Little did I know that the continuing saga of Dr. Ivanna Figge-Newton’s sojourn in America would continue to involve Yours Truly, Tom Collins, Washington policy consultant, but choke me to death with hot spotted dick if it didn’t. Yesterday morning, around ten, my private secretary put me through to what must surely have been the most disconcerted Limey bird since Twiggy realized one can’t be a clothes hanger all one’s life:
Ivanna: Tom! Is that you?
Tom: Ivanna?
Ivanna: Yes, yes, it’s me, Tom! I’m stuck in this absolutely dreadful place called Chicago!
Tom: Chicago? Ivanna, for the love of God Almighty, what are you doing in Chicago?
Ivanna: Interviewing with the University of Chicago Department of Physics for a position in sub-atomic particle research. And prospecting for Old Figgy Duff, too – which involved additional interviews for myself at the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics. Bit a of a stretch, actually, but I got some leads for him to use later, should it come to that. Honestly, Tom, I had no idea how uncouth, ignorant and… and…
Tom: Barbaric?
Ivanna: Yes, yes, thank you – how barbaric people of Northern European ancestry could be – until, that is, I visited this Chicago of yours.
Tom: If you think the people of Northern European ancestry in Chicago are barbaric, just wait until you visit Dixie.
Ivanna: Dixie? Who’s she?
Tom: “Dixie” is the American word for that group of states which seceded from the Union in 1861 – South Carolina, Alabama, Virginia, Florida, Texas, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee, Louisiana, Georgia and Arkansas. From that, today, I would exclude Florida south of the Everglades, which is actually part of the Caribbean now. Otherwise, Dixie then is Dixie now.
Ivanna: And the inhabitants of this “Dixie” region are more repulsive and ill-mannered than the people in Chicago?
Tom: Certainly the Northern European types – they’re mostly descended from Scots, the Irish and various Yorkies, Welshmen, Cornish and East Enders, you know. All your cousins, one way or another.
Ivanna: But wasn’t that Civil War of yours a long time ago?
Tom: Funny you should mention that – today is the one hundred and forty third anniversary of the Confederate commanding general Lee’s surrender to the Union commanding general Grant at Appomattox courthouse in Virginia.
Ivanna: “Appomattox?” What kind of word is that?
Tom: Algonquin.
Ivanna: Algonquin?
Tom: Algonquin Indian. They lived around here before the English arrived.
Ivanna: So what does it mean?
Tom: Appomattox?
Ivanna: Yes.
Tom: “Place where the white man defecates in our drinking water.”
Ivanna: Oh, I see. But haven’t the residents of your Dixie gotten over this Civil War of yours? Really, I should think they would have by now – look at us and the Germans, for example. It hardly took one hundred forty three years for us to get over Hitler, now did it?
Tom: There you go again, Ivanna, assuming that America is a civilized country. That could very well be your undoing…
Ivanna: “Undoing?” And just what do you mean by that, pray tell?
Tom: “Undoing,” as in robbed, raped, murdered, thrown in the river and eaten by alligators.
Ivanna: Alligators?
Tom: That’s what they call the “Mobile Welcome Wagon.”
Ivanna: Oh, dear, well then – I’m scratching that NASA facility in Huntsville, Alabama off my itinerary right now; and that Research Triangle Park place in North Carolina, too.
Tom: Well, those are enclaves established by our federal government and the corporate interests from the North that control it, so it wouldn’t necessarily be unsafe to visit them, as long as you don’t venture outside a ten mile radius.
Ivanna: Ten miles? Sixteen kilometers? Is that all?
Tom: Well, I don’t know if you realized it when you were here in Washington, but if you drive twenty miles away in any direction, you’re in the rural South and the natives remember Pickett’s Charge like it was yesterday.
Ivanna: Whose charge?
Tom: I suppose you remember Wellington’s Redcoat Squares at the Battle of Waterloo?
Ivanna: Of course – every British school child knows that story.
Tom: Just as every red neck child in Dixie knows about Pickett’s Charge at the Battle of Gettysburg, too.
