Conversations in Management
It
only took 34 seconds. From the time fire was first
spotted to the moment the already skeletal Hindenburg sank to
earth was only 34 seconds. While the cause of the fire is
still debated, its final moments are well known. After a weather
delay of several hours—during which time the passengers enjoyed
bird’s eye views of Boston and New York—the Hindenburg began its
landing at the Lakehurst Naval Station. It was 7:00 PM on May 6,
1937. Shortly after the mooring lines were dropped, a fire
started in an aft fuel cell. It was 7:25. As the fire raged, the
ship’s spine broke and the tail crashed to the ground. Hydrogen
in the forward cells pushed the bow upward until a geyser of
flame burst through the nose and the ship made its final drop to
the hard-packed New Jersey soil. It was still 7:25.
Thirty-six of the 97 souls on board perished. It only took 34
seconds.
Herb
Morrison was covering the landing for radio station WLS in
Chicago—the new media of its day. Morrison and his
engineer weren’t broadcasting live. Instead they were conducting
an experiment in recording live events for future broadcast. At
the time such recordings were prohibited for airing (other than
the sound effects for live shows). The Hindenburg would help
change that. Following the disaster, Morrison rushed his
recorded disks to Chicago and they aired that night. The
following day, NBC—in the first coast-to-coast broadcast
ever—played them in their entirety. Later the recordings were
synchronized with film shot during the crash and news reporting
was changed forever. In fact, it was the news coverage of the
Hindenburg crash more than the crash itself that has seared the
event into our popular culture. And it’s been the saturation of
coverage that in time permitted the transformation of a tragedy
into a source of humor. (At the 2006 White House Correspondent’s
Association’s banquet, Stephen Colbert quipped, “His
administration is not sinking. This administration is soaring.
If anything, they are rearranging the deck chairs on the
Hindenburg.” …Guess you had to be there.) This was the
start of the numbing of our collective consciousness.
Anyone old
enough to read has already been exposed to tragedies far greater
than the Hindenburg crash. And we’re all exposed to it on a
daily basis. The horrors that man is capable of inflicting on
man are played out in graphic detail 24/7 on both network and
cable news. If real life cruelty isn’t enough, stand by for the
dramatic rendition available on popular shows and in movies. But
what’s particularly frightening is the way personal tragedy is
trivialized to the point of insignificance. Do you commute? When
was the last time you heard the traffic report about a “fatality
accident,” immediately followed by the cheery, banal chatter of
a radio personality? It’s easy to forget that a
fatality accident means someone died and that the lives of a
cluster of individuals have been forever altered. We’ve grown
numb.
Sure we
need boundaries. Sure we need some emotional distance to keep
from being overwhelmed by the world’s sorrows. But we also need
to keep in touch with those feelings that come from recognizing
that things have gone awry. Experiencing the pain can keep us
from repeating the things that produced it. Don’t let yourself
grow cold with indifference. Stave off the media induced
numbness. Stay close to what Morrison called, “the humanity!”
—Ebert
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