Mr. Sullenberger, your fifteen minutes has begun

Mr. Bush, THIS is what badass looks like.

At a time when it's far too easy to become famous for outrageous behavior, and on a day which ended with a sociopathic man take the spotlight away from a heroic miracle for a self-serving justify the horrors of his misbegotten fuckup of an administration, perhaps having an actual hero who is an actual pilot, not a strutting martinet in a fake flightsuit; an actual hero with the unlikely name of Chesley B. Sullenberger III -- a name that sounds like it could belong to one of Bush's Skull & Bones buddies, was necessary to remind us of the kind of cool thinking that real leadership involves.

The landing of US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River yesterday was the kind of event that evokes so many incidents both real and fictional that it would have captured the public consciousness even had it not had such a picture-perfect ending. Of course to New Yorkers, the image of a low-flying plane along the Hudson had to evoke the possibility of another terrorist attack. This is something I immediately thought of, possibly as a planned part of George W. Bush's farewell tour. After all, what could be more fitting than for the guy who ignored warnings about 9/11 to be able to leave with a literal bang? Unlike most of those who asked questions of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Governor David Patterson at a press conference about the incident, however, I was relieved to hear that the cause appears to have been a flock of geese, rather than an excuse for wingnuts to whip themselves into a frenzy. Then, as the stoundingly beautifully composed image of passengers being evacuated into an exit slide-turned-lifeboat, in, I thought of how cold the air and water were in New York yesterday, and then of people being put off in lifeboats from a sinking ship on April 15, 1912. Then the report came in of Captain Sullenberger walking the aisles of his plane, now waist-deep or more full of water, to make sure everyone was off.

Mr. Sullenberger is now going to be the toast of New York (if he wants to be), as well he should be. I hope he allows himself to be, even if, as I suspect he will say, he was "just doing his job." No one would wish for 155 people to be as traumatized as the passengers of this flight were yesterday. But there's something oddly fitting about Americans having this reminder yesterday of what heroism looks like, on the same day that the poseur-in-chief sucks up valuable air time frantically trying to spin his own legacy into something other than what it is.

UPDATE: Via Digby comes this post by Marcy Wheeler reminding us of Sullenberger's -- and indeed the entire flight crew's status as UNION members -- yes UNION, that entity Republicans hate most. And in fact it was Sullenberger who fought for pilots to receive the kind of training that allowed him to do what he did yesterday.