A Few Choice Words

Bush as Don Quixote

Bush thinks no one can stop him and virtually dares the opposition to end his prosecution of the war. So now what? Unfortunately we knighted him (made him a king, some would say) by letting him abrogate the War Powers Act, spy on us, torture our enemies, wreck the army, assume for the presidency any power he deemed necessary. We permit him to continue playing Don Quixote, never to show public doubt or contrition since the knightly path of righteousness is clear. He has paid no price, yet, nor has Congress really challenged him. Neither have the gods, yet.

If the Greeks taught us anything, it is the concept of just retribution. Whether the president’s exaggerated behavior is rooted in psychopathology, religious belief or an almost total ignorance of history makes no difference. If you believe at all in the concept of hubris, this man is clearly riding for a fall.

How will it come and in what form? The great Cervantes may provide a clue.

“You should know, Sancho my friend,” responded Don Quixote, “that the lives of knights errant are subject to a thousand dangers and disasters, and by the same token they are just as likely to become kings and emperors at any moment, as demonstrated by the experience of many different and diverse knights whose histories I know thoroughly and completely. And I could tell you now, if the pain I feel would allow, of some who, by the sheer valor of their mighty arm, have risen to the high estates I have mentioned to you, and yet, both before and afterward, these same knights have borne all manner of calamities and miseries. . . . And there is even a little-known author, but a very creditable one, who says that in a certain castle the Knight of Phoebus was caught in a certain trapdoor that opened beneath his feet, and he fell and found himself in a deep pit under the earth, tied hand and foot, and there he was given one of those things called an enema, composed of melted snow and sand, which almost killed him, and if he had not been helped in those dire straits by a wise man who was a great friend of his, things would have gone very badly for the poor knight.”*

Well, if the trapdoor opened for Saddam and his henchmen, perhaps it’s only fitting that it open for George W. One thing we can say for sure: the wise man won’t be Dick Cheney. He should be next in line for the snow-and-sand enema.

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*Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, tr. Edith Grossman, New York: 2005, pp. 106-107. It’s interesting that Google provides some 95,200 entries comparing/associating George W. to Don Quixote.

Vincenzo and the Democrats

Last week, “Southampton [NY] police responding to burst water pipes in a Hampton Bays home found the mummified body of the owner—dead for more than a year—sitting in a chair in front of a television, officials said Friday. The television was still on.”

Apparently Vincenzo Riccardi, age 70, died of natural causes and failed to decompose because of the lack of humidity in the house (as opposed to Anna Nicole Smith, who is decomposing rapidly while relatives pick over the remains). Poor Vincenzo had previously gone blind, it was reported, and had strung a rope from the mailbox to the front door so he could stumble out and get his mail.

Imagine: dead in his chair, Vincenzo absorbed a whole year of wretched programming on the same channel. Maybe that's what mummified him. Don’t ask how he could watch if he was blind. Or if he was dead.

Don’t ask how this story applies to the Democrats, dead in the water and watching the war in Iraq run away from them. Their neighbors, the Republicans, are not going to come to the rescue—any more than Vincenzo’s did. The Dems are watching C-Span at 3:00 a.m. sitting on a folding chair in the middle of a desert.

Customer Justice, Part 2

After the JetBlue fiasco last week, one result has been to make manifest how badly most airlines run their business. The damage to JetBlue’s image was enormous, and it predictably blew up into public outrage over the airlines’ treatment of their passengers in general. Even Congress has gotten into the act with talk of a “passenger’s bill of rights.”

Last Friday, CEO David G. Neeleman called for his company's own bill of rights, actually admitted the airline’s catalog of errors and promised recompense to passengers. It’s the only way to recover from such a meltdown, and he made a good pitch. Will other airline CEOs take note? Like Doug Parker of U.S. Airways, they are probably too busy drinking or playing golf. These guys are among the most arrogant, PR-unconscious, never-apologize people in business.

If you're curious about the public's response, go to YouTube and view the 100-plus comments on Neeleman's speech.

Iraq Is Over, Part 2

Now comes General William Odom in the Washington Post to reinforce the argument made here a week ago. Odom has extraordinary credentials, and yes it feels good to find a kindred spirit of such stature. His is the best critique yet of the Iraq mess.

“The new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq starkly delineates the gulf that separates President Bush's illusions from the realities of the war.” The question is, what can we salvage? For the true bleakness of the Estimate, see the graphic sidebar to Odom’s piece.

