15 December 2003

Too Damn Bad

The Saddam thing is still rolling over everyone this morning. The comenators can’t talk about anything else. The deposed dictator and newest Federal Prisoner is unlocated. He may be in Qatar, or someplace undisclosed. Maybe Guantanamo by now. His last words in the wild are reported as being "I am the President of Iraq and I want to negotiate." He had a pistol, two AK-47s and $750 grand in crisp new American bills.

It is his last official act. There is an air of disbelief in the Arab world, the usual refusal to trust the evidence of their eyes, imagining more insults to their culture. That the capture was faked just like the moon landing. Well, it is just too damn bad. It happened just like 9-11 and they ought to get on with life.

I feel like I burned out on the story yesterday. There isn’t much to add except the exchange between Saddam and the troops. The good news is we can now devote more effort to locating Osama. Still, I can't help but feel that Saddam was just a sideshow, another roadside attraction on the way to somewhere else. But that is just too damn bad. We did what we did and now we ought to do our best and move on.

I drove past the new Udvar-Hassy Annex to the Air and Space Museum the other day. It is going to open tomorrow on the hundredth anniversary of flight. Hard to believe it has only been a century since we sprouted our wings. I don't know how many thousands of hours I have spent looking down at the curve of the earth, the miracle of flight moving me like a box of rocks around the globe. Puddle jumpers and giant liners, champagne and white knuckles.

One of the first flights I remember was a wild couple of turns around the field at a little fly-in in Michigan. Dad saw the old Stearman bi-plane and plunked down twenty-rive bucks for the privilege of strapping my brother and I on either side of him in the front cockpit and roaring off into the afternoon sky. The wind roared across the open cockpit and the exhaust stunk of avgas and oil.

Dad didn't fly that day. He left it to the barnstormer in the back seat. But the tail-dragger was part of his syllabus down at Pensacola when he got his Navy wings forty-two years after the Wright Brothers first flew.

And that afternoon in Michigan was around forty-two years ago this summer. Astonishing. My Uncle Jim actually met Orville Wright, or at least attended a banquette with him. He worked for Grover Loening, too, so the degrees of separation are not that great. Grover was the Wright Brothers first Chief Engineer, and Jim was Grover's Chief engineer in turn.

I am eager to get to the Museum. Most of the Smithsonian's collection has never been on formal display. I discovered the workshops out at Silver Hill in Maryland a few years ago, and have seen many of the airplanes that will be on display, but there was never a place for the big ones to be under a roof. Some of them have been making the last flight to Dulles all year to go on permanent display. I don't think I have been so excited about anything in a long time. The is one of the Shuttles on display, and airliners and heavy bombers.

The Enola Gay is finally reassembled. Parts of the B-29 have been on display before. When I was at Silver Hill one time the forward part of the fuselage was being worked on. There wasn't enough space downtown for the whole airplane to be shown at the 50th anniversary show marking the end of WWII. They actually encouraged us to touch the aluminum, since this was a small sample population and they were testing a variety of surface sealants. That was not political, leaning in through a hatch and looking at the interior of the airplane that dropped The Bomb.

It got political when the veteran's groups saw the text and pictures that would help the museum visitors "interpret" the airplane. They were shocked that the Japanese were portrayed as the victims of the war, that the conflict in the Pacific was a racialist war of colonialism. Or something. The Air and Space Museum director got canned in the ensuing furor and the vets were placated, which was too damned bad but he lost his common sense.

The radio this morning made me stop on the way to the shower in amazement. The commentator said that anti-nuclear activists are going to protest Enola Gay. They want picture of the 120,000 incinerated Japanese and some sort of testimony to the monstrous nature of the airplane. It is an exact reversal of the protests eight years ago. I haven’t heard anything from the 60,000 Chinese who were bayoneted at Nanking, but that is the way history goes. It is tempting to rewrite it to fit the mood of the moment. But I think that is bogus. To know all is not to forgive all. It is just part of trying not to make the same mistakes over and over again.

Poor Smithsonian can't win. Can't wait to get out there and see it all. One thing for sure is that I won't need any help with the "context" or the "interpretation."

I just want to see the airplanes. The rest of it is just too damn bad.