over. “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.”
I said to Karen, “I wonder if Alfred E. Neuman is available.” I had been thinking about Alfred since the week of the hurricane. Alfred is the familiar spokesperson for Mad Magazine, he strongly resembles the president, and his credo is, “What, me worry?” When President Bush flew over New Orleans on the Wednesday of the hurricane, and kept right on going, past the biggest leadership opportunity of a president’s life, I believed surely that Alfred E. Neuman had somehow occupied his body.
But Neuman wouldn’t be the one. Too many Neuman-Bush comparisons already exist on the Web, and people would easily figure out the switch. No, we need a Dave, and we need him without anything bad happening to the president. We need a group to make the president a nice, comfortable exile offer he can’t refuse, like the conservative right. I seriously think if anyone is worried about Bush these days, it is the group that has placed its agenda in his hands. I know I don’t feel good about a president who demonstrably cannot tell “a heck of a job” from a cheese enchilada, and I am not even counting on him for anything. The neocons are counting on him for everything. They need a Dave.
“Sort of,” I said. “About a guy who stands in for the President of the United States.”
But I didn’t remember how the story worked, so I looked it up in the Internet Movie Database.
Bill Mitchell is the President of the United States, and not a very upstanding one. He takes care of those who helped him get into office, doesn’t care about the rest of Americans, and he cheats on his wife (Sigourney Weaver), who can’t stand him anyway.
The president wants time alone with his girlfriends. Somebody knows about a temp agency whose owner is a dead ringer for President Mitchell. The president learns of this and has an idea. He has his chief of staff hire the look-alike to impersonate him at various functions such as luncheons and other appearances. The stand-in’s name is Dave.
One day Dave is standing in at a function while the president is in bed with one of his aides. As they are having sex, the president suffers a massive stroke and goes into a coma.
The chief of staff, who is as corrupt as the president, keeps the stroke a secret and talks Dave into impersonating the president full-time. It’s part of a plot the chief of staff has hatched to make himself president when it’s all over.
But Dave winds up liking the job, and he is good at it, conscientious and fair and good-hearted, etc. He does things that start to make the country a better place, and the country notices. Plus he starts to fall in love with the First Lady . . . .
I stopped my research there, because I want to rent the movie (Warner Bros., 1993) and watch it again. Karen liked the idea, and the concept.
“We need a Dave,” she said.
She has a point. For more than a week, the same words have been running through my head, over and over. “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.”
I said to Karen, “I wonder if Alfred E. Neuman is available.” I had been thinking about Alfred since the week of the hurricane. Alfred is the familiar spokesperson for Mad Magazine, he strongly resembles the president, and his credo is, “What, me worry?” When President Bush flew over New Orleans on the Wednesday of the hurricane, and kept right on going, past the biggest leadership opportunity of a president’s life, I believed surely that Alfred E. Neuman had somehow occupied his body.
But Neuman wouldn’t be the one. Too many Neuman-Bush comparisons already exist on the Web, and people would easily figure out the switch. No, we need a Dave, and we need him without anything bad happening to the president. We need a group to make the president a nice, comfortable exile offer he can’t refuse, like the conservative right. I seriously think if anyone is worried about Bush these days, it is the group that has placed its agenda in his hands. I know I don’t feel good about a president who demonstrably cannot tell “a heck of a job” from a cheese enchilada, and I am not even counting on him for anything. The neocons are counting on him for everything. They need a Dave.
September 11, 2005
A Message from Katrina
I have nothing against environmentalists, and I certainly agree with them that humans have done some very stupid, self-serving and dangerous things to the planet.
But I have always chuckled at their suggestion that it was up to us to “save” the planet.
The Planet Earth certainly does not need the efforts of a few measly humans to “save” it. Earth can save itself any time it wants or needs to. It would make a great movie. Humans continually plunder Earth, sacking resources and creating crucially deprived environments, until one day the planet’s exquisitely sensitive and totally comprehensive nervous system says, “Enough.”
If that moment ever arrives in human history on the planet, Earth will simply just sneeze us off. I have no idea how it would happen – air, water, fire, wind – but Earth would set in motion a sequence creating an environment in which humans cannot survive. We could all die in a heartbeat, which I think would be cool, because we wouldn’t have time to figure out how Earth did it – or it could be a painful demise lasting weeks or months, plenty of time for us to figure where we went wrong.
