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This is my all-time favorite Far Side: Two turkeys are sitting at a small round table. There are cups of coffee in front of both of them. One of them, wearing black-rimmed glasses, is reading a newspaper dated Tuesday, November 23. In the distance a coveralled farmer carrying a hatchet is walking toward them. The caption reads, “I always feel sorry for those chickens.”
Don’t say you weren’t warned. Please, don’t ever say that.
Looking back, the damage that had been done to American democracy by the Trump administration was almost incalculable. It was as if someone had lifted the Constitution out of its bulletproof, moisture-controlled sealed case in the Rotunda of the National Archives and edited it with a Sharpie. First Amendment? Ah, not so much. Fifth Amendment? Nobody needs all that stuff. Fourteenth Amendment? Don’t worry about it. With the grace of a defensive tackle at a ballet recital, Donald Trump and his sycophants had undermined the foundations of our republic; they had introduced new forms of vulgarity to the political system, inflicted terrible damage on the authority of the judiciary and the credibility of the media, coarsened the national dialogue, and emboldened hatred in all of its disguises. The Trump administration was the political version of the comedian’s fabled Aristocrats—the most vile, repugnant act in history.
Whatever chance at reelection Trump might have had disappeared with his fumbling response to the pandemic. I remember playing Covfefe Scrabble his last few months in office: any combination of letters that looked like it might be a real word was legal. Jenny and I had just started dating and I usually zayed her! Trying to find the right person to follow Trump was like watching a blind man in a dark room stumbling to fit a plug into a socket. There was no right answer.
In those last days of that administration I actually believed the worst was over. According to the pollsters, “any breathing person” was about 10 points more popular than Donald Trump. “Any dead person” was only 6 points more desirable. Ah, the innocence of a middle-aged journalist.
The big question was how much of the chaos was permanent. One terrible night in the sandbox years earlier we’d been dropped into a firefight to reinforce a patrol that had been ambushed. When we hit the ground, I looked around at the wounded and the dying and wondered, Where the hell do I start? That was what the whole world was wondering six years ago: Where does America go from Trump? My boss at the Pro, Howie Bernstein, summed up the problem in his most colorful journalese, pointing out, “You can’t push crap back up an asshole.”
In retrospect, it didn’t really matter who came next. We could just as easily have elected the grizzled old guy with the missing teeth who took the tickets at a traveling carnival as the Democrat. In a desperate effort to return to normalcy, the Biden administration shined up old ideas and pretended they had discovered gold. But those officials who filled the so-called Black Hole of Leadership either didn’t fully understand the extent of the damage or lacked the capability to respond to its economic aftermath. Our national foundations had been destroyed and even MacGyver with a 102-piece Craftsman tool kit couldn’t fix it. An anonymous poster on Facebook compared the Dems to housekeepers walking into a hotel room after the Stones had spent a week there. It was as hopeless as trying to glue a patch on the Titanic. Any chance they might have had to keep the ship of state afloat ended with the drought and resulting famine that plagued half the world.
The result in 2024 was the election of President Ian Wrightman. Ian Michael Wrightman was a career politician who until that time had been considered such a lightweight he had to be tethered to his Senate desk to prevent his floating away. While he lacked substance, he did have the distinct political advantage of not being one of them, whichever them you supported.
But that was not what I was thinking about when I woke up that morning, July eleventh. Jenny had stayed over that night and as usual was up before me. I had laid in bed watching with silent admiration as she slipped into her professional life. She glanced at me and, seeing I was awake, smiled. We made plans to meet for dinner unless, as always. She kissed me lightly, wrinkled her nose, picked up her briefcase, and was gone. The warmth of her next to me dissipated slowly.
“Cher,” I said when she was gone, “come here, please.” Mighty Chair rolled to the side of the bed, red and white side lights blinking happily as if saying good morning.
I almost beat the sunrise to the gym. The first embers of the morning were sneaking into the night. About half the members of the Light Brigade were already there, clacking away on the weight machines, grunting with pleasure. Although the mandatory face-mask rule had been lifted years earlier, several people still wore the popular designer coverings. “So you’re keeping banker’s hours now?” Hack Wilson greeted me. Hack was my friend and workout partner. He was built like a mountain range but moved with the ease of a Steinbeck sentence. As we got to work, the banter was the stuff of daily life: relationships, new restaurants, Netflix series, kids leaving for sleepaway camp (his), work, vacations, and eventually, politics.
