Star - Spangled Shortfall

“It’s a Trap!’” ― Admiral Ackbar

When I was a kid, parked on the living-room carpet with Pee-wee’s Playhouse and the Saturday-morning sugar rush, Ol Ronny Reagan would break in with what felt like political spam. He’d talk about how “special” America was, about the American “genius for splendid and unselfish action,” and the bit about how “into the hands of America God has placed the destinies of afflicted humanity.” It landed. I believed it. How could I not? My world ended at the county line; the map was myth; the myth was televised.

Author Sidebar – Pink-O Commie Social Studies, Columbus High. Mr. Roger “Deacon” Cates — church elder by Sunday, exceptionalism foreman by Monday. He doubled as driver’s-ed, too. Trick was simple: drive like a saint for ten minutes, wait for the Deacon to nod off, then practice your hairpins. F1 by way of Ford Taurus.

He made us keep journals. Daily prompt, mandatory “opinions,” occasional public readings. It looked like democracy: share your view, defend it, grow. In practice? A pop quiz in orthodoxy. There was the answer he wanted, and then there was the pile where dissent went to die. Also: Baptist deacon. Which meant if you colored outside the lines, his eyes went full brimstone. Ask me how I know. Then one morning: “In three sentences or fewer, explain why you should be thankful you live in America and not somewhere else.” Wait — what?

This was before I knew anything about “fake news,” but I could tell that “objective” question was crooked. First off, it’s a goddamn supposition masquerading as inquiry. To answer it objectively, I’d have to have lived in the other 185 countries of the world at the time. I was fifteen—meaning I’d have needed to rack up roughly a dozen countries per year since birth just to make that claim with a straight face. I was insulted. So — compliance or reality? I flipped a Lincoln—reality it is. And here was my response: The sample size is the entire world, and I haven’t lived in the rest of it. That makes the prompt a non sequitur—agenda dressed up as inquiry. For all I know, America could be mediocre. Besides—have you ever seen the Alps? And of course that was the day my journal entry’s wavefunction collapsed as I was called upon to read it.

Now—if Mr. Cates were Abraham and I Isaac—he’d have gutted me anyway, angel on the mount be damned. He’d mute the voices and strike me down.

He didn’t. He didn’t have to; even the outcast in the back row, eyes rimmed in black and boredom, hissed “Commie.” Jesus – even the back-row fraternity I was about to join rejected me.

And Ronny? Well, since he was accustomed to being in front of the camera – being a trained actor and all – he was quite convincing.

And if that weren’t enough, the anti-drug campaigns — fronted by Nancy — made me swear off fried eggs; turning breakfast into a crime scene – sizzle, pop, fear. Christ, even eggs were a target: the “this is your brain on drugs” spot seared a yolk in a skillet as if a frying pan were a stand-in for neurochemistry. Meanwhile, we spent the better part of a few decades arguing whether eggs were breakfast or biohazard — cholesterol panic, redemption arc, repeat.

Looking back, the eighties were a blast — but culturally dumb. The sugar high hardened into a creed: America is the best. Fine — if people actually understood America and its alter egos. I didn’t, not yet. But I did catch glimpses of the real thing: the Space Shuttle program — precision, risk, audacity — moments when we led instead of posed.

We even handled disasters with a kind of public grace. I remember sitting on the floor of the Columbus Elementary library, staring up at one of those tube TVs strapped to a rolling cart. I must’ve been eight, and even then I thought the whole rig was top-heavy — the center of gravity way too high. I sat as far back as I could, convinced it might topple at any moment. That anxiety vanished when the Challenger broke apart on live TV. Our teachers weren’t astronauts (like Christa McAuliffe – Payload Specialist and first woman in space), so nobody yanked the plug right away; for a few stunned seconds we all pretended the violent, off script “separation” was just complicated physics playing out above the clouds. I’m just thankful YouTube didn’t exist yet. We didn’t have the option of reliving the trauma on endless loop after experiencing it firsthand.

Man… technology is the greatest.

In the aftermath came the sober comfort of root cause: the Rogers Commission, with Cold War technical aristocrat Richard Feynman dropping an O-ring into ice water on camera to show how cold had killed flexibility. The performance was science as indictment — simple, elegant, devastating. If Apollo 13 taught us improvisation, Challenger taught accountability. Together they became a measure for triumph and for disaster — and why both matter. Root cause analysis has since permeated into every corner of society — domestic, social, commercial, industrial. It even helps us track vectors of disease transmission. We learn. We grow. We improve. But what is it about social disasters — the affairs of man — where we just can’t seem to get it right?

The year was 1993, and I was in junior high. By then the school had stopped strapping TVs to top-heavy carts (I like to think root cause had something to do with it) and had begun bolting them permanently to the corners of every classroom like Orwellian propaganda displays.

