The Curious Phenomenon of American Incompetence

No Incompetent Paddler Survives This 

Appollo 11 landing Neil Armstrong on the moon.  American Navy Seals swooping down on a compound in Pakistan and killing Osama Bin Laden and escaping with his body.  Any day at the Cleveland Clinic cardiac surgery suite.  Drones which kill a terrorist suspect half a planet away while the operator doing the killing sits safely in a dark suite in Langley, Virginia.  Sully Sullivan's airplane hits a flock of geese and he sets his airplane down in the Hudson River with not a single (human) life lost.

These are what we like to think about when we tell ourselves America is number one, competent to an astonishing degree.

But those are the exceptional cases. Those are what we are capable of, on a good day. But day in and day out, across America, the American way is not that.  The American way is the police department in Memphis which sits on rape kit tests, never bothering to process them, while serial rapists continue to prey on local girls and women for years. And multiply that incompetence by a thousand police departments from Baltimore to Los Angeles to Chicago.  There are the drugs which are approved for sale with warning bells going off, only to poison patients for years and esteemed professors like Milton Friedman shrugging it off, decrying the very existence of any institution to prevent bad drugs from reaching the population (i.e. decrying the FDA), asserting that drug companies can be regulated by the market, by fear of lawsuits.  In a sense, Mr. Friedman argued for institutionalized incompetence, because he was horrified by the idea of "regulations."

But what are regulations, if not a codified system for insuring competence?

During World War II, the American military suffered astonishing losses through sheer incompetence of generalship. Prior to D Day,  a training exercise off the coast of England was intercepted by German U boats and several hundred soldiers and sailors were slaughtered, during a training exercise.  The D Day invasion itself was a disaster, succeeding only because overwhelming numbers were thrown at a numerically inferior force. 

German commanders, after the war told of how astonished they were the allies never targeted the dams, which if bombed would have flooded their ball bearing factories and ended the war early--the German tanks would have been stopped in their tracks, literally.  American bright boys, like Robert Macnamara, who selected targets, simply were incompetent. American Sherman tanks, built by Henry Ford, were vastly inferior to the German built Panzer tanks. The American tanks were death traps, incompetently conceived and constructed, rolling powder kegs,  in which American soldiers were immolated, while the German tanks withstood face to face combat admirably.

Americans built Microsoft and Apple and Silicon Valley, and MIT, but that accounts for a small slice of the American workforce. In every state, in every health care organization incompetent "coders" and auditors dog doctors, transforming every effort at good quality care into a mindless race to the bottom.

Competence usually begins with a master, who actually knows something other people need to know and would benefit from knowing--and he imparts that wisdom and discipline to people who disseminates this down a line of command, usually through a hierarchy, which insures discipline, quality control and exacting execution.

But that sort of leadership, that willingness to be unloved if you are the leader, that insistence on performance, ahead of personal relationships, ahead of comfort, ahead of loyalty, that is a stern and ruthless discipline, which Americans somehow lack.

Our political system, our financial system somehow, in ways beyond the comprehension and experience of the Phantom, institutionalize incompetence. 

Maybe this happens here because we are a polyglot nation--and we are reluctant to say, "This is how it must be done" because we realize in a diverse world, there are many ways of doing things, and many measures of success.

But in the end, either the rape kit is tested and the rapist caught, or he is not. Either the patient anesthetized upon the table makes it to the recovery room alive, or he does not. Either the plane lands safely or it crashes and burns. Either the war is won and the new government is in place and remains functioning, or we have ISIS in Iraq making a mockery of every American life lost there. Either the Congress passes legislation to resolve the child immigrant tidal wave, or it does not. Either the Congress decides government is a good thing, or it decides not to govern.  Either the bankers and Wall Street types who gave us incompetent credit back securities are tolerated or they are not.  Either schools teach children what they need to know, or they do not. 

All this flows from the nature of our citizenry. If we are uneducated, undisciplined, tolerant of failure and incompetence, we get what is coming to us.