|
09 06 05
|
Katrina | |
|
(Due to unforeseen domestic exigencies, this is utterly unedited, so my full flaming unfiltered idiocy will be revealed for all. Alas. Flame away.)
There seems to be a competition about who can be Angrier about Katrina, since conspicuous emotion is now the primary signifier of compassion and concern. Those in the hurricane’s path have every right to anger or sadness or whichever emotion they have. But in the punditry circles there’s an angrier-than-thou mode that often seems intended to establish one’s bona fides as a critic of the relief effort. You may well have a timeline that buttresses your desire to distribute culpability across a broad spectrum of officialdom, but I AM ANGRIER THAN YOU SO MY COMPLAINTS MATTER MORE. I expect this from some – when the usual suspects that Bush was Criminally Negligent in dealing with the hurricane, you have to recall that the same people said he was Negligently Criminal for not crawling down his Crawford driveway on his belly and licking Mother Sheehan’s boots with his dry cracked tongue, and Criminally Negligent for not requiring Gitmo Korans to be sheathed in a urine-repellent plastic coating. (Remember Gitmo? The shame of America, before this other shame? The shame that came after that other shame?) I am somewhat surprised that RIGHTEOUS ANGER is now the default mode in situations like this – but not too surprised. If the biggest problem in the world is Bush, then everything is naturally his fault. Because he is a drooling moron who regrets that the demands of his office preclude a trip to N’Awlins to harpoon some floating Black people for grins ‘n’ titters. Right. Fine. It turns out that the state officials turned away the Red Cross from using pre-positioned supplies to alleviate the conditions in NO and the Superdome, “right after the storm passed.” Anyone have any Righteous Anger to spare for them? Or is that blaming the victim? It’s come to this: suggesting that the local officials might be more responsible for, you know, local conditions is now a partisan position. Apparently if you put more responsibility for those actually entrusted with the welfare of a city, you’re one of those “big government is the problem” Reaganite nutcases who wants to devolve everything down to the block level. Which, in retrospect, might actually have served NO residents better. But that would be bad; if the feds requested that people form block organizations for disaster survival it would be either derided as hysteria – oh, and I suppose we’re supposed to bring duct tape – or an attempt to extend the Patriot Act to cover rolling-paper purchases at the corner store. (Note: Cuban and Nicaraguan Party-ordered block clubs were a natural reaction to Yanqui imperialism, nothing more. Granted, when you get the order requesting your presence at the police HQ to explain what someone heard you say at the bar last night, that’s unfortunate. On the other hand, literacy rates in Cuba are great, so you can read the summons for your semi-annual tooth-loosening without having to ask your neighbor what this word means. Win-win, really, in the long run.) I never have understood why some people sprong a Louisville Slugger when the subject of Activist Government comes up. In another age and place, I would have agreed. Hoover Dam, the Interstate Highway System, enforcing Civil Rights, the Moon Shot - these are big-ticket items, and big guv paid the freight. But they are limited ideas with limited, defined goals. If the federal government had decided to make New Orleans safe from floods, and had unlimited funds, it could have done so – either by building 67-foot walls or moving the entire city or enclosing it in a dome and blasting it into space. Give them a blank check and 27 years, and they’ll probably get it done, and done well. But Big Government is not good at dealing with things that happen at 3:57 PM Eastern Standard Time tomorrow. If you haven’t worked in the gov / media / lobby nexus of the East coast, you may not realize the central narcissistic conceit that underlies the great institutional blob of BosNyWash. The primary concern is always how something will play in Washington. Truth matters less than play, but most have long ago convinced themselves that play is synonymous with “truth” and “public interest.” So you have White House correspondents forcing five-minute colloquies with the WH spokesman about whether the Administration fully supports the FEMA director – as if the spokesman will say “well, gosh, no, it’s qualified support at this time, and I won’t say any more, but you all can run with that as you like. Heck, put up big headlines about how the White House appears to be standing down from unqualified FEMA endorsements, because that sort of institutional jockeying is infinitely compelling to the nation at large.” And then you have egghead huddles at the papers about