His basic point is that the administration and Congress have never faced up to the realities of this war. The “mirage of democracy” was never achievable and now, with defeat looming, the war’s supporters propose a series of “myths that are invoked to try to sell the president’s new war aims.” The counter-arguments are in parentheses.

• Withdrawing our forces will create a bloodbath. (It’s already upon us.)
• Continue the war to keep Iran’s influence from growing. (Starting and prosecuting this war has put the Shiites in power, so the neocons propose to widen the war to Iran!)
• Prevent al Qaeda from finding a new haven. (The American presence in Iraq has brought them in and keeps them there.)
• Continue the fight in order to support the troops. (Are the troops “responsible for deciding to continue the president’s course”? Where does the buck stop?) See also Chickenhawks below.

Odom lays out four strategic “recognitions” for getting us out and then says:

Realigning our diplomacy and military capabilities to achieve order will hugely reduce the numbers of our enemies and gain us new and important allies. This cannot happen, however, until our forces are moving out of Iraq. Why should Iran negotiate to relieve our pain as long as we are increasing its influence in Iraq and beyond? Withdrawal will awaken most leaders in the region to their own need for U.S.-led diplomacy to stabilize their neighborhood.

Will the president seize the initiative and “rescue something of his historical legacy”? Not bloody likely, given Mr. Bush’s propensity to protect his judgments at any cost. Will Congress make the turnaround? So far they have been totally cowed by Odom’s four myths. The clock is ticking. Send this link, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/09/AR2007020901917.html, to your Representative.

Customer Justice

Y’all know who Doug Parker is? One of them arrogant, overpaid, golden parachute CEO bastids who run the big corporations we all are forced one way or another to deal with. How gratifying it is to learn that they occasionally do fall without a parachute.

The Associated Press reported yesterday:

PHOENIX: US Airways Chief Executive Doug Parker was arrested on suspicion of drunken driving just hours after his airline's $9.8 billion (€7.53 billion) bid for Delta Air Lines was rejected last week, police in Scottsdale, Arizona, confirmed Friday.

Doug was pulled over after attending a party and claiming he only had three beers, though police reported “Parker had bloodshot and watery eyes, slurred speech and alcohol on his breath.” Then he refused the breathalyzer test.

Why should I consider his misfortune cause for celebration? You guessed it: another pissed off customer.

My sister and I were boarding a US Airways flight from Portland, ME, to La Guardia just before Thanksgiving. Bald, she had just finished a long course of chemotherapy, and I always look like I need chemotherapy. We grabbed the exit row seats (more leg room) since there were only a few passengers (open seating) and settled in. A US Airways pilot deadheading to New York and accompanied by a flight attendant instructed us to move, saying these were his seats. Yes, an employee bumped two paying customers, one an obvious cancer patient.

After the 1-1/2-hour flight, I was so steamed that I got his name and decided to write the company. It took five weeks and a second email to get an answer from a US Air customer relations person.

We would like to take the opportunity to apologize for the difficulties you've encountered. The experience you've described is certainly not characteristic of the superior standard of service we are striving to provide. The importance of professionalism and efficiency is continually stressed to our employees, as we realize the inconvenience any mishandling can create for our customers.

Your feedback is very important to us since it provides us with a measuring tool for customer satisfaction. We appreciate the time that you have taken to write. We will document your comments and forward your correspondence to the appropriate manager. This matter will be reviewed with the employee and handled internally.

We would welcome the opportunity to provide a more enjoyable flying experience on a future US Airways flight.

Such a patently weak and stupid response deserved another email, this time to Doug Parker.

I have to say that this canned, formalized, delayed response to me is totally inappropriate. The first paragraph is little more than a blurb for the company; the second sets out a process that may satisfy company procedure but provides no closure whatever for me; and the final paragraph is just plain silly. Why would I or my family ever want to fly US Airways again under these circumstances?

Again, I had no answer for six weeks—until yesterday’s news article.

Seth Godin’s blog is full of frequent angst over the crappy customer service that is so prevalent in this country. Why can’t the big guys unbend and admit a mistake? Are they all trying to be like George W. Bush? There are three “lousy reasons” for their inaction, Seth thinks: “ego, power and fear.”