The wisps of optimism that had greeted President Wrightman’s inauguration were long gone—blown away by the random breezes of time. As we’d feared, the structural damage done by the pandemic and other natural and unnatural disasters had continued to reverberate throughout the entire world. Wrightman had made temporary repairs where that was possible and had slowed the decline in other areas, but his attempts to rebuild vital international relationships, restructure the economy to relieve the pressure on the middle class, salvage affordable healthcare, and begin healing the chasm ripping apart the nation had pretty much failed. The country was stagnant, as if 350 million people were stopped at a traffic signal, waiting patiently for it to change. In one of my columns I had written that Wrightman reminded me of the caretaker at a graveyard, who dutifully clipped the grass once a week to preserve the illusion of life.
So our once-hopeful workout conversations had transitioned into complaints and jokes about his ineptitude.
By the time I’d finished, the summer morning had sucked the air out of the city. It was typical Washington weather: 91 degrees, 100 percent humidity, no chance of rain. On the way to my office, I stopped at Nonna’s. As usual, there was a long line at the takeout window. “The usual?” George asked. “The usual,” I told him. “Cher, good morning,” he said.
“Good morning, George,” Cher responded evenly. George and I laughed; Cher was silent.
Everything flowed together, everything fit. The people, the places, the normalcy of a hot July morning in Washington made it a day that otherwise would have been enjoyed, then stored somewhere in my memory and forgotten.
Admittedly that’s a pretty big otherwise.
As usual when I got to work during the morning rush, I took the freight elevator to the seventh floor. While the thermal security camera signaled I was a healthy 98.6, I still didn’t think it was fair to squeeze Mighty Chair into a crowded elevator, no matter how much some of those people enjoyed teasing Cher. I walked into the Pro’s office a few minutes after nine o’clock. Sometime during the night two coffee cups had been added to the tower growing on the edge of my desk. It was now a rigid twelve cups high—substantial but not close to the record.
July eleventh began as what we in the journalism game call a slow news day. The media was still suffering through what was referred to as the post-Resurrection malaise—what stories might attract readers two weeks after Jesus had risen. During Trump’s regime and the worldwide pandemic, digging up a story among the hustlers, scoundrels, liars, incompetents, and dolts who had profited from the chaos had been easier than finding shells on a beach. We had so many stories to choose from that anything involving an official lower than a Cabinet undersecretary got thrown back into the press pool.
The Democrats had given us the excitement of bureaucratic competence and natural disasters. In contrast, the Wrightman administration took great pride in its boring normalcy. Rather than those provocative red Make America Great Again caps or I Survived 2020 T-shirts, Wrightman supporters wore lime-green caps reading Reboot Government to Original Factory Setting. This White House stressed quiet professionalism: no leaks, no turmoil, no fuss, no big-bucks bestsellers. As much as possible, everything was done behind closed doors. This quiet was welcomed by everyone except reporters, who once again were forced, as my great editor in chief Howard Bernstein urged, to do journalism.
Our newsroom at the Pro was a large open space plan with small glass-enclosed conference rooms and offices running almost the full length of both side walls. While we had the option of working remotely, most of us chose to come in at least several days a week. Co-cuddling, we called it. My desk was at the farthest end of the office; on a ship it would have been the lookout perch. Each desk had a low-backed rolling chair, except mine of course, with a visitor’s chair on the side. While the desks were all the same standard office gunmetal gray, every side-chair was different. That was our big perk: express your inner self in your choice of a side chair. They ranged from Costco folding chairs covered by bright cushions to style editor Katy Fitzgerald’s circa 1960s strapped-plastic lounger. I’d brought in one of the inexpensive dining room chairs my sister and I had saved from our parents’ home when it was sold: a brown wooden ball-and-claw with a scrolled back and a long-faded green cloth seat. The gnaw marks chewed into the arm made me confident it had been mine.