We had just settled into our social studies class when the current events broadcast flickered onto the screen. Monday, April 19, 1993 — the United States government launched a brutal assault against a religious sect known as the Branch Davidians near Waco, Texas. And the shit was shown live. Imagine watching a building burn on live TV, knowing innocent men, women, and children were trapped inside. Then realizing the whole thing was unfolding less than 150 miles away — in the same state you were sitting in, pencil in hand, feet swinging under a middle-school desk.

Oh wait.

That’s dumb of me.

You CAN imagine it.

The algorithms of human outrage and the commoditization of emotion that follows have turned this kind of spectacle into a currency now.

Trauma gets uploaded, time-stamped, optimized, and monetized. We’ve traded public grief for public engagement. Tomorrow's tragedy is just another thumbnail in the feed. Fast-forward to 1994: the juice got loose — but not before allegedly killing his ex-wife and her boyfriend.

They aired the getaway live, the whole absurd spectacle unfolding in real time. It felt less like a police chase and more like a Benny Hill sketch — slow-motion chaos with the wrong soundtrack, except this time the stakes weren’t slapstick comedy and bad-dad jokes.

Honestly, it could've doubled as a bizarre marketing campaign for Ford, making the Bronco seem… well… more interesting. There’s a reason it took them twenty-five years to resurrect that beast of automotive history.

Then it became a saga - it mutated into a full-blown soap opera — and they livestreamed the entire legal circus as it unfolded in the courtroom. It culminated in that ridiculous glove scene that “didn’t fit.” Bullshit.

He was probably instructed to drink more Gatorade and water than he ever managed during his football career — just enough to swell his hands and make the glove tight. A little sodium manipulation and suddenly we’re all supposed to believe leather shrinks with moral convenience? Where was Feynman this time? But I was witnessing something historic. News had morphed from a nightly or weekly “touch base” into something live, continuous, unfiltered — an always-on spectacle. The O.J. saga wasn’t just reported; it was broadcast in real time, consumed like entertainment, metabolized as culture. It was the birth of a new era where information didn’t arrive — it streamed.

Which also meant that if you ran out of something to report, you’d better find something else — even if that meant revising history or manufacturing outrage. The O.J. chase revealed the new rules: News wasn’t obligated to inform anymore; it was obligated to continue. The broadcast could never end — not for lack of content, not for lack of relevance, and certainly not for lack of dignity. So the industry did what any organism does when it finds a commercial opportunity - it embraced it and evolved. Except instead of developing better teeth or sharper claws, journalism developed narrative.

Plots. Villains. Heroes. Cliffhangers.

It became a self-replenishing ecosystem where every unresolved detail, every rumor, every shaky camcorder angle could be stretched, repackaged, and sold as “breaking.”

It wasn’t news anymore; it was serial storytelling wearing a press badge. Same for the Clinton blowjob drama. Think about the outcome if Bill had just come clean:

“Yes, I got a blowjob. Yes, I shot little Willies out of my flesh cannon and onto her navy dress. And yes — besides that tobacco dildo I puffed on — I’ve also smoked marijuana.”

Then imagine him leaning forward, leveling the cameras with that southern charm: “But you want to know what else I’ve done?

I helped steer post–Cold War diplomacy with Russia.

I negotiated one of the most important health-care protections in modern American history — preventing insurance companies from abandoning patients mid-treatment or denying them entirely for pre-existing conditions.

And I married that woman Hillary because she used to give damn good ones too.” The whole scandal could’ve collapsed under the weight of adult honesty and humor.

But that’s the thing about vice in America: It’s never the act that destroys you — it’s the performance required to deny it. Author Sidebar – In Sickness and in Health In 1991, my mother was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma in her stomach. My father had always worked for companies that—back then—still offered what passed for decent insurance. The treatment regimen was brutal: roughly nine months of chemotherapy, followed by nine months of radiation.

I didn’t understand cancer. All I knew was that it carried the vibe of a death sentence. Within the first couple of months it became clear that, although the treatment was wrecking her body, the cancer was responding.

And that’s when it happened.

The insurance company dropped coverage mid-treatment, and my father was forced to pay medical bills out of pocket. I don’t know what that translates to in ’90s dollars. I only know it permanently changed the trajectory of his life—and his career. For nearly two years I bounced between family: my Aunt Joann and Uncle Charles; my cousin Arthur and his wife Barbara; and my godfather, “Uncle Bob” Richardson, and his wife Sherri. They fed me, clothed me, and got me to school while my mother spent most of her time in hospitals and my dad worked out of state trying to keep income flowing.

So when Washington finally started putting guardrails on that kind of cruelty, I felt something close to gratitude. In 1996, President Clinton signed HIPAA, which—at minimum—began limiting how group health plans could exclude people for pre-existing conditions and barred certain forms of health-status discrimination. And later, the Affordable Care Act slammed the door harder—prohibiting pre-existing condition exclusions and making “rescissions” (retroactive coverage cancellations) illegal except in cases of fraud.

If that was the only arc the system ever bent toward decency, it mattered. I thought of the fear. I thought of my mother. And I thought about the millions of lives that would be changed by the simple idea that you shouldn’t be allowed to pull the parachute after someone jumps.