Earth will then take a little while off – a million years? more? – spinning lazily under the sun, morning into evening healing herself, restoring blue waters, green forests, teeming wetlands, golden prairies, purple mountains, clean air. After that, maybe she will give humans a second chance. But she sure doesn’t need “us” to save herself. Who do we think we are?
Who did we think we were, channeling and diverting the Mississippi River totally to satisfy human needs for commercial land free of the threat of natural flooding? The result was a city sinking below sea level, high-maintenance and low-quality levees to keep river and lake water out of the city, and a coastal wetlands environment that acted like a buffer against hurricane forces before the river flood control deprived it of silt and left it flattened into a submerged parking lot.
There was plenty of warning. Many people knew a hurricane would come, and what it would do to the unnatural New Orleans environment. Now it has come, and swatted away New Orleans like a pesky fly.
Most of us didn’t know that flood control history. It is important that now we do. Who do we think we are? Katrina showed us who. She was the perfect last act in a sequence to show us who we are, and what Earth can do to us if we don’t watch out.
But I have always chuckled at their suggestion that it was up to us to “save” the planet.
The Planet Earth certainly does not need the efforts of a few measly humans to “save” it. Earth can save itself any time it wants or needs to. It would make a great movie. Humans continually plunder Earth, sacking resources and creating crucially deprived environments, until one day the planet’s exquisitely sensitive and totally comprehensive nervous system says, “Enough.”
If that moment ever arrives in human history on the planet, Earth will simply just sneeze us off. I have no idea how it would happen – air, water, fire, wind – but Earth would set in motion a sequence creating an environment in which humans cannot survive. We could all die in a heartbeat, which I think would be cool, because we wouldn’t have time to figure out how Earth did it – or it could be a painful demise lasting weeks or months, plenty of time for us to figure where we went wrong.
Earth will then take a little while off – a million years? more? – spinning lazily under the sun, morning into evening healing herself, restoring blue waters, green forests, teeming wetlands, golden prairies, purple mountains, clean air. After that, maybe she will give humans a second chance. But she sure doesn’t need “us” to save herself. Who do we think we are?
Who did we think we were, channeling and diverting the Mississippi River totally to satisfy human needs for commercial land free of the threat of natural flooding? The result was a city sinking below sea level, high-maintenance and low-quality levees to keep river and lake water out of the city, and a coastal wetlands environment that acted like a buffer against hurricane forces before the river flood control deprived it of silt and left it flattened into a submerged parking lot.
There was plenty of warning. Many people knew a hurricane would come, and what it would do to the unnatural New Orleans environment. Now it has come, and swatted away New Orleans like a pesky fly.
Most of us didn’t know that flood control history. It is important that now we do. Who do we think we are? Katrina showed us who. She was the perfect last act in a sequence to show us who we are, and what Earth can do to us if we don’t watch out.
New in the Back Booth
Three new entries in the Back Booth: a new chapter in "Her Breast Cancer and Mine;" a new look at Reading Media through the huge news story in New Orleans (look for "New Orleans After Katrina" in Reading News); and "Bush's Image Managers" in Reading News.
September 05, 2005
The Image Managers' story
President Bush’s image managers are very familiar with a trait of memory that I call “the true definition of hell:” Hell is where you go, after you die, and all the ideas you ever forgot come back to you.
The point is, memory is fickle. You can have a great idea, think about it for a minute, then think about something else, and a minute later you can’t for the life of you remember the great idea. If you don’t write the idea down, you will forget it.
This same fickleness also creates confusion in how and when things happen, even dates you thought you’d never forget, like a first kiss or a wedding anniversary.
It has not even been a week, and already the average memory would find it impossible to reconstruct events of last week in New Orleans. The two strongest memories of that week, in most minds, will be the disaster’s surreal nature, and the outrage over government’s failure to respond. By Thursday, print and broadcast media were bursting with desperate, angry reactions to the failure of the federal government to help these people.
But when did things happen? When did the levees fail? When did anarchy start to appear? When did the Superdome and convention center become so wretched? What day? What sequence of events?
And where, during that sequence, was President Bush? Where was he on Tuesday? Wednesday? Thursday? Which day did he finally visit the region, and what did he do there?
