Commentary
New essays and articles by Susan Faludi.
The Heroics of Futility
September 24, 2007
When two firefighters died on August 18 in a fire at the Deutsche Bank building by Ground Zero and, a few days later, two more were badly injured when a forklift plummeted 200 feet at the same building, America was once again treated to the spectacle of heroic effect ending in horrific death, attributable to half-ass mishap. Unfortunately, this sort of travesty has become a hallmark feature of American public life.
We've rarely been treated to an era of pumped-up heroics like the one we're in right now, by which I refer not to the courageous men and women on the ground but the leaders who inflate themselves at their expense. These include a commander- in-chief doing a victory jig in a just-out-of-the-box flight suit, and a mayor running for president on the resume that "I was at Ground Zero as often, if not more, than most of the workers" and "so in that sense, I'm one of them." In both instances, while the man in charge assumes the mantle of the heroes to advance his political fortunes, the actual heroes are paying with their lives because of those leaders' neglect and ineptitude.
Lower Manhattan development officials ignored strongly-worded written warnings from the city's own investigators not to use the demolition contractor at Deutsche Bank, a shell company with no experience demolishing high rises. Once the work was underway, safety inspectors issued a raft of citations against the company (several of which involved fire hazards, like the accumulation of a "large amount of combustible material/debris" and illegal "burning operations"), but senior city officials never bothered to alert the fire department. The firefighters entering the building found stairwells sealed by plywood. The hoses they lugged to the upper floors ran dry because the standpipe's valve was shut, its pipes broken, and one section was entirely missing (and later found lying in the building's basement). FDNY officials never carried out mandatory twice-a-month inspections of the standpipe (which had last been checked in 1996), hadn't inspected the building since 2006 (even after receiving reports that the sprinkler system wasn't working and a 22-foot metal pipe plunged from the 35th floor through the roof of the neighboring firehouse), and had no plan for fighting a fire at the site.
The FDNY commissioner's demotion Monday of three fire department executives for violating procedure was a welcome event, but Americans will be better served when it's recognized that the Deutsche Bank fiasco was more than a bureaucratic glitch; it's an expression of the culture of our age.
The lack of responsible leadership was no anomaly. It reflected precisely the mismanagement that contributed to the deaths of so many firefighters on 9/11: the failure to prepare for a terrorist attack at the World Trade Center (despite the 1993 bombing there); the establishment of the emergency command center set up in the most vulnerable spot; the inability to communicate with the police department (denying firefighters a warning from a police helicopter pilot to get out of the North Tower more than 20 minutes before it fell); and, most notoriously, the inadequacy of those 15-year-old radios that prevented the firefighters from hearing their "mayday" orders. In the bureaucratic words of a 2005 National Institute of Standards and Technology study of the World Trade Center disaster, "A preponderance of the evidence indicates that emergency responder lives were likely lost at the WTC resulting from the lack of timely information-sharing and inadequate communications capabilities." Or as FDNY Lt. Robert Bohack put it more vividly, in one of the hundreds of oral accounts from firefighters submitted to the department (and repressed for more than three years until forcibly made public by court order): "There was no command structure. There was nothing. Nobody can get on the radio. The fucking radio was useless."
The recent tragedy at the Deutsche Bank building, like the disaster on 9/11 that preceded it, reflects a national culture of exploiting heroes while systematically undercutting their ability to make good on that title. In a speech before the Veterans of Foreign Wars that became controversial for its invocation of Vietnam, a speech delivered four days after the deaths of the two firefighters at Deutsche Bank and on the same day as 14 soldiers died in a helicopter crash in Iraq, President Bush exalted the heroics of the U.S. military—"the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known"—and, by extension, exalted himself: "As long as I'm commander-in-chief we will fight to win. I'm confident that we will prevail." He spoke these words to a military that his administration has consistently shortchanged with everything from nonexistent post-invasion planning (planning for which the military's experienced counsel was assiduously excluded where it contradicted neoconservative fantasies) to insufficient body armor to grossly inadequate medical care, and continuing into a season where the needs of the White House to run out the clock and hand defeat off to a successor have taken precedence over the needs of exhausted and demoralized American troops. "The thing that really upsets me," Paul Rieckhoff, an Iraq war platoon leader and executive director of the non-partisan Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America told MSNBC's Hardball after Bush's speech, "is the fact that he spoke to the largest gathering of veterans in America and didn't talk about veterans' issues." Instead, he basked in their reflected glory, continuing a "problematic trend," Rieckhoff noted, in which troops are treated like "political props" and "chew toys."