the Shifts in Support and Power Struggles in FEMA – the bread and milk and wine of DC life. To the rest of the company, it’s like reading about a posthumous demotion in the Titanic’s 2nd night-watch deck-chair maintenance officer. Six months hence, the press gives itself another round of applause at Romanesko for asking the tough questions about 2003 FEMA budget memos; Pulitizers are handed out all around. Meanwhile, some people wonder: say, what about those flooded busses I saw? How come no one drove out? (I’d continue in this confused, disorganized vein for another 900 words, but domestic life interfered and the train of thought was lost, completely. Here follows Monday’s Newhouse column on the subject of the Instinctive Bilious Reaction.) START SCREED Oh, the lessons we learned from Katrina. Bush’s refusal to invade New Orleans tells everything you need to know about Republican racist perfidy. The local government’s incompetence tells you nothing whatsoever about Democrats ability to govern at the micro level. Lethal storms can be turned aside months in advance by signing the right treaties. Or so they’re saying in the reality-based community. Check the blogs: they’re calling President Bush’s response to Katrina “My Pet Goat pt. 2.” It’s a reference to the idea, so beloved of the Michael Moore enthusiasts and Osama Bin Laden, that President Bush’s initial reaction to the 9/11 was to give a what-me-worry grin and keep reading a kid’s story, because he wanted to know how it ended. These people seem to believe that a complete set of evacuation plans – including the removal of the entire city, buildings included, to Manitoba – were slapped down on the President’s desk the moment Katrina was just a stiff breeze, and Bush said nope. Call me when gas hits nine bucks a gallon, and besides, the town’s just full of Democrats; let ‘em float out in those Cadillacs they bought with welfare checks. That’s what the frothier elements on the left seem to think. One Air America host said as much; various rappers and actors have blamed Bush for not calling Superman on the hotline and blowing the storm away with Superbreath. One theory – and it’s an interesting one, as Howard Dean would say – suspects the Administration of deliberately flooding New Orleans to test the nation’s ability to deal with a nuclear strike. That makes sense. Sure. Why bother to drill to learn lessons that can be applied in other cities when you can drown a city and learn nothing about the hazards of radioactivity? The latter method has the added virtue of a conspiracy, which means there’s a good chance someone in the chain will breach the levee of secrecy, leading to what the Founding Fathers called Super Extra Immediate Impeachment Plus. Crazy, yes. But this is what it’s come to. According to the choir of professional carpers, President Clinton spent half his two terms personally drawing up plans for new levees - when he wasn’t sneaking around Afghanistan in camo paint trying to apprehend Bin Laden, that is. By contrast the Bush Junta sent 100 percent of the National Guard to Iraq, which meant the 12th Airborne Plunger Brigade couldn’t descend to the Superdome with jetpacks and unstopped the overflowing toilets. Doesn’t matter that New Orleans had hundreds of school buses unused for evacuation – blame the Feds who cut matching funds for bus-driver instruction back in 1927. This level of incandescent lunacy isn’t new. In the 90s there were people who believed that President Clinton would use Y2K to herd us into FEAM-run gulags to have barcodes tattooed on our necks, but these people confined themselves to rants at 3 AM on Art Bell’s radio show. By 2006 their ideological heirs on the left will be the evening line-up of MSNBC guests. If we learned anything we can take away, it’s this: you’re on your own. At least keep an emergency kit on hand, the sort of thing Tom Ridge proposed, and which made the smart set hardy har har because it contained duct tape. Don’t rely on the government. Four years after 9/11, it’s apparent that some local governments are not well-oiled machines when it comes to disasters – more like a box of sand and busted gears. Blame for that can be promiscuously distributed. Lesson two: the next terrorist attack will not unite us for a warm hug-filled fortnight. The hard left won’t wait 24 hours before blaming President Bush, and the country will enjoy the sight of prominent pundits angrier at the President than the men who nuked Des Moines. If an attack should happen during the term of President Hillary Clinton, they’ll still blame Bush – and if she wishes to retain her moderate credentials, she’ll be canny enough to repudiate the lot. They’ll be stunned. They’ll be hurt. After all the free-lancing hating they did out of the goodness of their hearts! Where can they turn now? The guy who took over for Art Bell still takes calls. -- |
||
|
|
|
