Fri, July 18, 2003

It's been kind of a week for maniac ridiculous behavior, to the point where it's all running together. Yesterday in nearby Santa Monica an 83-years-young gentleman named Russell Weller drove his car through a crowded street farmer's market at nearly 60 miles per hour, killing ten and injuring dozens more. It was two and a half blocks of solid carnage and it wasn't pretty. Overturned fruit carts and upended canopies were strewn along both sides of the street. It was eerily reminiscent of a bad car chase from a cop movie; I kept looking for the two guys carrying the pane of glass. I am, of course, devastated by the lives lost and remorseful for everyone at the scene: the injured; the fatally injured; and even the eyewitnesses. I am also, however, incredulous at the lunacy.

To begin with, we have the local news. Oh, what local news we have! These people cut their teeth on car chases. An average day in L.A. news is filled with more insanity than that group therapy session in Dudley Moore's Crazy People. Just a few weeks ago, they covered a small propeller plane crashing headlong into an apartment building in the Fairfax district. They've seen it all. Though, quizzically, they haven't learned how to comment on live breaking news with any perspicacity. You'd think it would be something they'd pick up, or that those who had the skill would rise to the top. But no. As with the car chases, they're forced to "ad lib" for hours on end, and they're completely at a loss. On Channel 7, the blubbering on-the-scene helicopter guy was yammering so redundantly that I've come to believe "tragic, tragic" is the new "tragic." ("Tragedy" is one of many words that, in the wake of 9/11, has lost all meaning. Another is "family." At the time, we were told that "hero" had been redefined, but within weeks it was back in use referring to linebackers and TV weathermen who do photo-ops at soup kitchens.) Starved for sound bites, reporters interviewing a doctor at a local trauma center were asking his opinion about the mental state of elderly drivers. And, because it was a crowded scene, there were many, many eyewitnesses to interview. For some reason, when they get in front of a camera, people just get crazy. I think in our increasingly media-savvy culture it just feels like too much pressure. Everyone seems to think they need 40% more syllables to sound "official" enough for broadcast. The Santa Monica police chief was using phrases like "causation of the accident" and shell-shocked witnesses at the scene were saying things like "at this point in time." It's like Stephen Colbert and Bill Haugse say: put people in front of a camera, and they know how they think they're supposed to act.

In any media frenzy, there are a number of products that result. You have your breathless live commentary and your search for answers. You have your stunned eyewitnesses. And because of the frail human search for meaning, you have the Investigations To Make Sure This Never Happens Again. One on-the-phone witness early in the coverage could be heard pleading for increased safety at farmer's markets industry-wide, failing to realize that these are not exactly the kinds of events that have industries behind them. While it is hoped that some measures may be taken to reduce the risk of such an accident occurring in the future, it would be silly to think this incident is evidence that a wayward car poses more threat to a farmer's market than a beauty salon or a playground. Just like one guy with a bomb in his shoe shouldn't mean that shoes are subjected to more intense scrutiny than hats or glasses or key chains. Cars are heavy; cars move fast; cars can smash into things. At Saturday's farmer's market, they plan to park trucks across the intersections at each end of the bazaar, which makes sense. But beyond that, there is not much that can be done. We won't be building steel farmer's market cages. We don't need special government regulations. Maybe it would be nice if emergency brakes automatically deployed when an airbag goes off, so we don't end up with people stomping on the gas pedal when aiming for the brake the way Russell Weller alleges he did in this case. And sure it would be great to regulate elderly drivers. Out of all the squawking that's resulted from this event, that's the one thing that makes sense.

Santa Monica is full of senior citizens. It's a rent-controlled city and they all dug in their heels when it was cheap, so they continue to pay antebellum prices for prime oceanfront real estate and the rest of us have to shell out $3000 a month for a one-bedroom in a dilapidated old building to make up the difference (for once I'm not exaggerating). The mean age in Santa Monica is roughly 407. And gerontology is an exploding field because the baby boomers are headed back to diapers, which is why Social Security is a hot political issue and why the law of averages dictates that there will, from time to time, be a fender bender with some old coot who can't see well and has the reaction time of a heavily inebriated sea hare. It's an awful shame that this accident happened to occur in a crowded street, but it's far from the first time some gern has hopped a curb and smashed into something with his left turn signal flaring. Channel 7 recapped four such incidents in the last three years including a school building, a bank, and a DMV office. (The driver was waiting outside for her driver's test; I'm not making this up. She injured seven people.)