His image managers are well aware of memory’s fragile hold on these details, and how details and sequences can be modified after the fact, like taking a morning-after birth control pill.
For the record, Bush first visited the area, on the ground, last Friday. It was orchestrated away from the worst and messiest scenes in New Orleans, and the visit came just as the first federal trucks rolled into New Orleans with aid.
The image managers know that in the days and weeks to come, that event – the Bush visit and the trucks rolling in – can be skated around in the public memory like moving images around in a picture with Adobe Photoshop, until the picture looks more like you want it to.
They sent President Bush on Saturday morning to Red Cross headquarters in Washington, another image that, as time goes by, can be shuffled into the deck of actual events and made to show up, like the ace of spades appearing by magic out of thin air, where it isn’t supposed to be.
The image managers will load up the national memory this week with images of presidential response and presidential caring. The New York Times reported that the process was already under way by last Thursday. The president was making another visit to New Orleans today, Monday. A week from now, a month from now, it will be suggested strongly by the White House that those are the images that matter, timely images of a president reacting with the proper concern, and leadership, at the height of the crisis, to which the fickle public memory can only present a confused response. And when the image managers have you confused, they've got the picture like they want it.
The only defense that truth has is to write down the events and sequences of last week. The newspapers did that for us, and I’ve got mine clipped and sorted. It’s a crucially important story, just as it happened.
The point is, memory is fickle. You can have a great idea, think about it for a minute, then think about something else, and a minute later you can’t for the life of you remember the great idea. If you don’t write the idea down, you will forget it.
This same fickleness also creates confusion in how and when things happen, even dates you thought you’d never forget, like a first kiss or a wedding anniversary.
It has not even been a week, and already the average memory would find it impossible to reconstruct events of last week in New Orleans. The two strongest memories of that week, in most minds, will be the disaster’s surreal nature, and the outrage over government’s failure to respond. By Thursday, print and broadcast media were bursting with desperate, angry reactions to the failure of the federal government to help these people.
But when did things happen? When did the levees fail? When did anarchy start to appear? When did the Superdome and convention center become so wretched? What day? What sequence of events?
And where, during that sequence, was President Bush? Where was he on Tuesday? Wednesday? Thursday? Which day did he finally visit the region, and what did he do there?
His image managers are well aware of memory’s fragile hold on these details, and how details and sequences can be modified after the fact, like taking a morning-after birth control pill.
For the record, Bush first visited the area, on the ground, last Friday. It was orchestrated away from the worst and messiest scenes in New Orleans, and the visit came just as the first federal trucks rolled into New Orleans with aid.
The image managers know that in the days and weeks to come, that event – the Bush visit and the trucks rolling in – can be skated around in the public memory like moving images around in a picture with Adobe Photoshop, until the picture looks more like you want it to.
They sent President Bush on Saturday morning to Red Cross headquarters in Washington, another image that, as time goes by, can be shuffled into the deck of actual events and made to show up, like the ace of spades appearing by magic out of thin air, where it isn’t supposed to be.
The image managers will load up the national memory this week with images of presidential response and presidential caring. The New York Times reported that the process was already under way by last Thursday. The president was making another visit to New Orleans today, Monday. A week from now, a month from now, it will be suggested strongly by the White House that those are the images that matter, timely images of a president reacting with the proper concern, and leadership, at the height of the crisis, to which the fickle public memory can only present a confused response. And when the image managers have you confused, they've got the picture like they want it.
The only defense that truth has is to write down the events and sequences of last week. The newspapers did that for us, and I’ve got mine clipped and sorted. It’s a crucially important story, just as it happened.
September 02, 2005
A Story That Could Have Happened
Imagine if, on Tuesday, George W. Bush had called San Diego to say, “I know I am supposed to make a speech out there, but I am going to cancel it, because I have to go to New Orleans.”
The Secret Service would have gone nuts. But they could have responded, because he is the President, and he is their job.
The Presidential schedule would have been blown all to hell, plans made months before now neutralized, and some of the plans may have been important and hard to put on hold.
But he is the President, and it his decision, and Presidents just shrug when they have to make tough decisions and say something self-effacing like, “Hey, it’s my job.” It happens on "The West Wing" all the time. What was the sign Harry Truman kept on his desk? “The Buck Stops Here.”
