GELFAND’S WORLD-Back in the old days, when there was a ferry boat that ran from San Pedro to Terminal Island, it was a great day's outing to pile in the back of Dad's car, ride the ferry, and then tour a US Navy ship that was open to the public. Eventually, those showings stopped happening. More recently, we've had a return of ship visits in the form of Navy Days Los Angeles. This is a report on the good and the bad from this year's event. One hint: The bad has nothing to do with the United States Navy, and everything to do with a mandatory shore-side exercise in miseducating children.
Navy Days comes one week a year. In earlier years, it had some real issues, not so much due to ineptitude on its own part, but because of the enormous, unexpected popularity the event inspired. Back in 2011, There were 4 ships supposedly available to the public, including an aircraft carrier. It got to be a real mess, with 4 hour waits in the hot sun for tens of thousands of people. At the neighborhood council meetings, we got to hear a lot about the lack of porta potties.
So the administrative group and the port leadership decided to make things more organized. Reservations were now required. For this year of 2014, I got a ticket for 11 am, Sunday, August 10. It should have been easy enough. There weren't that many visitors in line, and the ship itself is 510 feet long. In the old days of Long Beach Naval Base ship visits, they could have handled all of us expeditiously.
Not so much this time.
Before being allowed to board the ship, we were first required to go through a series of 12 presentations that took, in all, more than an hour and a half to get through. Each involved hearing a (usually inaudible) speech delivered by a student volunteer, and then being shown a video.
The videos were ostensibly about the importance of STEM, which stands for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. In other words, this was a propaganda exercise aimed at those of pre-high school age. Don't get me wrong. I'm all in favor of students learning about science and math, and thinking about going into engineering and technology. No problem with that.
But there were two significant problems. The first is that a lot of us were adults, and most of us obviously didn't want to spend half the morning being treated like 8 year olds.
The second problem was that the presentations were pathetic. Part of it involved the big lie that our leaders have been foisting on young people in America for multiple decades, the implication that a limited technical education will lead to a fascinating, well paying, lifetime job. Ask a whole generation of software developers, many unemployed, about that one. I've got a friend who made a name for herself going around to graduate programs and talking about what to do when you can't find an academic job.
The other part of the videos that I found a little strange had to do with the way science education was portrayed. It invariably involved a group of students being involved in some fun laboratory project, or some exciting demonstration of an underwater robot.
In other words, science education was presented as a social activity. It might as well have been texting or tweeting. Not once did I see the more accurate representation of science education, which involves the solitary activity of reading a textbook and doing homework problems. You know -- studying. Not one moment of these videos showed students sitting in a dull lecture, trying to pay attention. And even more curious, none of the videos actually explained the true allure of actually doing science or engineering.
The reality of real striving and real achievement was replaced by this faux exercise in editing cute video clips together.
Eventually, about an hour and three-quarters after arriving, we were led out to the USS Spruance.
It's an amazing creation. As we were told by our guide, it is the second newest warship in the U.S. Navy. Technically it is a guided missile destroyer, but that term destroyer is a bit of an understatement. If I understand what I heard, and what you can learn online by looking up this class of ship, it carries more defensive and offensive power than whole fleets carried in previous wars. The USS Spruance is what a billion dollars in high tech development and careful craftsmanship gets us. There is a lesson here, something that relates to the STEM presentations. Let's consider.
I think the organizers of Navy Days Los Angeles meant well by trying to include some onshore exhibits. That even includes presenting a little something about STEM in the show. But as I pointed out above, the message that we have some sort of STEM shortage is somewhere between an exaggeration and a big lie. If you look at the real story, not the one we seem to want to tell to the kids, you can find it here and here. The latter story, from The Atlantic, refers specifically to "The myth of the science and engineering shortage."
The USS Spruance (photo) and her sister ships are at a level of technological sophistication and quality of construction that is unsurpassed. But Japan and Germany have the better reputation when it comes to consumer goods like cars and electronics. We're putting a billion dollars into each of these guided missile destroyers and four hundred million dollars into each new F-35 fighter plane, but (except for a few F-35s), we're selling them to ourselves.
In other words, the gap isn't STEM, it's in our ability as an economy to put technology and engineering to work building and marketing consumer goods, both to ourselves and overseas.
As lots of people have pointed out, the drag on our overall economy created by our military spending is significant. We seem to be in a Catch-22 here. We live in a dangerous world, but being the preeminent military power is so costly that it puts us at a great disadvantage to our European and Asian competitors. Navy Days Los Angeles, for all of its allure, was an object lesson in this quandary, even if the organizers didn't want to mention it.
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One last point. The modern generation of warships, including the one we toured, are a lot less interesting to look at. They are still big, gray, and imposing, but there is a dull sleekness about them. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that they have a small number of weapons you can actually see. There is one medium sized deck gun at the bow and a Phalanx gun near the stern that looks like R2-D2. The real offensive power, which consists of almost a hundred missile tubes, is evident only by an array of barely visible hatch covers.
Perhaps my truncated interest was due to the fact that they kept us on deck, and out of the ship's innards.
In comparison, the Battleship Iowa, open year round, is like something out of Star Wars or an old Superman cartoon. It bristles with giant guns and medium sized guns, and even has smoke stacks. And you can go inside of it. I do understand that there are security concerns when it comes to the working Navy, but if you can't visit even one part that's inside of a ship, it's a lot less of a show.
(Bob Gelfand writes on culture and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 65
Pub: Aug 12, 2014
