By Myles Ludwig
These are the days of lasers in the jungle/Lasers in the jungle somewhere/ Staccato signals of constant information/ A loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires/ And baby, these are the days of miracle and wonder /This is the long-distance call
Paul Simon’s lyrics are prophetic.
Apparently, no one answered that call. It went straight to voicemail.
HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told Dr. Sanjay Gupta of CNN, the Journalism 101 version of Oprah’s darling Dr. Oz, that the president learned about the problems with the Obamacare website in “the first couple of days” after the site went live October 1.”
Why no long-distance call across town? Why no Beta.gov ?
Again, the government is mired in the mud of blame and obfuscation. Plenty enough eggs to cover everybody’s face. We were wrong, mea culpa, no one’s madder than me, the A-team, too many cooks spoil the broth; the chef is having a bad day, etc. Not enough time for a few test drives, not enough time to kick the tires, not enough time to polish it up and buff it out before you get the customer to buy?
These kinds of government snafus are not unfamiliar. They’re always followed by some kind of damage control — who me? — and by absurd proclamations that government should be run like a business. That’ll fix it. Does that make sense? Ask Ford about Edsel; ask Coca-Cola about New Coke; ask Boeing about battery-powered Dreamliners; ask Kodak about film.
When their stuff doesn’t work, we complain by canceling the charge on our credit cards, closing our wallets and purses. We don’t buy. But we don’t have that same opportunity with government. We can’t say, hey, your stuff doesn’t cut it, so we’re not paying taxes until you fix it.
“I can’t fix it myself,” said Sebelius.
Maybe not, but you can certainly look under the hood.
I wikied up the word “glitch.” It’s an adjeverb apparently descended from the Yiddish “glitsh.” And suggests an electronic bump in the road, a fixable but annoying stutter: “an undesired transition that occurs before the signal reaches its intended value.” Lucky it wasn’t blamed on the Jews. The Second Law of Thermodynamics posits that all systems eventually break down: entropy. But does it have to happen before they get started? What’s the word for that?
And the rush to excuse POTUS is embarrassing. It’s his deal, didn’t he check it out? Nope. Nobody told him. It reminds me of what earlier peoples said about the czar. He’s OK, he’s cool, he was at 5 Guys during the pogroms, on the court shooting hoops, busy listening to Angela Merkel’s sighs and whispers, Hollande’s heavy breathing.
There’s a wonderful old Russian saying: The horse is not mine and I am not me.
Trust really is the issue.
Everybody makes mistakes, of course, but in an atmosphere in which people already don’t clearly understand the benefits or drawbacks of the new Affordable Care Act — a misunderstanding that sends people like me to repeatedly make 20-minute phone calls to Bangalore to find out if I can keep my Silver Sneakers program and tier-something drug coverage — you’ve got to bring your A game “to beat the snot out” of someone. You need to turn on Cruz control.
And this stuff about the NSA snoopery, as Amy Winehouse might have said, that keeps dribbling out of the Snowden team, and in its turn seems to be emanating from some transatlantic cyberlimbo, Every week another drip of information, another dribble.
We may be listening, but is anybody getting that long-distance call?
Pick up the phone.
Myles Ludwig is a media savant living in Lake Worth.