Determined to keep my sanity while on hold with a rude and incompetent
doctor�s receptionist who couldn�t transfer my call to the right extension
after trying over five times, I started humming a song from the sixties called
�Aquarius� and realized that the word �Aquarius� has the same number of
syllables as �Incompetence.� And with heartfelt apologies to �Hair� lyricists
Ragni and Rado, I started singing, �This is the dawning of the age of
incompetence.�
While I was waiting I came up with the whole song:
When the band begins Hail to the Chief
And a fool struts out to speak.
The VP shoots his hunting buddy
And hides behind his latest leak.
This is the spirit of the age of Incompetence!
Age of Incompetence!
Incompetence! Incompetence!
Hurricanes that go unnoticed
Wiretapping for no reason
Lots of falsehoods and derisions
Fundamentalist revisions
Crooked thieving politicians
Cronies making key decisions
Incompetence! Incompetence!
(Repeat �Let the dumb shine in. Let the dumb shine
in," etc.)
What does the Bush administration have to do with my incompetent
doctor�s receptionist? Everything. Incompetence has been elevated to an art
form by the Bush administration. Bush has made it acceptable for my doctor�s
receptionist to be an idiot who need not fear that she�ll ever lose her job.
Our president has established a standard whereby the dopiest employees
are actually rewarded. He promotes staff members like Alberto Gonzales,
Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld for furthering the goals of painstaking
incompetence in the handling of their respective jobs as they hide behind a
familiar and chilling phrase: �Who could have foreseen this latest disaster�
whether it be alleged terrorists flying planes into our skyscrapers or
floodwaters breeching the levees in New Orleans. Colin Powell couldn�t cut it
as an incompetent and he had a hard time lying about the Iraq war so he had to
drop out of sight. Conversely, my doctor�s receptionist would fit in well with
the Bush crowd. She�d be a superstar.
Sadly, she�s not alone. In the last two months, I�ve dealt with the
cable company that promised their elusive repairman would arrive between noon
and five on three consecutive Wednesdays. He finally came over on a Friday. There�s
the phone company that�s also linked to my DSL computer hook-up that shut off
my service at the request of my landlord. After I spent 40 minutes on hold from
a neighbor�s phone a sickeningly polite representative told me that she didn�t
believe me when I said I own my house and do not have a landlord, which led to
a day and a half of wrangling with her and a range of her so-called superiors
before getting a pseudo-sympathetic trained seal to admit that they made an
inexplicable input error that lead them to agree to reinstate my service at
their earliest convenience, which was somewhere around five working days later.
There was the churlish clerk at my advertised-as friendly neighborhood
supermarket that refused to make eye contact or acknowledge that I�m human,
while the box boy spouted the mandatory company line and asked if I need help
carrying the single insipid greeting card I purchased out to my car, which had
become sandwiched between a Hummer and an Expedition in a space that was
designated by lines painted too small to begin with. And how about those pop-up
ads that jam my computer, the barrage of daily junk mail that overwhelms my
household and the phone solicitors that need my contribution so they can rescue
the bottom line of their telemarketing firm that�s working to save various
causes from extinction, including the local police force and the Democratic
Party?
With Bush as the example in chief, is it any wonder that incompetence
has reached such heights in America? Could the incompetent multitudes be better
validated by anyone else? Bush represents a conundrum weightier than that of
the chicken and the egg. Do we have an incompetent president because voters are
ignorant and careless? Are voters ignorant and careless because they�ve been
victimized by a barrage of simplistic incompetent politicians and their
lynch-men puppets on talk radio and at Fox News? Sadly, most people in America
don�t like to think too much if it�s not titillating or if it�s not referenced
in their Holy Bible. Take the flag burning amendment that�s been dragged out
again in this election year. How many times can this rally the simple minded? Maybe
it�s got legs now that Hillary is aboard for the exploitative ride. (Shame on
her. She knows better.) �Flag burning is bad therefore politicians that support
a �no-burn� amendment must be good.� Is it too complicated for the masses to
understand that America and the Constitution are most esteemed because they
allow this kind of protest as part of our envied freedoms?
There are countless examples of simple voter ignorance but one of the
most telling involves illegal immigrants. Conservatives are fond of saying �they�re
here illegally, what more need be said?� They use this logic to attempt to deny
school and hospital benefits to these struggling people and their children. Well,
there�s a lot more to be said. Conservative-leaning big business executives in
America are benefiting in a big way from the cheap labor that �illegals�
provide. If incompetence were not the law of the land, then our Republican-led
congress could find ways to penalize the folks who are hiring illegals. But
that would be a punishment for their big contributors who pay them off to look
the other way on just such issues. That�s much too complicated for most
Americans to take the time to understand so they fall prey to the Conservative
Republican mantra: �Keep it simple, stupid.� Americans are then beat over the
head with sound bites that blame all our woes on illegal immigrants and they
are encouraged to vote for candidates who validate that simplicity.
But Americans have not only embraced incompetence in government they�ve
made it cultural. These two words may be the definitive oxymoron: �American
Culture.� What can anyone say about a people that embrace NASCAR, tractor
pulls, �Deal or No Deal,� Britney Spears, Anne Coulter, Paris Hilton, Toby
Keith, Thomas Kinkaid, Bill O�Reilly and Restless Leg Syndrome but have never
visited a museum and think that Michael�s has something to do with art. Because
Americans have allowed it, we are experiencing a modern-day version of the
seven plagues of Egypt: Telemarketers, talk-radio celebrities, cable news
talking heads, infomercials, drug company product, corrupt politicians. Try
watching television without viewing 20 minutes of commercials wedged into each
half hour for everything from how your penis isn�t hard enough to crap about
how some new allergy medicine will clear up your sinuses but may give you
chronic diarrhea, blindness, hair loss, sexual organ deconstruction, heart
failure, brain tumors, cancerous growths on your hemorrhoids or dry mouth.
All of this garbage was well in progress before Bush became president
but his leadership has opened the gates for a virtual jamboree of all-things
ineffectual. On the American incompetence org chart, the name George W Bush is
engraved in the box at the top and this is the most damaging part of his legacy
because it indicates hopelessness; that there may be no room left for recovery.
Is this the role model that our children should aspire to imitate? With Bush at
the helm, there�s more corporate incompetence rooted in greed; more worker
incompetence rooted in indifference; more grammatical incompetence rooted in a
broken education system; more voter incompetence rooted in ignorance; more
government incompetence rooted in a thirst for power for the sake of power. And
why try to do better when you too could be president someday? How about a
cabinet position?
Take a look around. It�s not the dawning of the age of incompetence;
it�s farther along than that. And it will probably get worse before it gets
better and I need to wrap this up before the next flurry of pop-up ads cause
this computer to crash.
Nick Paccione is a freelance writer
living in Long Beach, California.