On the wall directly in front of me, four large-screen Samsungs were set permanently to the four major networks. Smaller monitors were mounted above the offices along the side walls. They were set to various cable stations, including BBC America. There were twelve screens in all—four in front, four along each wall—enough monitors to enable us to simultaneously watch an entire season of the newest Star Trek series. Each monitor was numbered, and headphones enabled us to select the channel we wanted to hear.
The fact that twelve TV sets were required to enable us to produce digital stories did not escape my somewhat overdeveloped sense of irony.
I was developing several stories. I had the reporter’s itch, a feeling that deep below the placid waters of the administration the waters were roiling. The Wrightman administration had failed completely to fulfill any election promises and seemed bogged down. The nation remained so politically divided that any kind of progress was almost impossible.
Unlike Trump, who had governed with the stealth of Inspector Clouseau, or the befuddled Democrats, who had raced around trying to quench an erupting volcano with fire extinguishers, the Wrightman people were tunneling into the bureaucracy. Its appointees were quietly consolidating power, taking esoteric but legal steps to harness and control the remnants of the legislative process. Their actions were too subtle to raise any alarms and too complicated for anyone other than policy wonks to understand, but in some ways they portended far more danger. Obviously these people knew what they were doing. The question nobody seemed to be able to answer was what did they want to do?
I spent that morning investigating dry ditches. I had a nice off-the-record lunch with the Director of Befuddlement at the Department of Bureaucracy, as the Pythons might have identified him. He actually was the second assistant to an assistant ($85,000 annually) at Interior, a seemingly decent guy who actually had a roving eye. (I don’t mean he liked to scope out women; I mean he had a floating blue iris that wobbled like a duck in a bathtub.) The secretary had just spent several hundred million taxpayer dollars refurbishing the Stewart Lee Udall building, including the installation of Neo Deco murals, so I told him I intended to write a wry feature about the new interior of the Interior.
In fact, the secretary had quietly proposed amending several regulations and codes that would give the department considerably more oversight of state spending on public projects like roads, buildings, even airports. While on the surface it didn’t seem like much more than bookkeeping, in actuality these changes granted to the federal government approval power over significant portions of state budgets. Several governors had complained about it, but there was little fuss. After the sins of the past administrations, this story raised about as much interest as a pothole on the highway of life. I thought there might be a good story there, but the most I got out of this lunch was an off-the-record hamburger.
When I walked into the office a little after two o’clock, it was the unexpected silence that puzzled me. Newsrooms by definition are loud, raucous, alive with energy and enthusiasm. People are always in motion; you can feel the determination. Not this time. Just about everybody in the office was standing, staring at the large monitors in front. A couple of people were shaking their heads. Someone was crying.
I caught Joanne Curtis’s attention. Auntie Jo was our high priestess of punctuation; she had never met a semicolon she didn’t like. “What’s going on?”
She took her headphones off and looked at me as if I had just arrived from another planet. “Mighty Chair didn’t tell you?”
I shook my head. I’d turned off Cher’s alert system for the interview and neglected to turn it back on.
She indicated all the screens with a wave of her hand. “Somebody attacked Pearl Harbor.”
Rod Serling was the first thought that popped into my mind. I was floating through time. But an instant later I snapped back to reality. Each of our twelve screens were showing essentially the same disjointed images: visual bits and pieces of whatever they could grab as local crews scrambled to get cameras to the site. Reporters stepped in front of the camera, several of them donning headphones as they got there, like soldiers gearing up for battle. Chyrons at the bottom of the screen summed up what was known: EXPLOSIONS ROCK ARIZONA MEMORIAL IN PEARL HARBOR. Some stations were already reporting mass casualties. The recently issued government seal appeared on each screen: a red, white, and blue badge mounted by a bald eagle, with a bold N in the middle confirming this was actual news, not opinion.
The professional images were mixed with pickup shots from people who had rushed there and uploaded video to YouBroadcast.
I slid in behind my desk. The attack was coming to life in disparate pieces. Cameras were sweeping the area, searching for that one symbolic image that would visually sum up the story. The Pacific Ocean was on fire; thick plumes of ugly dark smoke spiraled triumphantly into the air. On CNN a reporter in plaid Bermuda shorts was doing his stand-up in front of a large block of jagged concrete embedded in the white sand. Bits of unrecognizable debris were floating on the tide. Fox focused on a body floating facedown; it was up only a few seconds before the director cut to another image, perhaps deciding it was too gruesome even for their audience. There were several pans of spectators with the usual horrified expressions on their faces: an older woman covering her mouth with her palm; two teenagers crying and hugging each other; cops pushing people back, back. Swirling responder lights colored the scene. Suddenly, there it was, the shot of gold.
