The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [61]
On my way to Des Moines to start this trip, I passed through O’Hare Airport in Chicago where I ran into a friend who worked for the St Louis Post Dispatch. He told me he had been working extra hard lately because of something that had happened to his boss. The boss had been driving home from work late one Saturday night when he had stopped at some traffic lights. As he waited for the lights to change, the passenger door opened and a man with a gun got in. The gunman made the boss drive down to the riverfront, where he shot him in the head and took his money. The boss had been in a coma for three weeks and they weren’t sure whether he was going to live.
My friend was telling me this not because it was such an incredible story, but simply by way of elucidating why he was having to work so damned hard lately. As for his boss, his attitude seemed to be that if you forget to lock your car doors when you’re driving through St Louis late at night, well, you’ve got to expect to take a bullet in the head from time to time. It was very odd, his deadpan attitude, but it seems to be more and more the way in America now. It made me feel like a stranger.
I drove downtown and parked near City Hall. On top of the building is a statue of William Penn. It’s the main landmark downtown, visible from all around the city, but it was covered in scaffolding. In 1985, after decades of neglect, the city fathers decided to refurbish the statue before it fell down. So they covered it in scaffolding. However, this cost so much that there was no money left to do the repairs. Now, two years later, the scaffolding was still there and not a lick of work had been done. A city engineer had recently announced with a straight face that before long the scaffolding itself would need to be refurbished. This is more or less how Philadelphia works, which is to say, not very well. No other city in America pursues the twin ideals of corruption and incompetence with quite the same enthusiasm. When it comes to asinine administration, Philadelphia is in a league of its own.
Consider: in 1985, a bizarre sect called Move barricaded itself into a tenement house on the west side of town. The police chief and mayor considered the options open to them and decided that the most intelligent use of their resources would be to blow up the house – but of course! – even though they knew there were children inside and it was in the middle of a densely-populated part of the city. So they dropped a bomb on the house from a helicopter. This started a fire that quickly grew out of control and burned down most of the neighbourhood – sixty-one houses in all – and killed eleven people, including all the children in the barricaded home.
When they aren’t being incompetent, city officials like to relax with a little corruption. Just as I was driving into town I heard on the radio that a former city councillor had been sentenced to ten years in jail and his aide to eight years for attempted extortion. The judge called it a gross breach of public trust. He should know. Across town a state review board was calling for the dismissal of nine of the judge’s colleagues for taking cash gifts from members of the Roofers Union. Two of those judges were already awaiting trial on extortion charges. This sort of thing is routine in Philadelphia. A few months earlier, when a state official named Bud Dwyer was similarly accused of corruption,