Sully's Reputation

If you're like me then you watch a lot of TV, and if you watch a lot of TV then you've probably seen a lot of Sully Sullenberger.  I'm so sick of this guy.

Sullenberger's the holier-than-thou spokesman for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.  He comes on surrounded by sad-looking, skinny, bald kids and he says, "Hi, I'm Captain Sully Sullenberger.  People call me a hero, but these kids here at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital are the real heroes…."  Then there's a montage of sick little patients looking forlorn and helpless in their hospital beds with wires and tubes and shit all hooked up everywhere.  Then Sully comes back on and tells me that I should give St. Jude some money so that these kids can continue their desperate struggle.

Wtf?  Cancer's a drag, no doubt about it, and I don't like dead children any more than the next guy, but who the hell is Sully Sullenberger?

I'll tell you who Sully Sullenberger is: Sully's the guy who crash-landed his airplane into the Hudson River a few years ago, US Airways Flight 1549…all 155 passengers and crew aboard the plane survived.  It was a slow news week, I guess, so suddenly Sullenberger's a national hero and he's meeting the President and he's writing a best-selling memoir (which he entitled Highest Duty…gimme a fuckin' break).

Last I checked, landing an aircraft without killing anybody was a pretty standard duty in any pilot's job description.  It's essentially one third of the job: you take off without killing anyone, then you fly the plane somewhere without killing anyone, and then you land the plane without killing anyone.  I'm not saying it's easy, necessarily, but it's certainly fucking doable.  Pilots all around the world are doing it every day.

It's true that Sully had to unexpectedly land Flight 1549 due to equipment failure, but the reason his equipment failed is because he flew his plane into a flock of geese.  Wasn't this fucker ever trained to not steer his plane into flocks of geese?  I've avoided geese plenty of times (Lake Merritt, y'all…yo, yo, Oakland!), in a car and on a motorcycle, and it ain't that hard.  Granted, I'm on the ground and I'm not going that fast, but, still, it's pretty easy to refrain from ramming your vehicle into a flock of geese.  Don't crash into shit…pretty much Aviation 101, folks.

So basically Captain Chesley Burnett Sullenberger is a hero and a celebrity because he did his job, the job that he signed up to do and that he was getting paid to do.  What the hell?!

I do my job, too, you know.  I'm there by nine most mornings, and I stay past five.  On my most recent performance evaluation I was rated "very satisfactory."  I've been involved in zero on-the-job fatalities.  So am I a hero?  Most people would say that I'm not.

You see, I don't fit the hero stereotype.  I'm not a veteran fighter pilot like Captain Sullenberger is.  I didn't go to the United States Air Force Academy, and I didn't win the Outstanding Cadet in Airmanship award.  So because I don't conform to people's preconceived notions of heroism, I'm just some shmo who's adequately doing his job.  But ol' Sully does his job, and, hooray, he's America's fuckin' sweetheart.  He's throwin' out the first pitch of baseball season.  Mayor Bloomberg dubs him "Captain Cool."  He's on the talk-show circuit.  He's the Grand Marshal of the goddamn Tournament of Roses Parade.

Whatever.

I'll tell you what, though: if I had Sully's reputation, I'd try to use it to do something cheerful to uplift the community.  I wouldn't come on TV trying to make people feel like crap and guilt-trip them into donating money.

If They Thank Me, Their Welcome

I don’t consider myself a lazy man, but I’d rather find a dollar than earn one. It’s not that I don’t value skill and labor. It’s that I value luck even more.

(One of my longest-running fantasies is that I’m a champion chess player, not just world-class but invincible. I literally can’t be beaten. In my fantasy I haven’t really mastered chess strategy or tactics, at least not on any conscious level, and I don’t put much effort into my matches. I know the rules and I pay some small measure of attention to my games and that’s about it. Whenever it’s my turn to move I’m guided mostly or completely by a vague hunch as to my best option. As soon as it becomes my turn I’m ready to move, and because I always make my play so quickly it often seems to spectators (and sometimes to myself) almost as though I were moving pieces randomly. My question is simply “what’s the most advantageous thing I can do right now that’s permitted by the game’s constitutive rules?” and my answer is always and immediately and infallibly provided by my intuition. (Actually, I should probably rephrase that. “Intuition” implies that my instincts are telling me distinctly that a certain move is the best play and that I’m listening to my instincts, and this is not entirely the case in my chess fantasy. It’s more like I’m on autopilot: I extend my hand and I move a piece, I wait while my opponent plays her turn, I extend my hand and I move a piece…and so on until I have won.) Being a famous chess player, a virtual rock star among the intelligentsia, I’m interviewed from time to time and I’m never ashamed to reveal that my perceived genius is but a knack for taking a phenomenal series of extremely lucky and slightly educated guesses. My apparent mastery is only serendipity repeated with unfathomable reliability, and I’m not afraid to tell the world so. Nobody ever believes me anyway. It wouldn’t matter if they did.)

It is for my love of happy flukes that I refuse to pity or scorn those benighted, semiliterate wretches who write “your welcome” when they mean “you’re welcome.”

I think that one could argue with a straight face that “your welcome” is a perfectly legitimate term with which to politely acknowledge thanks. Let’s say that you are the thanking party and I am the welcoming party. I provide you with your welcome by saying/writing “your welcome” just as greeting parties might provide greeted parties with greetings by saying/writing “greetings” (or “salutations” or “greetings and salutations”). Now, of course, I don’t really believe that the ignoramuses who write “your welcome” are ever actually contemplating the possession or ownership of the welcome that they are articulating. Rather, they have stumbled ass-backwards into the lap of good grammar. But I don’t see why I should begrudge them their good fortune.