Victims and Victor

Rachel Maddow surprisingly doesn’t make the obvious point in the clip below, when she talks about the Carnival Triumph debacle—the poop cruise, as she calls it—and the eight years that we suffered through George W. Bush. The Triumph passengers had a horrific week-long vacation. We spent 8 years while the ship drifted aimlessly, and then fell recklessly into maelstroms. Afghanistan, the financial crisis, Guantanamo, the War in Iraq, Katrina, the erosion of the worldwide goodwill after September 11^th, the list goes on and on.

Or rather, the poop kept rising while the ship kept sinking.

It was a disaster at every turn, and I was fortunate, I now realize, that I was so exhausted by Wal-Mart and Franny that very little of it got in. Yes, I read the headlines, skimmed the articles, and then went out to the back of the building to make my morning call to Franny. Then it was eight hours of teaching, an hour or two of emails / writing / class preparation / brownnosing the Human Resources ladies. (Yes, I caved to pressure, I’m sorry to say, and used to force myself to spend 20 minutes chatting with people in the department. I had been told, you see, that some people felt I was aloof, that I wasn’t fully a part of the department. So chatting I did….)

So all the five presidents and all the first ladies (minus Nancy) got together down in Texas to dedicate the new George W. Bush Library. And of course they would; it’s a club, after all, that handful of ex-presidents, and there must be a tacit disagreement. Once you’re out of office, your job is to shut up. Do good works: solve global warming or AIDS in Africa or build houses for the poor—but shut up.

And no one is gonna deny—the job’s not easy. My problem with W is that for him, it was. He was arrogant and entitled and too stupid to know how stupid he was on the first day of his presidency, when he inherited a country largely on its feet, and W was just as arrogant / entitled / etc. on the last day of his presidency. The difference?

The country was lurching on the edge of financial collapse, the rest of the world despised us, global warming was no longer a theory but a fact, and the United States Constitution had been overridden.

And the worst thing? Through a combination of arrogance and stupidity, Bush never realized the damage he had done. In fact, he said recently that he was “comfortable” with the decisions he had made.

Yeah?

We’ll never see him brought to justice, and I suppose he had to build his damn library, and he could hardly not do that and not dedicate it, and so he invited the boys down to Texas and they sighed and crossed a day out of their lives and whooped it up down in Texas with W and Laura.

And yes, by tomorrow we will have forgotten about it. And if Rachel Maddow is wondering, I can tell her that yes, last week there was a day when four cruise ships sailed into the old city, and walking Calle del Cristo felt more like Des Moines than San Juan. If the Carnival Triumph ever happened, you wouldn’t have known it as you found it impossible to move any faster than the gawking, open-mouthed couple ahead of you permitted.

We forget, the rest of the world does not. Often, of course, because so much happens over-there done by you-know-whom. Take a look at this:

 PAKISTAN

Name | Age | Gender

Noor Aziz | 8 | male


Abdul Wasit | 17 | male


Noor Syed | 8 | male


Wajid Noor | 9 | male


Syed Wali Shah | 7 | male


Ayeesha | 3 | female


Qari Alamzeb | 14| male


Shoaib | 8 | male


Hayatullah KhaMohammad | 16 | male


Tariq Aziz | 16 | male


Sanaullah Jan | 17 | male


Maezol Khan | 8 | female


Nasir Khan | male


Naeem Khan | male


Naeemullah | male


Mohammad Tahir | 16 | male


Azizul Wahab | 15 | male


Fazal Wahab | 16 | male


Ziauddin | 16 | male


Mohammad Yunus | 16 | male


Fazal Hakim | 19 | male


Ilyas | 13 | male


Sohail | 7 | male


Asadullah | 9 | male


Khalilullah | 9 | male


Noor Mohammad | 8 | male


Khalid | 12 | male


Saifullah | 9 | male


Mashooq Jan | 15 | male


Nawab | 17 | male


Sultanat Khan | 16 | male


Ziaur Rahman | 13 | male


Noor Mohammad | 15 | male


Mohammad Yaas Khan | 16 | male


Qari Alamzeb | 14 | male


Ziaur Rahman | 17 | male


Abdullah | 18 | male


Ikramullah Zada | 17 | male


Inayatur Rehman | 16 | male


Shahbuddin | 15 | male


Yahya Khan | 16 |male


Rahatullah |17 | male


Mohammad Salim | 11 | male


Shahjehan | 15 | male


Gul Sher Khan | 15 | male


Bakht Muneer | 14 | male


Numair | 14 | male


Mashooq Khan | 16 | male


Ihsanullah | 16 | male


Luqman | 12 | male


Jannatullah | 13 | male


Ismail | 12 | male


Taseel Khan | 18 | male


Zaheeruddin | 16 | male


Qari Ishaq | 19 | male


Jamshed Khan | 14 | male


Alam Nabi | 11 | male


Qari Abdul Karim | 19 | male


Rahmatullah | 14 | male


Abdus Samad | 17 | male


Siraj | 16 | male


Saeedullah | 17 | male


Abdul Waris | 16 | male


Darvesh | 13 | male


Ameer Said | 15 | male


Shaukat | 14 | male


Inayatur Rahman | 17 | male


Salman | 12 | male


Fazal Wahab | 18 | male


Baacha Rahman | 13 | male


Wali-ur-Rahman | 17 | male


Iftikhar | 17 | male


Inayatullah | 15 | male


Mashooq Khan | 16 | male


Ihsanullah | 16 | male


Luqman | 12 | male


Jannatullah | 13 | male


Ismail | 12 | male


Abdul Waris | 16 | male


Darvesh | 13 | male


Ameer Said | 15 | male


Shaukat | 14 | male


Inayatur Rahman | 17 | male


Adnan | 16 | male


Najibullah | 13 | male


Naeemullah | 17 | male


Hizbullah | 10 | male


Kitab Gul | 12 | male


Wilayat Khan | 11 | male


Zabihullah | 16 | male


Shehzad Gul | 11 | male


Shabir | 15 | male


Qari Sharifullah | 17 | male


Shafiullah | 16 | male


Nimatullah | 14 | male


Shakirullah | 16 | male


Talha | 8 | male

Right—so what is it? It’s the list of kids who have been killed in drone attacks in Pakistan.

“No,” you say. “It can’t be. You trawled through the Internet and found a site to your liking, and now you’re ramming anti-America propaganda down our throats.”

http://www.policymic.com/articles/24164/a-list-of-children-killed-by-drone-strikes-in-pakistan-and-yemen

Well, it’s true—I haven’t checked out this site, which, by the way, adduces a Colombia Law School Human Rights Institute study that says that up to 98% of drone deaths are civilians.

But of course we do remember, on those rare occasions when the carnage takes place on our soil. We read the three thousand names every September 11^th.  Next April 15^th, there will be ceremonies, minutes of silence, bowed heads, tears and prayers.

I’m guilty of it myself. I had written about Tomas Young, the Iraq vet who wrote an angry last letter to George W. Bush, and then set himself the date of 20 April 2013 as the start date for his fast until his death.

20 April 2013—the day after two young men shut down an entire city plus several substantial suburbs / small towns. These “terrorists” killed five people and maimed over 150 victims.

Horrifying and completely indefensible.

But what would you say if you were the family of Luqman / 12 / male—to choose at random just one of the names on  the list above?

And sadly, there is a group of Americans who will remember—or rather, who are incapable of not remembering.

Guys like Tomas Young, whose damage is physical, if they’re lucky. Or guys who have the worst fate thrust on them. Guys with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, guys who startle awake at 2AM when a car backfires, guys who take their wives “hostage” when their kid forgets not to slam the screen door.

Not a Particular Triumph

Good news, readers—however bad your day is, it can’t be worse than what Gerry Cahill is enduring.

He’s the CEO of Carnival, and he spoke—as you can see below—to the press before going on board the ship that suffered a major fire, lost power, listed dangerously to one side, and became a fourteen-story un-flushable toilet.

Well, Cahill looks the part—male, white, greying hair, craggy looks. Viewing the video, I remembered my Wal-Mart days of bumping into guys like this: guys who could work fourteen hours a day for six days a week; guys who knew the numbers; guys who always were taking seminars on servant-leadership, leading by example, coaching by walking around.

