Evaluating Obama’s first week

I’ve held off on writing anything about Barack Obama for as long as I possibly could. Lord knows we have been saturated with media coverage of the new president to an extent that we have never experienced before, and I didn’t want to be just another of the million voices dissecting his every move.

But when it came time to pick a topic for this week’s column, the only stories that seemed to be choking out every other topic in the news were Obama and the floundering economy. And frankly when I think about the economy I become too depressed to move, much less write anything. So, without further ado, here are my thoughts on President Obama’s first week on the job.

- I don’t believe I have ever seen the mainstream media fawn over anyone the way they have for Obama. Any minute you expect the anchor or reporter covering his latest act to proclaim his/her undying love for the man. That makes me a little nervous. The press is supposed to act as a watchdog when it comes to our government. How likely is it that some reporter who thinks they have uncovered a scandal or evidence of wrongdoing in this administration would get the go-ahead to report on it from CBS News or the New York Times? I don’t like the odds on that one.

- We have our first black president. I understand that this is news, and I understand why this is exciting for a lot of people. But I wonder how many people feel the way I do and could care less if the president is black or white, male or female, gay or straight, or whether he’s a Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, or atheist. I really only care about what he DOES while he’s in office. What decisions will he make and how will those decisions affect me and my family? That’s really all that matters to me. But I feel as is I’ve wandered away from the herd with this attitude. Again.

- Obama is every bit the godsend to right-wing talking heads that they could have hoped for. In less than 10 days he has rolled back abortion restrictions, pledged to shut down Guantanamo Bay, moved to toughen environmental standards, and more or less apologized to the Muslim world for Bush’s hard-nosed anti-terror tactics. This environment has to be much more favorable for them than when Bush and a Republican congress were in charge and less popular with the public than Rosie O’Donnell’s failed variety show. Rush Limbaugh hasn’t been this giddy since he got off the happy pills. I’m just waiting for him to say “this guy is more overrated than Donovan McNabb.”

- Somewhat under the radar was Obama’s pledge to hold a “fiscal responsibility summit” in February with the goal of coming up with a plan to address our unsustainable fiscal position in relation to entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare. It is mind-boggling to imagine this summit taking place even as the government is in the midst of an unprecedented deficit-spending binge as they try to rescue our moribund economy but, well, that’s the plan. Anyone who reads this column regularly knows that the federal deficit and the entitlement program mess is the windmill I most often tilt at, so in spite of my deep skepticism that this will amount to anything I was pleased to hear that this issue is at least on the Obama table. In the highly unlikely event that anything resembling a serious plan to deal with the problem emerges from the summit, it is possible that I will be forced to join the ranks of the Obamaniacs. I may even get one of his t-shirts and tape over the “Change” slogan with a “Fiscal Responsibility” proclamation.

Laziness and desperation lead to a dangerous fake death

Have you ever made such a mess of your life that you just wanted to start completely over? I’m sure many of us have felt that way at some point and maybe, in the throes of regret over tragedies we have brought upon ourselves, we’ve even considered doing some crazy things to try and erase those mistakes and start fresh.

Perhaps some of us who are creative thinkers have even considered doing something completely off the wall, like, for instance, faking our own death. But 99.99% of us would never in a million years really do such a thing. We would realize that these things are usually unsuccessful and are extremely embarrassing when they don’t go off smoothly.

Ah, but then there is that other 0.01% of the population that does not allow rationality to get in the way of their “brilliant” schemes. And every so often a member of that exclusive group goes and does something spectacular, and spectacularly stupid, and the rest of us can only watch the situation unfold and marvel. We were treated to just such a scenario this week.

By now you have probably heard about Marcus Schrenker’s ill-fated attempt to escape his numerous personal and legal difficulties by faking a death-by-plane crash. The plane did indeed crash, but it didn’t take long for people to notice that when it did so he was not inside. And when a strange man showed up at someone’s door at 2:30 AM along the flight path of said plane claiming to have been in a “canoe accident”, the inevitable sad ending to this saga was irrevocably set in motion.

It is hard to imagine how this guy’s plan ever seemed like a sound one. My guess is that a great deal of beer may have been involved.

First of all, any fan of bad movies could have told Schrenker that if you are going to fake a death-by-plane crash you have to steal a body that is roughly height and weight proportionate to your own and have it sitting in the pilot’s seat when you jump out. Duh!

Also, leaving the plane to fly over a populated area where it might crash into someone’s house when it ran out of fuel – not the best idea. How about pointing the thing out to sea, Marcus? You might even get lucky and it might sink and get lost, never to be recovered.

In fact I think a plane crash is one of the worst ways to fake your death. It draws way too much attention to the situation, and the odds that your true intentions are likely to be discovered are much higher that way. It seems it would be a lot smarter to be low key.

What’s wrong with telling everyone you are going hiking to some remote location and just never coming back? People will assume you got lost and if you are not specific about your plans they won’t even know where to look for your remains.

Or here’s one I like a lot - how about going to visit an active volcano, on your own, dropping a shoe next to the mouth, and slipping away never to be heard from again? “Must have fallen in,” people will speculate. It’s not like they’re going to even try to recover that body.

And that was just off the top of my head. This isn’t rocket science. Instead we have unmanned planes dropping out of the sky and endangering everyone’s safety because some guy couldn’t be troubled to think his fake death plan through properly.

If you are in a desperate situation and considering doing something drastic like this, I strongly encourage you to reconsider. Facing up to your problems is very likely to be a higher percentage solution. But if you are dead-set on a pretend death, put some thought into it and keep the safety of innocent people in mind. After all, you want people to remember you fondly.