A Few Choice Words

Customer Justice, Part 3

The saga of dis-service continues. I flew from Portland to New York on business again on US Airways last week. Given my reported disgust with the airline, why, you may ask, would one subject oneself to further indignities? Well, their schedule is a lot better than the competition and I figured that the probabilities of further screwups would be minimal, considering the law of averages. Wrong thinking on both counts.

We boarded, taxied out to the tarmac where the captain informed us that LaGuardia had suddenly called a flight stop and we would have to wait thirty minutes to depart. Soon our flight attendant (FA) told the group that if anyone needed to use the bathroom, she wanted to know now so we could return to the gate since the one toilet on the plane was not working.

This was great news to yrs trly who has a fat prostate, like lots of old guys, meaning he can’t go all that long between visits to the bathroom. (These trials were graphically described in a previous posting.) So it was a question of whether to gamble on getting to NY before unbearable pain and embarrassing leakage set in or turn back to the gate to inconvenience fifteen other people (none of whom raised their hands as to needing relief) and possibly lose our place in line to take off.

What a stupid goddamn dilemma. Given the alternatives, I was about to go for the gate when the FA reported that we were given the green light for departure. An hour or so later, I rapidly “deplaned,” as they used to say, and immediately “restroomed.”

How in the world can this abysmal airline put a plane in the sky without a functioning bathroom—the only bathroom? I’m still too pissed off even to ask Doug Parker, who wouldn’t respond anyway.

The day I got back to Portland an AP story appeared in our local paper to the effect that

six Muslim scholars who were kicked off a US Airways flight last fall have filed a lawsuit claiming the airline discriminated against them and violated their civil rights. . . . The imams were taken off a plane in Minneapolis, handcuffed and questioned. They had prayed on their prayer rugs in the airport, and after they boarded, a passenger passed a note to a flight attendant. . . .

US Airways Group Inc. released a statement saying its employees “acted appropriately.”

The scholars are suing for punitive and compensatory damages. Wonder if I can get a little class-action action going for our toilet-deprived group?

No Plan B, No Consequences

To understand how futile the Iraq situation is, look at today’s Washington Post which considers a wide range of backup options for not only Plan B (if the surge doesn’t work) but the war’s outcome, given a number of contingencies: “The current Plan A is arguably already Plan D or beyond,” say authors DeYoung and Ricks.

The conclusions are inescapable:

• For the White House, there is no Plan B, as Secretary Rice has virtually acknowledged. “Plan B,” General Pace was reported to say, is “to make Plan A work.”
• Each possible option requires committing to a specific but problematic hypothetical presumption which may well not be borne out.
• That makes the situation ripe for doing nothing.

Everything this White House attempts, in so far as it attempts anything, gets fouled up totally in the execution.

The latest scandal is Walter Reed and the widening story of neglect and substandard military care across the country. We send our soldiers into battle with substandard vehicles, equipment and sometimes training, then reward them with filthy conditions, “bureaucratic disarray” and neglect when they return home wounded and disabled. Read this piece; the stories are quite incredible.

Why is there never a Plan B? Never a plan for contingencies? Never a sense that likely consequences follow from a particular course of action (or inaction)? Whence came the notion that policy could be considered without aftermath, effect without cause?

Two years ago I started to write a book about Bush called No Consequences. The thesis: because of his privileged upbringing and the ambivalent relationship with his father, George W. never had to deal with the real consequences of his actions. Others picked up the pieces or protected him from the trapdoors that lay in wait.

Some of that attitude is responsible for his administration’s strategic dysfunction—its total failure to look down the road (much less comprehend history) or do any kind of accurate environmental assessment of present conditions. I think the no-consequences attitude permits him to assume he can twist reality to serve his own purposes—and not even be aware that he’s doing it.

One result is an ultimate unconcern for those who are instruments of his policy—our magnificent soldiers, the Iraqis whose country we have destroyed, the Katrina victims.

It’s far easier for him to walk the ground of belief and ideology. At the February 14 press conference, the president once again asserted, “What's different about this conflict than some others is that if we fail there, the enemy will follow us here. I firmly believe that.”

Once again, that elusive enemy threatens. Has Al Qaeda finally taken over in Iraq? Will we be watching Sunnis and Shiites shoot it out in the streets of New York? And who will defend us? Our shattered army and National Guard? Where is Plan B?