The dereliction of American leadership has put American heroism in a strange box. Certainly the courage of individuals who've dedicated their lives to protecting our cities from conflagration and our country from threat is unimpeachable. So, why do we have so few stories from the World Trade Center, Pentagon or, for that matter, our long engagement in Iraq that stand as totemic expressions of American valor at work? In the case of the World Trade Center, the collapse was so quick it left little chance of heroic narrative: most of those inside either walked out, unaided, or were instantly obliterated. But the larger problem is the context in which demonstrations of national heroism are asked to play out. No matter how courageous the individual, it's hard to be a hero on a fool's errand, owing one's laurels of mortality to the stupidity of leaving a crucial standpipe uninspected or of a botched and unnecessary invasion. The handmaiden of heroism is effectiveness. Heroism wants not just to be courageous, but to be courageous in useful, not futile, service. The firefighters who survived the World Trade Center know this best of all. "We were just as much victims as everybody that was in the building," firefighter Derek Brogan said in his oral account to the fire department. "We didn't have a chance to do anything." Or as firefighter James Murphy observed in his account: "Basically the only difference between us and the victims is we had flashlights."
Our leaders have tried to get around this problem by staging highly embellished heroic dramas—the rescue mission of Jessica Lynch, for instance—or simply denying the facts, like former mayor Rudy Giuliani's claim before the 9/11 Commission that firefighters actually heard the "mayday" radio orders and "chose" to stay inside the North Tower to help people. "Rather than giving us a story of men, uniformed men fleeing while civilians were left behind, which would have been devastating to the morale of this country; rather than an Andrea Doria, if you might remember that," he said, "we got a story of heroism and we got a story of pride and we got a story of support that helped get us through."
America won't have that uplifting story until heroism on the ground is matched by competence, not chest-thumping, from above. Perhaps if our leaders were a little less concerned with claiming the hero's honor as their own, perhaps if they could get down to the business of humbly providing pragmatic management in support of courage in the field, America could once again find itself with heroes it could laud for their effective good works, as well as their valiant deaths.
We've rarely been treated to an era of pumped-up heroics like the one we're in right now, by which I refer not to the courageous men and women on the ground but the leaders who inflate themselves at their expense. These include a commander- in-chief doing a victory jig in a just-out-of-the-box flight suit, and a mayor running for president on the resume that "I was at Ground Zero as often, if not more, than most of the workers" and "so in that sense, I'm one of them." In both instances, while the man in charge assumes the mantle of the heroes to advance his political fortunes, the actual heroes are paying with their lives because of those leaders' neglect and ineptitude.
Lower Manhattan development officials ignored strongly-worded written warnings from the city's own investigators not to use the demolition contractor at Deutsche Bank, a shell company with no experience demolishing high rises. Once the work was underway, safety inspectors issued a raft of citations against the company (several of which involved fire hazards, like the accumulation of a "large amount of combustible material/debris" and illegal "burning operations"), but senior city officials never bothered to alert the fire department. The firefighters entering the building found stairwells sealed by plywood. The hoses they lugged to the upper floors ran dry because the standpipe's valve was shut, its pipes broken, and one section was entirely missing (and later found lying in the building's basement). FDNY officials never carried out mandatory twice-a-month inspections of the standpipe (which had last been checked in 1996), hadn't inspected the building since 2006 (even after receiving reports that the sprinkler system wasn't working and a 22-foot metal pipe plunged from the 35th floor through the roof of the neighboring firehouse), and had no plan for fighting a fire at the site.
The FDNY commissioner's demotion Monday of three fire department executives for violating procedure was a welcome event, but Americans will be better served when it's recognized that the Deutsche Bank fiasco was more than a bureaucratic glitch; it's an expression of the culture of our age.