Leaders, you see, are not born but developed, which is very fortunate because that means—guess what!—you can build a nice little industry around it. Along with motivational speakers, the leadership guys routinely charged into Wal-Mart—eager to activate our sleeping potential and make us all proactive change agents, empower us, fan our self-development, and deliver added value and unexpected benefits to our associates and customers.

I wrote that sentence pretty much as fast as I could type, since I spent seven years writing the equivalent. Sometimes I wrote in Spanish, sometimes in English—in either language it was gibberish. I can report, however, that English is much more capable of gibberish than Spanish, though that could reflect my lack of prowess in Spanish.

Tens of thousands of dollars were spent on the two twin gods; motivation and leadership. Every monthly meeting had some section of it devoted to the topics. Had it had any effect whatsoever, we would have had a building full of generals.

It was as much a part of the building as the grey carpet and the blue walls.

“I’m going to the leadership seminar, so I won’t be in class,” a student would say.

“Isn’t there a leadership seminar tomorrow?” I would counter.

“Yeah.”

“So did you talk to Human Resources to reschedule?”

“Uh, no….”

“Isn’t being responsible part of being a leader?”

It was useless, and in the end I gave up and simply observed. My students were good people, all doing things that the organization deemed necessary. Some of them were in charge of selling fifty or sixty million bucks a year. Some of them were in charge of deciding whether it was Crest or Colgate that would catch your eye on the shelves. Some of them simply spent their days figuring out how the business was doing financially—whether the millions were rolling in at the necessary rate.

They were not, most of them, leaders. Actually, they were utterly content to be led, to be told what to do, to do it—often grudgingly—get paid, and leave. That was the name of the game: try not to get fired before you win the lottery.

My mother and brother took a trip out west, years ago, to visit Eric. Along the way, they came upon a group of Indians who were struggling to set up a teepee. It looked like a bit of diversion in a very flat landscape, so they stopped to watch.

Well, only Franny watched. Johnny got right into the action, and was soon directing the Indians on how to set up their teepee.

Say what? A Manhattan lawyer directing a tribe of Sioux?

Interestingly, none of the Indians complained, or suggested that Johnny take his white ass off their land, or told him to take the teepee and shove it where the sun don’t shine. They all parted the best of friends.

So Cahill—getting back to the Good Ship Norovirus—is going to go apologize for the five days of hell that 2300 vacations turned into. Typical move, a classic example of modern-day leadership. He’s taking charge, he’s owning responsibility, he’s standing in the front line.

He’s a fool.

Look, giving those cruise passengers a chance to vent is not going to do them or him any good. People are going to be filming him with their cell phones; it’s going to be all over YouTube, he’s going to look stupid.

What should he have done?

Gotten the passengers off the boat however he could have done it. Whether it was getting an aircraft carrier or another cruise ship—apparently several approached to provide food—or talking to the Navy, he should have found a way to evacuate the vessel and speed for home. A cruise ship can move quite quickly, and even if all the additional guests were stuck on the top deck for twenty-four hours—well, wouldn’t it be better than five days?

Carnival considered the idea, and decided no. Here’s a quote from an Email written by a vice president of the company:

"Regarding why we didn't use another cruise ship, we checked on this and all of our ships are in service right now, meaning that there aren't enough cabins available to accommodate more than 3,100 guests who are currently on the Triumph. Additionally, a ship-to-ship transfer at sea would be considered too risky," he said. 

Hmmm—all of their ships are in service? So you’re going to let 3,100 “guests” slosh through sewage for five days, just not to inconvenience other “guests” on your other cruises?

Nor do I know how difficult a ship-to-ship transfer would be. I’m suspicious, grammatically speaking, of any sentence that has this shaky, waffling construction—“would be considered too risky.” Is it risky or not?

It was all about the bottom line, of course. But I think it was about something more. All of our talk about leadership and core values and corporate culture has fogged our minds, blinded our vision, turned us into worse yes-men than we ever were before. Nobody had the guts to tell Citibank or Bank of America or Merrill Lynch, “hey, these subprime loans are gonna backfire!”

No one told Cahill, “hey, we gotta do whatever to get these people off the boat!”