This country is not doing so well. In “American Hegemony and the Three Great Warning Signs of its Collapse,” I wrote of a longstanding trend in America (though certainly in abundant evidence elsewhere as well) to avoid addressing its problems:

We are a nation of interpreters and dreamers -- and wonderfully so. We get more interested in new projects than in maintenance or fixing what is old... . The growing portrait is of a more industrial version of the Soviet Union, an increasingly dilapidated nation powerful because of its size and money... . History has this to say to those at the top, to the mighty empires around the world with their vested interests that prevent addressing the problems all can see but few can easily solve: solve your fucking problems, because your position is not an entitlement.

Today, however, I am outraged. While the events of the last twenty-four hours are less dramatic than skyscrapers and America’s military command center in flames, they may be all the more telling about the state of America. The most prominent story has been a fire at a Rhode Island nightclub at which the band Great White was performing: the fire, apparently set off by a small pyrotechnic device, spread very rapidly through the wooden structure, was not immediately recognized as not part of the show by the drunken partiers, and not only was the fire department not notified of the pyrotechnic device, but fire extinguishers were not nearby and no one seems to have taken any action to put out the fire or quickly organize an evacuation plan. As a result, despite being only a one-story building, some 96 people are presently known to have died by smoke and trampling and fire, their dying screams as they burned audible through the wooden walls through which they could not escape, and almost as many are hospitalized, with some 25 in critical condition.

This is more than just a tragedy. It is more than just a stupid tragedy, like some drunken idiot on a motorcycle slamming into a semi. It is rather that most offensive of tragedies: an intolerably and systemically stupid tragedy.

We have known for years that concert organizers routinely ignore public safety. For years, incident after incident of deaths and injuries at concerts have demonstrated this. Hell, Woodstock (the original one) demonstrated the costliness of dealing with crowds gone awry, as any attempt to make profit faded as drastic measures were taken to prevent mass death and dehydration.

At the same time, the nightclub tragedy has become its own subgenre of tragedy. Just a week before this current fire, 21 died in a Chicago nightclub on Monday when a stampede broke out after pepper spray was mistaken for a terrorist attack. The twentieth century has seen worse examples. This is nothing new: in 1942, almost 500 were killed in a fire at a club when exit doors opening inward caused a pile-up at the door preventing their opening. In March 1990, 87 died in a Bronx fire at a club with only one exit, unfortunately in flames. In fact, a Minnesota nightclub on Monday -- just three days before this deadly fire in Rhode Island -- burned down when a band used pyrotechnics, apparently without notifying the manager. In that case, a well-executed evacuation plan saved lives. Although we obviously have laws to avoid such instances, they are not satisfactorily enforced, whether through corruption or systemic incompetence.

I went to sleep watching videotape taken in the nightclub as it caught fire, over and over on the news. The death toll rose as I watched from ten to 26. I awoke and turned on the news, and the first line I heard set the death toll at an appalling 75, which quickly was revised to 85 as I watched. That first line also announced, almost as if an afterthought, that a massive explosion at an Exxon oil facility off Staten Island had exploded as a barge delivered some 100,000 barrels of unleaded, sending enormous flames and black smoke once again billowing a mile high over the Manhattan skyline. Was the cause a smart terrorist plan? No, it too was apparently an accident. It apparently occurred while a massive amount of fuel was being loaded, and a few people were killed while the water burned, however contained by comparison to the oil spills that still occur around the world with frightening regularity.

The government is not so much as bothering to provide even the illusion that this problem is being aggressively addressed. And this is not just the Bush administration; this is nothing new. This is the American problem: it’s a year and a half after 11 September, and we still don’t have security at nuclear facilities and water sources to prevent attack upon these obvious terrorist targets. People burn, oil storage facilities explode, planes crash, and we just say it’s an accident and continue, ignoring that these are indications of systemic vulnerability. We have smoke detectors and safety inspections because the government mandated them to prevent such accidents. It is the beyond the ability of the law to prevent all accidents, but the recent record in America demonstrates the remarkable failure of the law to use legislation to prevent such sloppiness.

Later during this same day, the day after the night of the tragic fire, as workers pulled unidentifiable roasted corpse after unidentifiable roasted corpse out of the wreckage of a Rhode Island nightclub, the same day an oil facility exploded in New York City, word came that the hospital that had performed a ground-breaking heart and lung transplant -- Duke University Medical Center -- had actually botched the operation and that Jesica Santillan, the young female Hispanic recipient, would likely be irreparably brain-damaged. The reason: donor organs of the wrong blood type were used. Even remotely educated people with no medical experience know better than this -- perhaps they should have to observe and check that the doctors are putting the right organs into people. The family recently gave a press conference, understandably crying for their daughter and complaining of their treatment by the staff, who are probably scared of a multi-million-dollar lawsuit -- which I hope is forthcoming, affecting the most people possible.

