From Zero to Hero

The bumbling buffoon is back and there are few places to shelter from talks of "terrists" and "clean, hybrid ve-hicles" tonight. The President's State of the Union address is to be found on every television network this evening. Also to be found is a tearful senior speechwriter back at the White House. With head in hands he’s questioning why he can’t write for a leader of over 300 million people who is capable of delivering his script without tripping over punctuation and compound sentence structure. Nevertheless, the breaks for applause from the floor keep coming. You’ve got to wonder if modern day speeches are only written for these back-slapping moments and the statisticians. Significant column inches will be dedicated to the number of "applause-breaks" tomorrow. A few more undeliverable promises in the speech and soon we’ll all be tuning in for fifty minutes of continuous clapping. My suggestion? Move the event outside. It’s minus 2degC in DC tonight, if something’s really worth the applause then the politicians will take off their gloves to make the effort, if not then you’ll just hear the muted thump thump thump of mitten on mitten. You may even see the President thwacked with a few snowballs…imagine that, Secret Service agents jumping in the way to take those hits.


While the lecture continues on how the rest of the world can be saved from untethered leaders and nations who bypass UN resolutions (ahem) I’ve been learning a little more about how this event functions. One of the traditions dates back to 1982. In his speech President Reagan paid tribute to a government employee who had jumped into a frozen river to save a passenger from a crashed aircraft. Since then a selection of American heroes are invited to sit in the First Lady’s Box and for a few minutes we hear about their outstanding achievements.
(Oh goodness, no! We’ve just reached that bit now. A Congolese immigrant who has made it as a professional basketball player and has helped build a hospital back in Kinshasa has just been referred to as both Mutembe and Mutombo. It’s the guy’s name! Get it right!). Anyway, one of the great hero stories I’ve ever heard actually comes out of New York and only occurred a couple of weeks ago. Wesley Autrey was waiting on the platform at a Harlem subway station with his two daughters. Nearby, a man collapsed and began convulsing; he then fell onto the tracks between the two rails. The lights of the No.1 train were already coming down the tunnel so without a moment’s thought Autrey left his two kids on the platform and jumped down onto the track covering the convulsing body with his own, pressing it down into a space of 20” – five carriages rolled over the top of them before the driver finally brought the train to a stop, the clearance was 22”. Both were fine and extracted by workers. Autrey later said, "I'm still saying I'm not a hero ... I'm just saying I saw someone in distress and went to his aid. You should do the right thing." Now those are the types of people that really deserve taking your mittens off for.