Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Pilot Error

A few months ago, we were all thrilled by the incredible airmanship of Captain “Sully” Sullenberger, who put an Airbus down on the frigid Hudson River so skillfully, so professionally, that not a single life was lost.

Compare that heroic feat with the emerging story of a commuter jet that crashed in February in Buffalo. The jet was apparently being flown by two pilots who had never experienced severe icing in flight. Now, you might think the chances of severe icing in Buffalo are pretty good, especially in February, and you might think that only an ice-savvy pilot would be assigned that route. I remember flying into the old Hong Kong airport, the one where a normal glide path was impossible because of an inconveniently placed mountain, so you had to bank sharply to make your final approach. A 747 pilot landing at that airport had to be not only 747-qualified, but Kai-Tak qualified. The problem with Buffalo is not its airport, but its weather. A pilot who has landed 50 or 60 times in severe icing will not be spooked. He or she will not try to fight a stall by raising the nose, as the pilot of the commuter jet allegedly did, sealing the fate of 49 people on the aircraft.

I thought of that tragedy while listening to analysts debating the merits of President Obama’s plan to fight a stalled economy. The President has decided to raise taxes directly on the high earners and indirectly (through “cap and trade” energy costs) on everyone else. He also wants to implement universal health insurance, rescue the banks and the automobile industry (and any other domestic industry with a large, unionized work force), and ramp up the war in Afghanistan.

I don’t think he can pull it off, any more than a pilot can correct a stall by pulling up on the nose. He has to lower the nose to increase airspeed, just as President Obama has to lower taxes to increase consumer spending. Because the deficit is huge, that will mean deferring the health plan. (That’s not a bad idea anyway. Adding 50 million people to the insurance rolls sounds like a noble idea until you try to figure out where we’re going to get all those extra doctors, nurses, hospital beds, etc.)

I have admired the President’s oratory, his political skills, and his natural leadership ability. Most of all, I liked his boast that he would subordinate ideology to “what works.” But attacks on Chrysler bondholders, executive salaries, and corporate jets are all born of ideology, not pragmatism. Alas, he is sounding more like a politician and less like a pilot every day. But now we are in a terrible ice storm, and his other gifts aren’t much help. Experience does count. The worst of it is, we are all passengers in the plane Captain Obama is flying.

Sunday, May 03, 2009

The Day That Changed History

Few days can be said to have changed history. Most of the really important shifts have come over a period of years and decades or even centuries. But every so often, there comes along one solitary day that, in retrospect, is a total game-changer. Such a day was September 11, 2001.

Think of it: If Mohammed Atta and his friends hadn’t embarked on their mission of death that morning, there would have been no invasion of Iraq, no Abu Ghraib, no Guantanamo. The President of the United States, who had been solidly reelected less than a year before, would not have become so despised that his party’s ouster in 2008 was all but guaranteed. Secret wiretaps, waterboarding, Blackwater, the Mission Accomplished banner – none of it would have happened.

It is true that the neo-cons in government – Wolfowitz, Feith, Perle – were looking for any excuse to defang Iraq, a potential threat to Israel, but without the attack on the World Trade Center they would have lacked the casus belli. Even with Bush and Cheney rattling sabers, there were enough Congressional skeptics to hold them off. And Secretary of State Colin Powell, a grown-up among children, would certainly have been a voice for reason.

It is hard to imagine what the United States would be like today had not 9-11 happened. The Republicans would probably have held Congress, because the polls show that the nation leans to the right. Would the stock market have crashed? Probably, for that’s what stock markets do from time to time. House prices would have tumbled, because too many people were living beyond their means. The ensuing recession would have been painful, but without the trillion-dollar war tab we might have handled it. President Bush, without the poisonous publicity from Iraq, might have held the support of the American people.

Today we would probably have in the White House a President Giuliani, or a President Huckabee, or even a President McCain. Barack Obama would be known as an interesting senator and a politician with a future. Instead, he rode the tide of public’s revulsion that all stemmed from the event of September 11, 2001.

FDR called December 7, 1941 “a day that will live in infamy.” And so it was, because it turned a European war into the world war that decisively altered history. The assassinations of Julius Caesar (15 March 44), Abraham Lincoln (April 15, 1865), John F. Kennedy (November 23, 1963) are remembered because the men involved were icons, not because their deaths changed history.

One wonders whether Osama Bin Laden appreciated what he was unleashing on that unforgettable morning. To him, the United States was the Evil Empire. Today, if he is still alive, he must know that the Empire has been roundly discredited. Capitalism is in tatters. The nation’s biggest banks and its biggest industries are now wards of the State. Most depressingly, our military adventures in the wake of 9-11 have made things worse, not better, with the Middle East still in turmoil, nuclear Pakistan out of control, and no end in sight.

Now we are all caught up in the whirlwind, like scraps of debris soaring aimlessly in the sky after a tornado has blown through. People are worried, not just because they have lost their houses or their jobs, but because they fear the country has lost its way. They feel that Barack Obama is a good man, but they know he’s a rookie. They hope he’s a messiah, but it’s possible he’s just another scrap of debris, caught in the vortex of 9-11.