Like Steven McCrosky in Airplane Picking the Wrong Week to End Vices, Bass Picked Wrong Week to Be in Africa on L.A. Business As Wild Fires Raged

 

In the movie Airplane, Steven McCrosky, the Chicago Air Traffic Controller, by Lloyd Bridges played
Has the task of trying to get a flight whose captain and co-pilot have become incapacitated by food poisoning from eating inflight fish filets
Ted Striker, played by Robert Hayes, was a passenger who was a pilot in the war but drove his squadron to crash into the ground killing 6 and the rest spared
Is drafted to fly the plane after the captain and copilot are incapacitated to land at O’Hare
One mishap after another occurs on the plane and in the tower while McCrosky his problems with talking the plane down shares
He laments he picked the wrong week to quit smoking and drinking and sniffing glue
While trying to build up Striker’s confidence as the plane he flew
Mayor Karen Bass like McCrosky picked the wrong week to on city business to Africa fly
While staying there initially to confer by long distance phones as embers and ash continued to blot out the sky
But worse for the firefighters overwhelmed by the fires
In the annual budget weeks prior
Cut the LAFD’s budget by 17 million dollars to the LAFD’s dismay
Crippling its ability to fight the uncontained fires soon to be coming its way
With funds for homeless dwarfing the LAFD yet half of the money for homeless went unspent
Imagine the uses of more millions to raging wildfires now being fought used to wildfires prevent

© 1/8/2025 Michael P. Ridley aka The Alaskanpoet