As soon as I saw it, I knew that this was the image that was going to be looped endlessly for the next few days. It was going to be splashed on the front page of newspapers and the opening image on news sites: a single tannish bone on the shoreline, shifting just slightly as it was nudged by each rippling wave. I knew what it was, the remains of one of the men of the Arizona. Free, finally free, coming home.
The horror delivered by that simple image was astonishing; I puffed out my cheeks and released a long, thin breath to maintain control. “Whoa,” I muttered.
As the numerous visuals began to coalesce into a story, the office came alive as if someone had double-tapped the play button. Howie clapped his hands sharply three times, shouted, “C’mon, people, let’s do some journalism.” He started rattling off assignments—gather, organize, report. This was Career Day for reporters; this was the type of story that made reputations and led to promotions and bigger jobs. This was Murrow in the blitz, Dan Rather on a rooftop after a Dallas flood. Maybe the attack took place some five thousand miles away, but we were in Washington, D.C., and the response would come from right around the corner. That was our bailiwick. Track down sources and find out how the government was responding. What was the military doing? How did our intelligence community fail? Three claps, and it was as if the starting bell had rung, the gates had sprung open, and the horses had burst onto the track; in an instant the newsroom had been transformed from startled spectators to journalists reporting a story.
“Cher,” I said, “call Jenny.” I’d start by finding out what was happening on the Hill. But two rings into the call I was stopped by the traditional newsroom expression of surprise. “Hol-lee shit!” someone shouted. “Heads up, everybody. Look at this.”
I swiveled Cher around. One of the side monitors was showing an entirely different scene. Several other monitors quickly switched to it. Thick smoke was pouring out of the entrance to a tunnel. An aerial shot from a helicopter or drone showed people scrambling out of smoke, through a gridlock of stalled vehicles. Soldiers, or maybe cops, were going against the flow, trying to get into the tunnel. It was like a scene from a monster flick. Only apparently this was real. The chyron reported: TERRORIST ATTACK INSIDE NEW YORK’S LINCOLN TUNNEL.
The other networks picked up this second attack. Screens were split between rescue operations in Pearl Harbor and the ongoing fighting in New York. Fire. Smoke. People running. Cameras were moving quickly, sweeping across the sky, then over the ground—visual panic. Accurately capturing the confusion.
I put on my headphones and began clicking between channels. Mostly I heard sirens, some shouting, gunfire in the background. Little of it matched any images; all of it reinforced the chaos.
A series of explosive flashes lit up the tunnel mouth, like lightning illuminating storm clouds; but victims continued emerging from the smoke. NYPD officers and firefighters were pushing, dragging, even carrying people to safety. Two officers crouched behind a ballistic shield and disappeared into the cloud, walking into the attack. It was a level of bravery I’d seen over and over, first in Iraq, then in the Big Sandbox. I was still awed by it. I could feel my heart being ripped open.
I closed my eyes. I was back in the mix. Rushing into the firefight carrying seventy pounds and seven years of combat experience. The world around me was exploding. Back in my personal comfort zone. It felt right.
When I opened my eyes Howie was standing in front of my desk, his back to me; his sleeves rolled halfway up, hands resting on his hips, looking straight ahead at the wall of monitors, shaking his head. Even Howie was having difficulty organizing this reality. It appeared that for the first time in our history America had been attacked simultaneously from the East Coast to the farthest West Coast. Howie was wrestling with how to cover it, what angles we could take that would set us apart. How do we “do journalism” here?
“All right,” he snapped, turning around to face the room. “Bart,” he said, pointing at our youngest reporter. “You do the history. Every domestic attack since…”
“Howie!” another voice shouted with hesitant astonishment. We turned again and looked. The newsroom went silent. Two of the screens were now showing a still photo of a summer lake. Sailboats, children floating on inner tubes; it looked like a travel poster. “There’s another one.”
Copyright © 2021 by David Fisher
