The China Syndrome

The email arrived, cheery in its encouragement. “Just keep writing,” it said. So came some relief from my friend Bill who actually gets paid to write an opinion column. I had bemoaned to him the state of commentary, most problematically the dearth of topics fresh for new insight. Who needs yet another piece on, take your choice, college campus “safe spaces,” the De Blasio explosion of street vagrants, anything to do with Washington, D.C. politics, or the unfairness that is Tom Brady existence? And then, quite suddenly, the universe provided an answer from the most unlikely of sources, U.S. Senator Charles Schumer.

For those unfamiliar with the modus operandi of New York’s senior U.S. Senator, “Chuck” Schumer has raised his Sunday morning press conference to a near-religious level. Knowing the battalion of bored reporters and cameramen working the weekend graveyard shift desperately need a story, Chuck has, for the past few decades, taken it upon himself to provide weekly copy and video to the fourth estate right around communion time. The ensuing day’s coverage gives him a bounty of free media coverage that is the envy of every politician in the tristate area. The topics are indistinguishable from week to week; the script generally follows some “crisis” that his office has spent “a considerable amount of time researching” with a solution involving expending billions of federal dollars and hiring plenty of unionized employees to “fix” the issue. Yet recently Schumer came up with an idea that, unbelievably, combined high comedy with a touch of Trumpian paranoia.

“Given what we know about how cyberwarfare works…the Department of Commerce must give the green light and thoroughly check any proposals or work China’s CRRC [the firm making subway cars] does on behalf of the New York subway system,” quoth The Senator. His press release then adds ominously, “This kind of national security responsibility is just so big, and so complex, that the MTA [the folks who kind of run the subways]…should not have to foot the burden of going at it alone to assess whether or not CRRC’s low bids for work, and current contracts across the country, are part of some larger strategy. We just cannot be too careful here…”

Yes, it has actual syntax and proper punctuation, but otherwise is undistinguishable from a Trump tweet. Add that weird “Shhhhhyyna” pronunciation and you could hear it from The Donald himself. And the subject, a contract for new subway cars, is almost as petty.

Perhaps Schumer imagines a nefarious plot out of a Hollywood action film. With the clack of the tracks in the background, the camera bounces and sways with the passengers, a mass oblivious to the impending danger while focused on their phones or maybe even reading a paper. A quick cut focuses on a single finger hovering over a keyboard, a blinking curser next to the word “Execute?” on the background screen. The slow-motion digit descends with a telltale “click” and we are thrown back to the straphangers looking around as the lights flicker and then, with a screech of metal and sparks flying, the train comes to an emergency stop. Bodies crash into each other. A faint announcement comes over the intercom, mostly unintelligible and sounding, well, like Chinese. New Yorkers start swearing like New Yorkers.

Welcome to Tuesday’s commute. Or pretty much any day ending in “Y.” Clearly Chuck doesn’t take the subway on a regular basis or he would realize this apocalyptic vision is the average ride. The threat isn’t a theoretical foreign intervention, the threat is the very real MTA.

And at the basest level, what national security problem is there? Somehow I doubt Chinese President Xi wants to hack and find out how many times I swipe my fare card, or that Foreign Minister Wang is secretly slowing down trains so that Yankees fans are late to the game. In fact, a little Chinese authority might not be such a bad thing for the subway system. Holding the doors open and delaying service? Off to detention camp. Deface a subway car with graffiti? Off to detention camp. Jump a turnstile to avoid the fare? You get the idea. And in the end, when it comes to faceless bureaucracies that are answerable to nobody, there isn’t much difference between China and the MTA.

So Senator Schumer, if you really want to improve the subways, ask the people who actually ride it every day. But be careful, the answers may get so nuclear hot they bore a hole through the earth’s crust to the other side of the planet. The original China Syndrome.

© 2019 Alexander W. Stephens. All Rights Reserved.