No wonder we’re all losing faith
IN 1962, the baseball veteran Casey Stengel took on the job of manager of the newly minted New York Mets, who were so bad in their first year that he famously asked, “Can’t anybody here play this game?”
Fifty-five years later, Americans can be forgiven for wondering the same this week — except we aren’t talking about a ragtag expansion team made up of players discarded from other ball clubs but about important American institutions ranging from the world’s third-largest airline to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And this ain’t no game. The decline of public faith in our institutions — from the media to Congress to banks to the presidency to businesses to places of worship — is among the most serious crises of our time. It breeds cynicism, lack of trust and a general feeling of social and cultural unsteadiness, as though the pillars supporting our way of life are hollow and crumbling.
We need those pillars. But any effort to convince people that they should trust the pillars to bear the weight of a complex and troubled society is not only a fool’s errand, it’s foolhardy.
When America’s leaders act not with discretion and care and seriousness of purpose — as everyone hopes those responsible for maintaining the infrastructure of our civil society would and should — but rather with ass-covering incompetence, why should people trust these leaders to know what they’re doing or have anyone’s best interests at heart other than their own?
Why should they have confidence that anybody knows what he’s doing?
The shocking manhandling of Dr. David Dao on United Airlines Flight 367 was a horrible spectacle — but it was the insulting, Orwellian and craven behavior of United’s chief executive that turned a dreadful incident into a corporate meltdown. At every point in the scandal thus far, Oscar Munoz has responded in a way that degrades what little goodwill any American traveler might have for the airline he has managed since 2015.
First, he blamed the passenger and told United personnel he had their backs. Then he expressed regret for having had to “reaccommodate” Dr. Dao by having goons force him off a plane Dao had been invited to board. And then he threw himself on the mercy of the court of public opinion by saying, “My initial words fell short of truly expressing the shame.”
In March, Munoz was named “Communicator of the Year” by PRWeek Magazine. In other words, he’s supposed to be really good at this business of, you know, communicating.
And speaking of communicating, how about the man who is supposed to be the foremost explicator in America? That would be White House press secretary Sean Spicer, whose daily briefings are watched by millions — which makes him the most visible member of the Trump administration.
For one thing, Spicer almost literally cannot speak a grammatical English sentence, and the very fact he got the job despite this obvious liability is an implicit mark of national decline. But whatever violence he has done to our language was outdone on Tuesday by the disgustingly potted history lesson he attempted for some reason to deliver to a horrified nation.
In making a moral case against Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and his use of chemical weapons, Spicer found himself helpless before his own tongue as he suggested Adolf Hitler hadn’t gassed his own people. (Hundreds of thousands of German Jews were killed by Zyklon B.) Then, in the course of trying to figure out how the hell to get out of the Dark Forest of execrable taste in which he had lost himself, he referred to the very places in which Hitler did just that as “Holocaust centers.”
The morning after this disquisition, Spicer apologized profusely in a public forum — but even as he did so, his body language and tone suggested he was bitter that he had been held to account.
What was missing from the behavior of both these men and from the conduct of our institutions in general is elementary dignity — the dignity that arises from the responsibility such people ought to feel as they fill roles of great power and influence in our society. Given how cheaply they have mortgaged their own social capital in pursuit of authority and fame and financial comfort, it’s no wonder nobody at the top of the greasy pole seems to know how to play this American game any longer.