So Bush picks up the intercom and tells the pilot of Air Force One, “Get this thing on the ground at Baton Rouge as soon as you can.” Then he gets on the phone to military and National Guard units in the Texas-Louisiana-Mississippi area and tells them to mobilize and meet him in Baton Rouge with all the emergency equipment and medical supplies they can haul. Then he calls the Governor of Louisiana and says, “Meet me at the airport.” He calls the New Orleans Mayor and says, “Meet us at the Convention Center.”
He lands at Baton Rouge and walks to the first National Guard truck that he sees. He climbs in, tells the driver, “Let’s go to New Orleans.” He leans out the window of the truck and yells to the Governor, “Follow me.” She jumps back in her limo and falls in line. The Secret Service guys wet their pants and jump in the back of Bush’s truck and commandeer two more. President Bush will be the safest man in New Orleans, Louisiana.
An hour later the President, the Governor and the Mayor are studying the rising waters and deciding what to do. The President gets on the phone and calls the Air Force. “Air drops, by noon tomorrow, or there will be hell to pay.” The Coast Guard, Army and Marines: “Helicopters, by sunup. Rescue missions. Got it?”
The Superdome and Convention Center are designated refugee centers. The President gives a short television interview in front of the Superdome. His advisors, aghast two hours ago, are starting to see some good in this.
Back to Baton Rouge. The first military equipment is arriving. The President asks the Governor to commandeer food and water from area wholesalers and get it loaded into all the 18-wheelers she can find.
Eleven p.m. Tuesday. The convoy is assembled and ready to roll. The President tells the Governor: "Climb into the lead truck." He climbs into the second truck and commands, “Let’s go.” A third of the nation has stayed up to watch this live on television. Shortly after midnight, the convoy reaches New Orleans and goes about its mission.
Would that have been cool, or what? Even Wednesday, flying back to Washington, surveying the chaos from 1,700 feet in Air Force One, if the President had been seized by a stroke of leadership, and told the pilot: “Put this thing down right now at Baton Rouge.”
We would be living in a different country today.
The Secret Service would have gone nuts. But they could have responded, because he is the President, and he is their job.
The Presidential schedule would have been blown all to hell, plans made months before now neutralized, and some of the plans may have been important and hard to put on hold.
But he is the President, and it his decision, and Presidents just shrug when they have to make tough decisions and say something self-effacing like, “Hey, it’s my job.” It happens on "The West Wing" all the time. What was the sign Harry Truman kept on his desk? “The Buck Stops Here.”
So Bush picks up the intercom and tells the pilot of Air Force One, “Get this thing on the ground at Baton Rouge as soon as you can.” Then he gets on the phone to military and National Guard units in the Texas-Louisiana-Mississippi area and tells them to mobilize and meet him in Baton Rouge with all the emergency equipment and medical supplies they can haul. Then he calls the Governor of Louisiana and says, “Meet me at the airport.” He calls the New Orleans Mayor and says, “Meet us at the Convention Center.”
He lands at Baton Rouge and walks to the first National Guard truck that he sees. He climbs in, tells the driver, “Let’s go to New Orleans.” He leans out the window of the truck and yells to the Governor, “Follow me.” She jumps back in her limo and falls in line. The Secret Service guys wet their pants and jump in the back of Bush’s truck and commandeer two more. President Bush will be the safest man in New Orleans, Louisiana.
An hour later the President, the Governor and the Mayor are studying the rising waters and deciding what to do. The President gets on the phone and calls the Air Force. “Air drops, by noon tomorrow, or there will be hell to pay.” The Coast Guard, Army and Marines: “Helicopters, by sunup. Rescue missions. Got it?”
The Superdome and Convention Center are designated refugee centers. The President gives a short television interview in front of the Superdome. His advisors, aghast two hours ago, are starting to see some good in this.
Back to Baton Rouge. The first military equipment is arriving. The President asks the Governor to commandeer food and water from area wholesalers and get it loaded into all the 18-wheelers she can find.
Eleven p.m. Tuesday. The convoy is assembled and ready to roll. The President tells the Governor: "Climb into the lead truck." He climbs into the second truck and commands, “Let’s go.” A third of the nation has stayed up to watch this live on television. Shortly after midnight, the convoy reaches New Orleans and goes about its mission.