I would like to remind you at this point that America is the most powerful nation in the world, its GDP vastly above its nearest competitor. And what is this government of awe-inspiring power doing while doctors put the wrong organs in some poor girl? It’s debating a Bush administration proposal to restrict legal judgments against doctors, which demonstrably have made -- and have been designed to make -- U.S. medicine safer, on the grounds that they so drastically have raised insurance premiums paid by doctors that doctors in certain states have refused to perform procedures which would drastically raise their insurance rates. Of course, this trusts the insurance market to automatically correct for lower liability, which remains utterly theoretical: moreover, California has adopted a similar policy only to see insurance rates rise. Any attempt to directly address the insurance companies, let alone to socialize medicine, is off the table as the Republicans who control both the federal Legislative and Executive branches go after the trial lawyers, traditionally allied with Democrats, because those lawyers have gotten too much money for victims of medical malpractice. If the problem is high insurance premiums, one might think going after the insurance companies that set those premiums or forcing the doctors to perform procedures no matter the premiums, or some combination of both, might make more sense than listening to those poor insurance companies’ excuses for why they charge so much. Another sterling example of America addressing its systemic problems while, meanwhile, a girl has the wrong heart in her and probably has been brain-damaged as a result of one of the clearest cases of medical incompetence that one could imagine.

The last twenty-four hours have not been as tragic as 11 September, but they have perhaps indicated more for the future of America. We’re making a $26 billion opening offer to coerce Turkey into letting us use their bases to stage a war on Iraq, while our spending on homeland security since 11 September has been, by some estimates, only $1 billion. We’re good at launching wars, good at big and exciting programs, a hotbed of invention and new ideas, but we’re just not doing a good job at maintaining things. Our power is built upon surprisingly weak and perhaps decaying foundations. Fires like this, medical botches like this, explosions of fuel facilities next to major cities -- these are things we expect from third-world nations.

Of course, these three events in the last day, combined with the earlier nightclub disasters and the relative lack of useful response to 11 September is just the tip of the iceberg. It has been a bad season in America. Just days after 11 September, a passenger airplane crashed in New York City, scaring the hell out of everyone that it was yet another terrorist attack, especially given the combination of airplane crash and New York City. But no: it was another accident. And again, it was preventable: a plane took off too soon after the last, from a cramped airport letting safety slide a bit in order to keep a hectic flight schedule rolling, flew into the last plane’s wake, and went straight down. This is not, as they say, rocket science.

Then, of course, we have the shuttle tragedy, most likely caused by debris hitting Columbia’s left wing during take-off. I like NASA and am glad not only for the openness they displayed at press conferences after the tragedy but also for that organizations quick admission of guilt, of its desire to find out, as they put it, where it went wrong. And it did: like we knew of problems with the O-rings prior to the Challenger disaster, we’ve long known of the problem of debris knocking off the heat-resistant tiles that were the product of remarkable engineering in the 1970s. Then, NASA had proposed a three-prong plan -- a reusable orbiter, a space station staging ground, and a manned trip to Mars -- and got enough money for one. The legacy of America’s moon landing, a titanic moment for our entire species, was cut off. The burning Columbia trailing over American skies was twenty years old, maintained only with great expense, because the world’s most powerful country did not have the vision to replace it with a new model, even in 2003 -- just two years after that year in which Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick then reasonably predicted that we would be on our way to Jupiter or Saturn.

If we do not learn from our mistakes, we stagnate and diminish. We must commit ourselves to looking at these preventable accidents and say with the certainty of our angry hearts, “never again, first here and then everywhere else.” We must say this with renewed vigor about 11 September. And we must say this with the same vigor at the many deadly sloppy and incompetent accidents with which America is afflicted, largely because we did not say it, or keep that certainty borne of pain, when such sloppiness and incompetence occurred in the past. If we allow complacency and the paralyzation of entrenched, if not corrupt, political parties while our infrastructure, not only material but legal and enforcement and humanitarian, to slide, America’s foundation will deteriorate. You can prop up a foundation, pretending to address its cracks, but the future is not kind to such actions because such actions are not kind to the future.

It is precisely this, more than the horror of any of these recent tragedies in particular, that should be generating outrage. Death is a part of life. Tragedy is a part of life. We cannot at present legislate such concerns away. But we can legislate against stupidity and incompetence, especially when it has precedent. Death may not be preventable, but preventable death is just that. And it need produce outrage.

YOUR ASSIGNMENT

I've got a new essay available on ContinuityPages.com: " Continuity: No-Prizes, Retcons, and the Mental Acrobatics of Continuity Repair." This is the seventh Sequential Culture column I've published there, in addition to the 48 Apollonian Bacchanalia columns published here in the last year. Kiss, kiss.

Get a friend to visit this site. I'm presently in the process of reformatting the body of my writing, including unpublished material -- a project which will make a great deal of work available online on this site.

Discuss this column online on the message board.