THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:

I recently got into trouble at The Thinking Housewife by saying what I thought about naval officer Destiny Savage’s visual self-presentation.  Here I go again.  This time it’s the late Christie Rodgers, fireperson.

I speak with some knowledge.  My father (1911 – 2006) joined the Los Angeles City Fire Department as a firefighter in 1937 and retired, with the long-standing rank of Battalion Chief, in 1972.  He was a lean man and athletic, who rigorously every morning went through the complete fitness schedule of the Royal Canadian Air Force, which the LAFD had adopted as its model for the physical training of firefighters.  Every firefighter I knew was lean and in good condition.  A firefighter who looked like either one of the stricken Rodgers marriage would have been called on the carpet and threatened with termination, did he not swiftly lose weight and comport himself with the published standards of the force.

Christie Rodgers was a “volunteer fireperson.”  Well, so was my Uncle Jim, my mother’s brother, who served on the Cambria Pines California Volunteer Fire Department in the 1960s, before earning a degree and becoming a shop instructor at Cambria Pines High School.  Uncle Jim was, if anything, even leaner and more athletic than my father.

Quite apart from the inappropriateness of obesity to the firefighter profession, being overweight is a known factor in heart disease, raising the likelihood of heart-attack exponentially.  Given that firefighting is a high-adrenaline activity that puts enormous physical stress on the firefighter, might not someone have counseled Christie Rodgers on the risk inherent in her condition?  And why would a fire department, whose supervisors are certainly aware of the requirements of the profession, hire someone who is so obviously unfit to meet the stresses of the job?

In his thirty-five years on the force, my father was blown up twice (losing his hearing in his left hear), buried under collapsed structures at least a half a dozen times, struck by a wild hose an equal number of times, and tested on innumerable occasions in all the ways that firefighters are tested.  Once, fighting a canyon-fire in the Santa Monica Mountains, he was stung by a scorpion, whose poison was so virulent that he had to be evacuated on an emergency basis and hospitalized.  Had he been anything other than in top physical condition, he undoubtedly would have died.

Yes, it is terrible for the survivors to be deprived of the loved one. This was a preventable death and would not have occurred, at least not in this way, in a sane society.

In the contemporary world, wanting something seems to be the only employment qualification for those in the privileged categories.

— Comments —

Terry Morris writes:

Professor Bertonneau wrote: “And why would a fire department, whose supervisors are certainly aware of the requirements of the profession, hire someone so obviously unfit for the job?”

As I said in a comment to the original post, these small-town volunteer firemen are not “hired,” they’re given the collective nod (or not) through ‘one-man-one-vote’ democratic process, in which the supervisors merely call, count, and record the vote. As to the issue of Christie’s obviously not meeting the physical criteria of an honest-to-goodness firefighter (which only a blind monkey, otherwise known as a dyed-in-the-wool leftist revolutionary: see comments from military members in the other thread Prof. Bertonneau alludes to) could miss, my informed assumption is that the department supervisors, as well as the grunts, likely had in mind when they voted to accept, rather than to reject, Christie, that she would merely act in a support capacity – dispatching, filling out fire reports, turning knobs, etc., and not actually fight fires per se – albeit she would have been expected to complete the same training requirements as the other firemen – Confined Space Entry, CPR training, dragging hoses and so on and so forth.

One of the problems with these local volunteer fire departments is that they’re almost always undermanned. They’re not undermanned for lack of firemen, they’re undermanned because they’re volunteers and generally have full-time jobs or businesses which take up the bulk of their time. (I turned in my resignation after four years because of time constraints.) In any event this woman should have been rejected for several reasons in my opinion. Not the least of which is that once she received a certification in a required training, she likely would have felt herself “qualified” to serve in such a capacity and, in one way or the other, have demanded to fill it. Which, of course, would place her supervisors and the entire department in a bad predicament all around. Hindsight may be 20-20, but it’s no substitute for foresight.

Laura writes:

According to a reader familiar with the family, she was a dispatch operator but also apparently went on calls.