The lack of responsible leadership was no anomaly. It reflected precisely the mismanagement that contributed to the deaths of so many firefighters on 9/11: the failure to prepare for a terrorist attack at the World Trade Center (despite the 1993 bombing there); the establishment of the emergency command center set up in the most vulnerable spot; the inability to communicate with the police department (denying firefighters a warning from a police helicopter pilot to get out of the North Tower more than 20 minutes before it fell); and, most notoriously, the inadequacy of those 15-year-old radios that prevented the firefighters from hearing their "mayday" orders. In the bureaucratic words of a 2005 National Institute of Standards and Technology study of the World Trade Center disaster, "A preponderance of the evidence indicates that emergency responder lives were likely lost at the WTC resulting from the lack of timely information-sharing and inadequate communications capabilities." Or as FDNY Lt. Robert Bohack put it more vividly, in one of the hundreds of oral accounts from firefighters submitted to the department (and repressed for more than three years until forcibly made public by court order): "There was no command structure. There was nothing. Nobody can get on the radio. The fucking radio was useless."
The recent tragedy at the Deutsche Bank building, like the disaster on 9/11 that preceded it, reflects a national culture of exploiting heroes while systematically undercutting their ability to make good on that title. In a speech before the Veterans of Foreign Wars that became controversial for its invocation of Vietnam, a speech delivered four days after the deaths of the two firefighters at Deutsche Bank and on the same day as 14 soldiers died in a helicopter crash in Iraq, President Bush exalted the heroics of the U.S. military—"the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known"—and, by extension, exalted himself: "As long as I'm commander-in-chief we will fight to win. I'm confident that we will prevail." He spoke these words to a military that his administration has consistently shortchanged with everything from nonexistent post-invasion planning (planning for which the military's experienced counsel was assiduously excluded where it contradicted neoconservative fantasies) to insufficient body armor to grossly inadequate medical care, and continuing into a season where the needs of the White House to run out the clock and hand defeat off to a successor have taken precedence over the needs of exhausted and demoralized American troops. "The thing that really upsets me," Paul Rieckhoff, an Iraq war platoon leader and executive director of the non-partisan Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America told MSNBC's Hardball after Bush's speech, "is the fact that he spoke to the largest gathering of veterans in America and didn't talk about veterans' issues." Instead, he basked in their reflected glory, continuing a "problematic trend," Rieckhoff noted, in which troops are treated like "political props" and "chew toys."
The dereliction of American leadership has put American heroism in a strange box. Certainly the courage of individuals who've dedicated their lives to protecting our cities from conflagration and our country from threat is unimpeachable. So, why do we have so few stories from the World Trade Center, Pentagon or, for that matter, our long engagement in Iraq that stand as totemic expressions of American valor at work? In the case of the World Trade Center, the collapse was so quick it left little chance of heroic narrative: most of those inside either walked out, unaided, or were instantly obliterated. But the larger problem is the context in which demonstrations of national heroism are asked to play out. No matter how courageous the individual, it's hard to be a hero on a fool's errand, owing one's laurels of mortality to the stupidity of leaving a crucial standpipe uninspected or of a botched and unnecessary invasion. The handmaiden of heroism is effectiveness. Heroism wants not just to be courageous, but to be courageous in useful, not futile, service. The firefighters who survived the World Trade Center know this best of all. "We were just as much victims as everybody that was in the building," firefighter Derek Brogan said in his oral account to the fire department. "We didn't have a chance to do anything." Or as firefighter James Murphy observed in his account: "Basically the only difference between us and the victims is we had flashlights."
Our leaders have tried to get around this problem by staging highly embellished heroic dramas—the rescue mission of Jessica Lynch, for instance—or simply denying the facts, like former mayor Rudy Giuliani's claim before the 9/11 Commission that firefighters actually heard the "mayday" radio orders and "chose" to stay inside the North Tower to help people. "Rather than giving us a story of men, uniformed men fleeing while civilians were left behind, which would have been devastating to the morale of this country; rather than an Andrea Doria, if you might remember that," he said, "we got a story of heroism and we got a story of pride and we got a story of support that helped get us through."
America won't have that uplifting story until heroism on the ground is matched by competence, not chest-thumping, from above. Perhaps if our leaders were a little less concerned with claiming the hero's honor as their own, perhaps if they could get down to the business of humbly providing pragmatic management in support of courage in the field, America could once again find itself with heroes it could laud for their effective good works, as well as their valiant deaths.
