Still in the Dark
New York Times columnist Bob Herbert was reading a report called “Emergency Responders: Drastically Underfunded, Dangerously Unprepared” when the lights went out last week, and now he’s writing that Americans simply refuse to pay attention to warnings. There are always plenty of warnings, but should we let them alarm us? We’ve read that our harbors can be easily penetrated, that the safety of air travel is an illusion. The New Republic reported that the secretary of energy asked for almost $380 million to protect nuclear-weapons storage sites and the White House gave him $26.4 million. The Chicago Tribune editorial page just complained that Republicans in Congress are dithering over a plan to install missile protection systems in passenger airplanes.
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Nobody woke up worrying about Arab terrorists on 9/11, but everyone knew what to think when the unthinkable happened. On August 14 everyone immediately needed to know that it hadn’t happened again. I turned on the TV last Thursday afternoon, and assurances that terrorists weren’t responsible came at me so fast I understood I shouldn’t blame them almost before I understood what I shouldn’t blame them for. By the time I began to write this column five days later, the U.S. had blamed Canada, Canada had blamed the U.S., and everybody had blamed Cleveland, even though nobody could be sure yet what had caused the blackout. And everyone was still stressing that terrorists weren’t responsible.
Ted Koppel impressed me when he got a police official in Sudbury, Ontario, on the phone and asked about some miners stranded as much as 4,000 feet belowground. But the miners turned out to be in no danger, leaving Koppel with a look of troubled concern and nothing much to be troubled about. Meanwhile Ottawa, the nation’s capital, went dark too–suggesting a line of inquiry that might have been more edifying than a 13th look at pedestrians streaming over the Brooklyn Bridge.
But the Web site, www.scoresdaily.com, wasn’t enough to satisfy Alexander, who came to the old-fashioned conclusion that “people like something they can touch, take on the train, read in the bathroom.” So he resurrected the Chicago Sports Review, which had made a brief appearance last year under a different owner, and he’s now published six issues. “We want to spend less time worrying about if the Cubs won yesterday and more exploring the bigger-picture issues,” he says. “You lose something when you obsess about what’s happening from Monday to Tuesday.”
It’ll be interesting to see what kind of case they come up with. Admiring Soldier Field won’t be easy. I’ve worked on the problem myself, making some headway without solving it. Approaching Soldier Field from the south, I’ve groped for language adequate to the sight. There the thing stands, like nothing else ever built, and words fail me as they failed the bygone generation that gaped at the Daley Plaza Picasso.
Markunas, sticking to basics, quotes a fan who says, “I like the fact that I will be able to pee in a toilet and the fact that I won’t have to miss an entire quarter to get a beer.”