Given that she had a premature baby and had had a Caesarean, she should not have been involved in emergency services in any capacity at that point.

Mr. Morris writes:

Agreed. But I would go even further and assert that she shouldn’t have been nominated, never mind accepted, as a volunteer fireman in any case. As I said in the above comment, one of the big issues common to volunteer fire departments is a shortage of manpower on a given call. Generally speaking women are weaker, possess less stamina, are more injury-prone, etc., than their male counterparts, aside from Christi’s delivery-related heath issues. As a volunteer fireman, aware as she must have been that on a given call her department needs all the warm bodies it can muster, Christi would have felt obligated to respond, if only to aid with dispatch resonsibilities or something like that.

My main point is that while women can and do serve effectively in such capacities, the problem is always that it’s never enough for them to serve effectively in such capacities. And it’s not all the woman’s fault; it’s mostly the fault of men, in my opinion, that this is the case. Open the door ever so slightly, and before you know it you’ve got men advocating for diversity and talking it up about how it serves combat readiness, and such mindless hogwash. I’m not assuming anything about Christi’s mindset or character either, for the record. It’s just that she set a precadent (or so I assume) by becoming a volunteer fireman on her department. Invariably, no matter how self-aware as a woman Christi might have been, she paved the way for more aggressive, “manly,” feminist-type women to be nominated and accepted onto the force. And therein lies the problem.

James P. writes:

I noted in the story that Christi had been a volunteer firefighter since she was sixteen! One wonders what her parents were thinking when they permitted that. Last thing I’d want is my 16 or 17 year old daughter hanging around the firehouse.

More importantly, if you read closely she did not suffer her heart attack at the fire. She suffered it in her own home, right after she woke up from an alert calling her to go to a fire. Therefore it seems likely that the heart attack was postpartum related rather than brought about by the stress of fighting a fire. [Laura: Yes, she went into cardiac arrest after she received the call at 5 a.m. She was woken up suddenly and that probably contributed to the heart attack. So I would speculate that it was a combination of her duties and her condition.]

Finally, her husband looks rather puffy himself — not exactly the lean and athletic fellow you’d hope to see coming to your rescue.

A reader writes:

The insights on this thread are interesting. I should note, that here in Lancaster County, most fire departments are volunteer. One problem not mentioned is the attraction to firefighting by pyromaniacs. A number of barn and covered bridge fires here in the past were started either by Amish teens or by volunteer firefighters. It is my understanding that there is a psychological test taken by potential firemen to weed out firebugs.

I don’t know if this is also the case for volunteers. The morning she died, her company was called to a house fire, and in the news just that day, there were at least four other house fires in the area…one a suicide by burning down his mobile home. Fires aren’t just a big problem in the big cities, but are a great problem here in the sticks.

Paul writes:

You have eloquently and precisely defended the idea of women in the military, and Mr. Bertenneau has defended the view in this and in the linked thread.

One point that has not been brought out is women in the military and other occupations requiring close quarters with men contributes to sexual immorality, which also hinders readiness.  No way could I have resisted at eighteen, and probably still could not resist, sexual immorality with a female in a foxhole.  Soldier’s throats are cut at night by enemy infiltrators while sleeping or smoking.  See Brave Men.  Sleep can certainly be more attractive than sex, but sexual activity can just as surely get their throats cuts.

A very intelligent father, husband, and ex-Navy man told me that most of the women on his ships were immoral.  His word was “sluts.”  This is an ugly, dangerous lifestyle for a father or a husband to support for his female daughter or wife.  The fathers and husbands are trying to avoid modern thoughtcrime, discrimination, which is the antithesis of the liberal ideal of nondiscrimination.

The delusional thought of modern fathers and husbands is understandable considering that not even George Orwell (1984) foresaw that a Media’s “two minutes hate” could be superseded by a Media’s unending hate towards “enemies” such as Ferguson, Zimmerman, female Republicans, and the Duke Lacrosse team.  In other words, these modern fathers, husbands, men, and women have been brainwashed.  As Orwell predicted, the enemy would always change.

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