Ivanna: Wait a minute – if I drive twenty miles north of Washington, I’m in rural Maryland, aren’t I?
Tom: Sure.
Ivanna: And Maryland wasn’t in your list of states that left the Union to join the Dixies for your Civil War, was it?
Tom: No.
Ivanna: So Maryland isn’t part of this Dixie thing.
Tom: I wouldn’t go so far as to say that. Everything but the western part of the state, which, like West Virginia, sympathized with the North, and the area around Washington, which was essentially Union-occupied territory, was on the Confederate side. The guy who shot Lincoln was from Baltimore, you know.
Ivanna: But… but the French don’t still hate us for defeating Napoleon…
Tom: France is a civilized country.
Ivanna: And the United States of America isn’t?
Tom: No.
Ivanna: What?
Tom: The USA went from savagery to decadence with no period of civilization in between.
Ivanna: Savagery… to decadence… with… no… period of… civilization in between?
Tom: Precisely.
Ivanna: Thanks, Tom. I think I understand Chicago now.
Tom: You’re welcome. But have you been to New York City yet?
Ivanna: In point of fact, that’s where I’m trying to go. I had an appointment there today, actually, at the Columbia University Physics Department. I called and they were gracious enough to re-schedule me for next week. Why do you ask?
Tom: Because, if you think the people in Chicago are rude, unfriendly and gratuitously nasty, then the people in New York City are going to give you a heart attack.
Ivanna: I’m a woman, Tom – women don’t get heart attacks.
Tom: They do in New York City.
Ivanna: Oh, my goodness, is that all you have here in America, then, northern cities full of ill-mannered oafs and southern towns full of inbred cretins who feed strangers to alligators?
Tom: Why, no, of course not. Out west of the Mississippi, we have cities full of Mormons and towns full of cowboys, none of whom cotton to outsiders, neither, ma’am.
Ivanna: You know, Tom, if scientific funding weren’t such a God-awful mess in England at the moment, I’d be on the very first aeroplane out of here – if I could get on one, that is. Can you explain to me, Tom, why you Americans suddenly decided to inspect all your commercial aircraft simultaneously?
Tom: Ah, ah, Doctor – you and I both know that “simultaneity” is nothing more than an illusion created by the enormous speed that light travels, relative to the speeds at which all other things travel.
Ivanna: What am I supposed to say, “why are you Americans suddenly inspecting all of your commercial aircraft in a concurrent mode?”
Tom: Well, since you’re a physicist, I’d say, yeah, you probably should.
Ivanna: All right then, can you explain to me, Tom, why you Americans suddenly decided to inspect all your commercial aircraft concurrently, thus canceling flights willy-nilly, hither and thither, leaving poor foreigners like me stranded for days in places like Chicago? Is this the way you usually behave?
Tom: No.
Ivanna: Then what, pray tell, is your usual approach to inspecting passenger jet aeroplanes here in America?
Tom: We don’t and say we did.
Ivanna: I beg your pardon?
Tom: “Let’s not and say we did.” It’s the American way, you see. When you take your car in to be repaired, the mechanic doesn’t do anything, but he says he did. When you get sick, the doctor doesn’t cure you, but he says “treated” you. And when politicians get to Congress, they don’t do anything, but they sit around talking a lot, and they say they “represented” you.
Ivanna: Why?
Tom: So they can get paid for doing nothing.
Ivanna: And how does this apply to aeroplane inspections, then?
Tom: Oh, well, you see, when the time comes for a scheduled inspection of a commercial jet aircraft, mandated by the Federal Aviation Agency, the chief mechanic looks at the log sheet, then he looks at the airplane, then he says “Gee whizz, boss, it looks like that there airliner is due for a federally mandated, legally required inspection of its wiring harnesses.” Then the chief mechanic’s boss says “Let’s not and say we did.” Then they both have a nice laugh and take a coffee break. After their coffee, the chief mechanic points at another aircraft and says “Golly, boss, it says here that there airliner is due for a federally mandated, legally required brake and tire inspection,” and what do you suppose the chief mechanic’s boss says?