Would that have been cool, or what? Even Wednesday, flying back to Washington, surveying the chaos from 1,700 feet in Air Force One, if the President had been seized by a stroke of leadership, and told the pilot: “Put this thing down right now at Baton Rouge.”
We would be living in a different country today.
September 01, 2005
Dawn of Media revisited
In "Reading Media" (see the Back Booth) terms, stories don’t get any bigger than what has happened, and is happening, to New Orleans.
The Definition of News – anything that changes, or threatens to change, the status quo – is operating like a piano roll, continually in motion and constantly striking new keys in a massive concerto of the New Orleans blues.
And every new change adds in some way to the ongoing threat. As bad as the news has become, there hangs over the city an ominous threat of how bad it could get. It is one of those situations beyond the power of the media to describe, particularly the television media. I keep watching for one reporter to emerge who can put together simple words in an elegant way that shows an intellectual and emotional attachment to what is happening.
Instead, the words are pale and frustrated, and the reporters know it, and they flail openly in their attempts to find a passage to their emotions. They have very little practice for this, but I wish at least they were more intellectually equipped to rise to story-of-the-century opportunities. I wish Charles Kuralt was in New Orleans.
Scenes and stories from New Orleans provide the spooky opportunity to travel back hundreds of thousands of years, to the time of the formation of the Twelve News Values in the Toolbox, created by unprotected people living on the ground with survival their only purpose. "New Orleans After Katrina" provides us a living, instant view of the beating heart of the news that was born in "The Dawn of Media." Conflict, Disaster, Prominence, Proximity, Human Interest, Consequence, Information, Demographics. Humanity’s values of news are on display on our television screens in all their mute, primitive reality.
New Orleans, even more than 9/11, shows how helpless, how motionless, humans are, against the news values in their original strength. Conflict totally erases Progress, and Prominence cowers before Disaster. More than anything, humanity in New Orleans needs a leader. Always, humans unsure of their survival have needed someone who believes in survival and will move toward where he thinks it is, so at least the people will have someone and something to follow, and be reassured by the simple act of moving.
And always, there are humans preying on humans. We are watching a news story unique in its originality. Watching it isn’t easy, and it shows what survival is really like, no food, no water, no protection, no direction, with violence all around. It is a unique opportunity for anyone curious about how to read media, to witness media where it originated, with humanity locked in its eternal battle to survive.
The Definition of News – anything that changes, or threatens to change, the status quo – is operating like a piano roll, continually in motion and constantly striking new keys in a massive concerto of the New Orleans blues.
And every new change adds in some way to the ongoing threat. As bad as the news has become, there hangs over the city an ominous threat of how bad it could get. It is one of those situations beyond the power of the media to describe, particularly the television media. I keep watching for one reporter to emerge who can put together simple words in an elegant way that shows an intellectual and emotional attachment to what is happening.
Instead, the words are pale and frustrated, and the reporters know it, and they flail openly in their attempts to find a passage to their emotions. They have very little practice for this, but I wish at least they were more intellectually equipped to rise to story-of-the-century opportunities. I wish Charles Kuralt was in New Orleans.
Scenes and stories from New Orleans provide the spooky opportunity to travel back hundreds of thousands of years, to the time of the formation of the Twelve News Values in the Toolbox, created by unprotected people living on the ground with survival their only purpose. "New Orleans After Katrina" provides us a living, instant view of the beating heart of the news that was born in "The Dawn of Media." Conflict, Disaster, Prominence, Proximity, Human Interest, Consequence, Information, Demographics. Humanity’s values of news are on display on our television screens in all their mute, primitive reality.
New Orleans, even more than 9/11, shows how helpless, how motionless, humans are, against the news values in their original strength. Conflict totally erases Progress, and Prominence cowers before Disaster. More than anything, humanity in New Orleans needs a leader. Always, humans unsure of their survival have needed someone who believes in survival and will move toward where he thinks it is, so at least the people will have someone and something to follow, and be reassured by the simple act of moving.
And always, there are humans preying on humans. We are watching a news story unique in its originality. Watching it isn’t easy, and it shows what survival is really like, no food, no water, no protection, no direction, with violence all around. It is a unique opportunity for anyone curious about how to read media, to witness media where it originated, with humanity locked in its eternal battle to survive.
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