Perhaps Doug Parker’s recent arrest—not to mention the rejection by Delta of his hostile takeover bid—will make him more humble. Don't hold your breath, however.

Final Thoughts on Biden v. Obama

It’s really not a question of “Joe, what were you thinking?”

We should be recognizing what Dr. Freud called a slip of the tongue, when your unconscious does the talking. When Hillary Clinton made her remark about “evil and bad men,” that too represented an unwilling disconnect that either makes people laugh or has them questioning the speaker’s intent.

So in Biden’s case, though the context of his remarks was clear enough, people immediately questioned how he, Mr. Liberal, could have let slip those loaded words. The uproar they caused indicates how sensitized people in this country have become to racial overtones. Many seem to have forgotten that most language and word choice is not generally a rational, conscious matter at all.

Lynette Clemetson was among those who wrote lengthy, defensive commentary pointing up how inappropriate, condescending and dumb the word “articulate” was in Biden’s usage. “There are not enough column inches on this page to parse interpretations of each of Mr. Biden’s chosen adjectives,” declared the outraged Ms. Clemetson and proceeded to cite successful black celebrities in support of her 1,200-word argument that white people just don’t get it when they use words this way.

Everyone, including Biden, understood what a gaffe it was. The interesting question is what caused him to use language this way. I’ll offer one idea as to why liberal whites refer to educated blacks as “articulate” and fail to realize how condescending that word is.

It’s because they are accustomed to perceiving so much of black America as, in their terms, inarticulate. Think about how consistently music, television, films, the news and sports media portray black people as either talking in a private hip-hop ghetto language of their own or talking street talk that is deliberately positioned as far from Standard English as you can get.

This is no apology for Joe Biden who as an old politico should certainly have had his linguistic filters turned on, particularly since he’s often a little too voluble. The language one “chooses” reflects one’s view of the world and one’s prejudices, certainly. Lenny Bruce used to say that no matter how smart that southern trial judge was, when he opened his mouth and started talking, hip northern whites always assumed he was just a shitkicker.

Judge not, lest ye be judged. Language is a window to the soul, and sometimes it’s hard for any of us to stand the gaffe.

Murdoch's Money

His very name strikes fear into media boardrooms around the globe. One imagines an aboriginal bushman emerging from the Australian mists to bestride the world. From a press empire in Sydney, Rupert Murdoch moved on to acquire a bunch of British and U.S. papers, then Fox News, the L.A. Dodgers, and so on (now 175 world newspapers, Twentieth Century Fox, MySpace, Harper Collins, etc.) all under the umbrella of News Corp., which name Orwell himself couldn’t have invented.

In an effort, maybe, to soften this image, the magnate has “displayed an unexpected burst of paternal generosity by sharing a taste of his wealth with his six children through a family handout of $600m (£305m) of shares in his global News Corporation empire.” So says the Guardian, though his spokespeople call it just “normal financial planning.” In fact, this handout is only a fraction of his $8 billion in News Corp. shares.

Predictably, it’s enough to set his four adult children (there are six in all, aged 48 to 3) squabbling. One commentator speculates that the gifts may be a kind of test to see what each of his adult heirs can produce—with an eye to finding the fittest to carry on the Murdoch legacy. That idea is just Darwinian enough to fit with the Murdoch image.

Iraq is Over

The killing will continue and likely intensify, but there’s every indication that we will soon be “outta here.” The president and his cohorts cannot hold out much longer against the tide of opinion and the course of events. They will concede because the costs (human, material and political) are becoming too great to be born. As in Vietnam, we will leave in helicopters, abandoning people we can no longer defend.

Today, at least 130 were killed and 373 injured in a truck bombing. The ante goes up.

Recently released portions of the National Intelligence Estimate summarize the difficulties looming:

A number of identifiable internal security and political triggering events, including sustained mass sectarian killings, assassination of major religious and political leaders, and a complete Sunni defection from the government have the potential to convulse severely Iraq’s security environment. Should these events take place, they could spark an abrupt increase in communal and insurgent violence and shift Iraq’s trajectory from gradual decline to rapid deterioration with grave humanitarian, political, and security consequences.

The Shiites will ride out the surge, retreating into the jungle, as it were, while the Sunnis continue their reign of terror. The Maliki government will fall the moment the U.S. leaves. Remember Diem and the succession of puppet regimes we backed forty-plus years ago? Of course you do.