When it comes to politics, I am a tepidly interested amateur observer at best – and whenever I have to do an interview about politics on the morning show, I find myself on slippery and unfamiliar terrain. (True, I can name all of the U.S. Presidents in order and the exact years that each of them held the office – but that’s less a matter of genuine interest in politics and more of a random anomaly in the mind of someone dubbed by his own father as “a walking encyclopedia of useless information.”) But even someone such as I cannot quite avert my gaze from the car crash which is Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich’s political career. Car crash? It’s more like a plane crash in the midst of a train derailment. . . except that in this case one need look no further than Human Error for the cause.
Such matters aren’t typically the subject matter of my blog, which tend to focus on more significant topics like Car Trouble and Opera Videos, but I wanted to write a word of two about what it was like to follow this story as it first broke over the Associated Press wire Tuesday morning. The Illinois governor was arrested at his home around 6:15 a.m.- but nothing came over the press wire, as far as I can tell, until a little after 8 a.m. with this brief item in the State News file: U.S. Attorney’s Office: Governor Rod Blagojevich, chief of staff, arrested. That was it. No *URGENT* or *BULLETIN* notification at the top of it but just those few words, presented as though they were no more significant than the latest soybean prices. I could hardly believe my eyes – and then I started to wonder if it was some sort of error. Maybe it was a story about somebody speculating or predicting that the governor and his chief of staff might soon be arrested- and the story maybe got garbled up and truncated. Or I wondered if maybe the comma after the governor’s name was there by mistake and it was “just” his chief of staff who had been arrested.
The old fashioned AP wire – the teletype machine that you would hear chugging along in the background of the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite – had a helpful feature for big news stories- a bell would ring to alert the radio operator that something big was about to cross the wire, and five bells (the most I ever heard with my own ears) would signify something like the eruption of Mt. Saint Helen’s. . . and the assassination of a president or the country going to war would be a seven-bell story. But the new computer-based system has no such bells and whistles (to speak both literally and figuratively) and you just have to keep watching and hope that nothing important slips past you.
So anyway, I sat there at 8:40 looking at this brief news item and wondered if it could possibly be true. Not that I was skeptical because of any admiration for the Illinois governor; there was already a strong stench emerging from his administration and anything was possible. (To paraphrase my friend Marion Judge, if crooks were planes, he’d be a jet.) But arrested? I sat in front of the computer screen, waiting for clarification. And I waited and waited and waited for an eternity, which was actually only about twelve minutes. But in the world of radio, that kind of time feels like forever. Then finally a story crossed the wire which spelled out the arrest in all of its awfulness – by which time we were nearing the end of the morning show and I could let the interview end before turning on the mic and letting our listeners know about the latest monster to emerge from the swamp slime of Illinois politics.
I am struck by the parallels between Governor Rod Blag. and a guy named Lou Pearlman whose big claim to fame is in bringing Backstreet Boys and *NSync to the public – but whose career went down in flames when he couldn’t manage to tap dance his corpulent frame out of the monumental mess he created from a long series of fraudulent enterprises which ended up costing innocent investors over 400 million dollars in unrecoverable losses. (He’s now in jail.) I finished reading this book on the treadmill yesterday, and by the end I had the speed ratcheted up to 5 miles an hour (the fastest I’ve ever gone) and I’m pretty sure it’s because I was getting SO angry and frustrated that this monster hurt so many people whose only crime was in being a bit too naive and trusting. . . and the only way to let go of that frustration was in picking up the pace. We are all guilty of greed to some extent – but it’s people like this whose greed drives them to the financial equivalent of assault and battery on the well-being of others that really make me sick. And the good governor is no better and maybe even worse – not because he reached into the pockets of innocent people to grab their hard-earned assets for himself, but because he placed his own personal gain above the interests and concerns of the citizens who elected him to office – and did so in such brazen fashion, and so seemingly oblivious to the possibility that he might be caught in the act. Either he’s evil . . . or an idiot.
Or maybe an evil idiot.
above: the front page of today’s Chicago Tribune. The photo at the top is of the governor leaving his home and heading into work on Wednesday, the day after he was arrested. By the way, Marshall and I were in Chicago Tuesday night to see “Porgy and Bess” and the Lyric, and this marks yet another occasion in which we were in downtown Chicago as something momentous was happening. (The last opera I saw there, The Pearl Fishers, was on election night.)