Ivanna: “Let’s not and say we did?”
Tom: Now you’ve got it! That’s exactly what the airline boss says to the chief mechanic, and they do that all day long, laughing, drinking coffee and slapping each other on the back in a manly, yet affectionate way, until quittin’ time rolls around and they call it a day.
Ivanna: But what about your Federal Aviation Agency?
Tom: What happens, you see, is that at end of the week, the boss spends all day Friday watching his administrative assistant use Microsoft Word templates to create FAA Aircraft Inspection Reports that, in effect, all say, “we did,” even though he, his administrative assistant and the chief mechanic all know they didn’t, not really. Then, first thing Monday morning, he sends all those reports to a designated FAA Inspector, who reads them and then checks off little boxes on his set of forms that the federally mandated, legally required aircraft inspections were all duly performed.
Ivanna: Why? Why would they endanger the public like that?
Tom: To save money.
Ivanna: But that’s a moral outrage!
Tom: Not if every other airline does the same thing. If that’s what’s going on, and your airline actually performs all those federally mandated, legally required aircraft inspections, your airline’s profits will look terrible in comparison to the profits all the other airlines are making, and your stock price will fall through the floor and bingo – just like that, your airline is in Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Ivanna: But isn’t that just because the FAA lets everyone cheat?
Tom: Sure, that’s it, right there, you got it.
Ivanna: So what happened? Why are all these aeroplanes grounded for federally mandated, legally required inspections?
Tom: Because somebody at the FAA discovered that everybody in the airline industry was looking at those federally mandated, legally required aircraft inspections and saying “Let’s not and say we did,” and that fellow, he went to his boss and told him all about it.
Ivanna: I see – and then the FAA jumped in and demanded that all the airlines start obeying the law again!
Tom: No, that’s not what happened.
Ivanna: It’s not?
Tom: That’s what would happen in some Hollywood made-for-TV movie about a handsome, brilliant, crusading FAA employee who puts his career on the line, blowing the whistle on a corrupt and criminally incompetent federal regulatory bureaucracy he caught in bed with rotten, criminal airline executives.
Ivanna: So what really happened?
Tom: United States Civil Service standard operating procedure – anybody who blows the whistle on corruption or incompetence gets fired.
Ivanna: Fired?
Tom: As a matter of fact, blowing the whistle on your federal agency’s culture of corruption and incompetence is practically the only way a person can get fired from the Civil Service.
Ivanna: And the FAA bigwigs fired that fellow because the airlines were bribing them?
Tom: No, it was the whistle blower’s immediate supervisor, an FAA Chief Inspector, who got him fired. But then the whistle blower went to Congress, and when the members of Congress who are on the relevant committees found out that the airlines were bribing FAA Chief Inspectors, they hit the ceiling.
Ivanna: As well they might.
Tom: Absolutely. Imagine, all the undeserved, unearned millions of dollars those airlines were reaping from this scheme, and all they had to pay was a few measly bribes to a few FAA Chief Inspectors, when everyone in Congress could readily see that the bribery scheme should have included them, too. So Congress convened some hearings, the whistle blower testified, then Congress dragged some of those FAA bigwigs you mentioned up on Capitol Hill and knocked their heads together. Then, after all that, the FAA finally cracked down on the airlines, ordering them to catch up and get current on their inspections.
Ivanna: And that’s why I can’t get a flight out of O’Hare today? And couldn’t get one out yesterday? Or the day before?
Tom: And probably won’t be able to get one out tomorrow, either.
Ivanna: Well, at least when I do, I’ll have the comfort of know that the aeroplane I’m flying in has had all its mechanical problems fixed up.
Tom: Fixed? Who said anything about that? All they’re doing is completing the inspections.
Ivanna: You mean, when their inspections actually find something wrong, and someone suggests they actually fix it, they tell them…
Tom: “Let’s not and say we did.”