Something Democratic

Death from above

Like most residents of Washington, DC, yours truly heard about the Great Cessna Scare of '05 long after the fact. Two guys from Pennsylvania were apparently using an outdated map and drifted into restricted airspace. I'm sure SAM batteries were locked onto their little plane, but fortunately for them they were intercepted by fighter jets and forced to land outside the city, proving again that there but for the grace of God go the Darwin Awards. While red alerts were issued to Capitol Hill staffers and White House personnel (sending my pregnant landlord hustling out into the streets and the first lady to the White House basement), I gather that no one else in the District of Columbia had much of an idea what was happening until reading it in the papers.

I certainly didn't, though I was nowhere near the real action. At the time I was at the Ft. Reno tennis courts, taking advantage of unemployment to knock some balls around in the noontime sun. While it did seem peculiar that I could see F-16s flying circles over the city, much greater attention was directed on the alarming deterioration of my backhand. But let me come to my purpose. There was something democratic to come out of the whole situation. That something was general ignorance.

First some background: I've always been a great admirer of the Bob Dylan line "Even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked." This seems to have been updated on Wednesday as the POTUS "sometimes must have to ride his bicycle." As I was playing tennis, unaware that many thought the capital under attack, Bushy-Bush was out bike riding in Maryland, also unaware that fighters had been scrambled. No one thought he needed to know, so he continued rocking John Fogerty on his i-Pod until the end of the ride. For nearly an hour on that glorious late-spring day, I knew as much (if not a little more) about urgent matters of national security as the president. Some, however, perceived this to be a slight problem and it led to an amusingly contentious exchange between the press corps and Scott McClellan the next day: "Might there be something wrong with protocols that render the President unnecessary when the alarm is going off at his house?"