A few years ago a state Senator proposed legislation that required road tests for drivers over 75 in order to renew their drivers' licenses, but his idea was shot down by lobbyists for seniors. Similar ideas have received a lot of press in the last 24 hours, and I for one agree. Start at 70. Make a road test mandatory every six months. We have enough insane drivers out there as it is. Warren Olney (and here is a broadcaster for whom I haven't an ounce of respect) was discussing the issue this evening on his radio show, which is just my punishment for not leaving the office early enough to catch "All Things Considered". One of his guests was a woman named Monika White from the Center for Healthy Aging. She's also a professor at USC's School of Gerontology, so her credentials are soggy at best. From the picture on the CHA website, I'd say she's at least 65, but I can't be sure. He asked her if she thought the proposal for elderly drivers to have to prove their mental acuity and motor skills made sense. She couldn't really disagree (I suspect she probably didn't even want to) but she felt like she had to say it was a bad idea. This is just what I was talking about earlier. Put a person in front of a camera (or microphone) and they assume a role that they think they're expected to play. She was there as the advocate for the elderly, so she thought she was supposed to say no. She began by asserting that there is a range of ability within the senior population and that some senior citizens are excellent drivers. Olney was too gentle to point out the obvious – that those drivers would pass the test handily and have nothing to worry about. White was all flustered because it was unfair to use age as a means of determining fitness to drive, but in fact that's not the case at all. The test determines the fitness. The age just determines when it's a good idea to have some more testing. A lot changes as the mind and body age. She continued to stammer a lot and say basically nothing, not exactly providing an example of someone in her silver years who should be trusted to possess mental acuity. At least she managed not to make the "dignity" argument. I haven't heard it yet, but I sense that I'm going to soon. That old people are robbed of their dignity when they're forced to jump through hoops to renew their licenses (not literally; that would be fun to watch) or otherwise discriminated against. Hogwash. Old people are robbed of their dignity when they start crapping their pants involuntarily or falling down stairs. Young people don't rob them of their dignity. Congress doesn't do it. Nature does it. Age does it. And seniors who can still drive perfectly won't be robbed of their dignity by taking a test. They'll be champions! Everyone likes to get a good grade on a test. A gold star on your report card is a guaranteed boost to your dignity. The only people who'll take a dignity hit from the driving test are those who fail it miserably. Whose eyes don't clear the top of the dashboard and who cause a 14-car pileup just backing out of the garage. Why exactly do we owe these people any dignity in the first place?

Consider Russell Weller. He escapes from the path of his own devastation without a scratch on him. He appears befuddled but hardly contrite. He's not talking to reporters. His family and his lawyer are casting him as a victim. It's absurd! "He feels really sorry and he's very shaken up." He's shaken up?? What about the mothers who lost a 3-year-old and a 7-month-old as a result of his actions? Or the other eight people who are really just as dead even though to hear the media talk about it, the fatalities seem to include "a toddler, an infant, et al." So far, we don't really have his side of the story, but the police say that he says he made a wrong turn and tried to slam on the brakes. He hit the gas pedal instead. Evidently he tried to slam on the brakes real hard because he kept trying to slam on the brakes to the tune of 60mph through two and a half blocks of screaming people and fresh veggies before coming to a stop. The police aren't yet sure if they'll be filing manslaughter charges. What?!? Men are slaughtered! What other qualifications must be satisfied? Hey, I can agree that it's a grey area if you're driving along the road and someone springs out in front of your car and you hit him. That's an accident and it's hard to say there's anything you could have done. But Weller has said that he tried to stop the car once he realized he was in the farmer's market. By that point, he was already through a plastic barricade. If you've knocked down a barricade to get to somebody, you need to own up to the fact that you've been pretty damn negligent. I find the whole thing unbelievable.

I was also going to talk about "Operation Supreme Court Freedom," the 21-day prayer vigil that Pat Robertson is holding, apparently beseeching the Lord Almighty to kill Justices Kennedy, Ginsburg, and Stevens for their role in defending the U.S. Constitution by overruling some archaic Texas statutes that legislate what consenting adults can do in their own home, to wit, homosexual sodomy. I kind of ran out of room, so I guess I'll fold Robertson's ridiculous response into my forthcoming column on the Lawrence v. Texas decision. (I swear it's still forthcoming! I just have to hope I can finish it before the ruling is overturned.) Suffice it to say, the man is a maniac and the fact of his very existence is evidence that mindless fundamentalist religious zealotry is as alive and dangerous here as it is in the hearts and minds of our terrorist enemies. Right-thinking people look at him and laugh at his absurd frenzy (like when he asserted that Hurricane Andrew struck south Florida in 1992 because god hates Disney World's annual unofficial "Gay Day") but the problem is that he's still around, which means that plenty of people aren't laughing – they're believing. And this is where democracy gets dangerous. Those wackjobs have a voice. At least in the fundamentalist Islamic community you have to be crazy and have access to armies and weapons to cause trouble. These people can just vote one of their kind into the presidency and let him wreak havoc on everything from the deficit to civil rights and there's nothing anyone can do about it. Let's hope this California "election recall" trend catches on. As Jay McDaniel says in this week's "What Do You Think?" on The Onion, "All I ever hear is Bush, Bush, Bush. When are we getting a new president?"

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