This is not an exaggeration: between the years 2000 and 2008, I don’t believe I watched more than 24 hours of news – total – because I could not stand the fact that W. was running the show. I was sick of hearing from and about Bush during those dark, lonely years, and I am even more sick of hearing about him now. For the first few months of the Obama show, it was fun, really fun, to constantly remind the world that we were in clean-up mode thanks to the mess W. and the ranchers made. But it got old quickly, as all simple games do, and the constant referencing of what the current administration inherited from the one that preceded it began to make me wonder if it was amateur hour in Washington. Like many people I know, I voted for Obama because I believed, naively, I think, in his ability to steer the country in a somewhat new direction. And a new direction, in my opinion, does not include constant references to the Bush administration a year into Obama’ s first term (if he’s a one termer, which I believe he will be, that’s one quarter of his presidency).
Then a guy from Nigeria put some explosives in his underwear, got on a plane and took a seat right above one of the jet’s engines. The intelligence community, we are told, did not connect the dots. Of course they didn’t. Who does? At the City of Portland, the department that enforces sidewalk code violations does not connect the dots with the contractors licensed to repair them. Nor does it connect the dots with the department that files the reports on the violations, or the repairs. The company that backs up my hard drive, supposedly, does not connect the dots with my computer. The health insurance company does not connect the dots with the doctors practicing less than two miles from its office, the same doctors who are part of the insurance company’s provider network. My opinion is that nobody’s really saying anything worth listening to, so, in spite of our marvelously sophisticated communications technologies, nobody’s listening. Lots of disconnected dots out there, bobbing along in the sea of blather, I think. So I was surprised by the shock and outrage expressed over the fact that someone on some sort of official list could actually board a plane even though his father had told someone at an embassy that he was worried about his son’s politics. At the root of the failure to connect the dots, of course, was the legacy of the Bush administration. Enough, I thought.
And then came the commentary about the fact that Obama was on vacation the day of the incident, which just happened to be Christmas. In fact, after he was told about the incident, he played another round of golf – or two – before making a statement. That’s when I had to set my aversion to referencing Bush aside and, well, reference Bush: during the eight years he lived in the nation’s most opulent public housing project, he spent nearly 11 months (that’s more than one month per year) at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, vacationing. Although I’ve tried to forget his reign, I’m struggling to delete that factoid from my memory bank.
Then a guy from Nigeria put some explosives in his underwear, got on a plane and took a seat right above one of the jet’s engines. The intelligence community, we are told, did not connect the dots. Of course they didn’t. Who does? At the City of Portland, the department that enforces sidewalk code violations does not connect the dots with the contractors licensed to repair them. Nor does it connect the dots with the department that files the reports on the violations, or the repairs. The company that backs up my hard drive, supposedly, does not connect the dots with my computer. The health insurance company does not connect the dots with the doctors practicing less than two miles from its office, the same doctors who are part of the insurance company’s provider network. My opinion is that nobody’s really saying anything worth listening to, so, in spite of our marvelously sophisticated communications technologies, nobody’s listening. Lots of disconnected dots out there, bobbing along in the sea of blather, I think. So I was surprised by the shock and outrage expressed over the fact that someone on some sort of official list could actually board a plane even though his father had told someone at an embassy that he was worried about his son’s politics. At the root of the failure to connect the dots, of course, was the legacy of the Bush administration. Enough, I thought.
And then came the commentary about the fact that Obama was on vacation the day of the incident, which just happened to be Christmas. In fact, after he was told about the incident, he played another round of golf – or two – before making a statement. That’s when I had to set my aversion to referencing Bush aside and, well, reference Bush: during the eight years he lived in the nation’s most opulent public housing project, he spent nearly 11 months (that’s more than one month per year) at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, vacationing. Although I’ve tried to forget his reign, I’m struggling to delete that factoid from my memory bank.
