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This Week:
- Timeline: August 2003
- Places & Culture
- Weekly Digest
Beneath the streets of Manhattan, subway cars stopped in their tracks, went pitch black, and started to swelter when the power went out on a Thursday afternoon last month. In one of the broadest power failures ever, darkness enveloped swaths of seven states and swept into Canada, closing airports and office buildings, disrupting hospitals and homes. At the feet of blackened skyscrapers in New York, people spread newspapers and slept on the sidewalk. They boiled their drinking water in Detroit, kept candlelit shops open in Toronto, were told not to drive in Ohio (where the problem may have started). Who would have thought the loss of power could leave us feeling so … powerless? "You realize just how dependent we are on electricity," said New York's Mayor Bloomberg, and soon a caveman in a New Yorker cartoon, sitting on a stone and roasting fish over a fire, said to another, "And then one day the grid went down and never came back up." It brought back memories of the last time New York City was devastated, as did released transcripts of telephone calls and radio transmissions on the morning of September 11, 2001. Earlier, a forensic scientist said as many as 1,000 victims of that day may never be identified.
We felt just as powerless about events elsewhere in the world in August. In Iraq, where the postwar death toll of U.S. soldiers exceeded the casualty count from the war itself, bombings ravaged Baghdad, including U.N. headquarters and a Shiite shrine. Bombay, Jakarta, and Jerusalem were also shattered by blasts. But elsewhere, the loss of power was empowering. Charles Taylor vacated the presidency of Liberia, coaxing flickers of hope for peace there. Hambali, an al Qaeda leader who planned last year's bombing of Bali, was caught in Thailand. Not all shifts in power seemed so promising; action hero Arnold Schwarzenegger became the most talked-about candidate to replace California's governor. California television stations refrained from airing Schwarzenegger's movies, lest opponents demand equal time under campaign advertising laws. "All That's Missing Is the Popcorn," said Time magazine of the Schwarzenegger story. So much for the dog days of August, which, we presume, are meant to be idling carelessly on a hammock listening to a ball game. Which is, more or less, what cost one sportswriter his job; he was fired for filing a report on a game he watched on TV but did not attend.
People used to feel powerless about racial injustice in America, before Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech, the 40th anniversary of which was marked last month. The timeless and deeply religious speech evoked principles of justice and righteousness as fundamental to the Bible as the Ten Commandments, which were removed from the Alabama Supreme Court in a controversial ruling. Thou shall not steal, they say, but last month, a 91-year-old bank robber did anyway. Thou shall not kill, as a Congressman from South Dakota allegedly did after running a stop sign. The gift of life, meanwhile, was celebrated by participants in the first known three-way kidney transplant.
Father Walter Ong, a Jesuit linguist and student of Marshall McLuhan, who studied the effect of media on oral traditions, died in August at age 90. John Burgess was the first African American bishop of an Episcopal diocese in the United States. Colonel John Landsdale Jr. raided the Nazis' atomic weapons labs in 1945, before the Soviets could get to them. Gregory Hines, one of the fleetest tap dancers of his time, died of cancer at age 57. Herb Brooks, who coached the "Miracle on Ice" U.S. hockey team at the 1980 Olympics, died in a car accident. With his record-setting son Barry, Bobby Bonds formed one of the greatest father-son duos in baseball history. Claude Passeau pitched Game 3 of the 1945 World Series for the Chicago Cubs, the day before a fan put the Billy Goat hex on the team. Connie Reeves, considered America's oldest cowgirl, died at 101 after being thrown from her horse. Roxie Laybourne was an ornithologist who studied the death of birds in jet engines for airplane manufacturers. In a place where people feel powerless, Miss Hen, as she was known to everyone she considered family in Chicago's Cabrini-Green housing projects, was a light in the darkness.
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