House of Eratosthenes

The American political theater is just a big sine wave, with peaks and valleys. A zenith for Republicans is a nadir for Democrats and vice-versa. This means if one party keeps right on winning, the winning streak comes to an end sooner or later, and you can see it coming when the wins get less and less frequent, and less and less meaningful. If the other party keeps right on losing, the time’s going to come when there is noplace left to go but up, and when that happens, the losing party will start kicking ass.

With this whole New Orleans debacle, I’ve got a feeling we’re just about there. One of the things that made Bill Clinton such an effective representative of the Democratic party was that his presidency saw to it that international problems, if there were any, were kept off the front pages. (The incident with “Monica Missiles” was an exception to this, his motives for making it such being obvious.) One thing that stays consistent across time, is that international news is not helpful to Democrats. It’s hard to get worked up about free medicine for rich old people being increased in next year’s budget by eight percent instead of ten percent, when shaggy old men who smell like goat pee are trying to kill you.

Democratic party activists say they “hate George Bush because he started a war,” but it’s probably closer to the truth to say they hate him because he got people to start talking about the war. President Bush, like everyone on this side of the ocean, actually started nothing. The organizations we’re fighting now, started a war on us, and throughout the years they’ve probably been getting pretty darned ticked off over their inability to get our attention.

I hope Al Qaeda enjoyed having our attention while they had it.

Hurricane Katrina has turned things around, and I’m afraid it’s for the long haul. Bush looks bad. The road doesn’t go uphill anymore, it’s leveling off, and it’s leveled off because we’re at the summit. Worrying about Iraq, all of a sudden, is tough to do. A woman a hundred years old is sitting out in the scalding sun, with no way to get the medication she needs, while thugs and rapists rule the streets around her, and babies with bloated bellies go without formula.

The Boston Herald has started to dig up some dirt on the current FEMA director. It looks like a hatchet job. It looks petty. It also looks pretty persuasive.

This is why, while it’s easy to get a laundry list going of social problems toward which liberals have contributed helpful programs, it’s awfully hard to think of any social problems they’ve actually solved. Social problems are dry powder for them; excruciating social problems that make people wince when they hear about them, are more like dry C-4. Democrats are in a position to monopolize just about every pressing domestic issue, but what they can politically afford to actually solve amounts to precisely nothing.

What’s interesting to me, is that when you start digging around for some facts on what went wrong with this whole New Orleans business and how it could have gone down a little better, everybody looks bad but the questions left unanswered reflect more on the municipal side of things. As more facts come out, that may change. But by now it seems firmly established that there either was no plan, or if there was one, it lacked substance or was rendered inoperable by emerging circumstances.

Let’s take the things that make the feds look the worst. Mike Brown himself, director of FEMA, was unaware until sometime in the middle of the week about the evacuees being warehoused at the convention center. This is pretty huge. If this whole exercise culminates in a resignation from Mr. Brown, the seeds that will blossom into that resignation event will have been sown here. So is this purely a federal problem? Do we call for Brown’s head and call it good?

If that’s our strategy for fixing the problem, I do not want to go into any convention centers during the next crisis.

How does FEMA become aware of people waiting for help at convention centers? Is the director of FEMA supposed to be watching Nightline? As I wallow in human filth at the convention center, starving and dehydrating, how exactly am I supposed to be hoping someone finds me? Am I supposed to be hoping one of Mike Brown’s subordinates finds out about me on Google? No, that’s ridiculous. A breakdown in communication of this magnitude, had to happen in a number of places…and some of those places were municipal. Is the convention center a place you’re supposed to go to in an emergency, yes or no? Why are we confused about the answer now, on Saturday, six days after the hurricane hit? If we’re this confused now, what was it like as the lights were going out?

This situation cries out for overhaul across the board. But the way the American political system works, I’m afraid there will only be an outcry for overhaul at the federal level. You can only find some powerful interest groups to agitate dissatisfaction at that level…nowhere else.

And how long will this dissatisfaction stay agitated? Probably quite awhile. Look at Abu Ghraib. Long after the last prisoner was ever made to wear a hood and stand on a box holding wires in his hands…long, long after the Army had opened its own investigation into this…major newspapers were cooking up ways to put Abu Ghraib stories on Page One, without any new news to report on it. Long after Janice Karpinski had been relieved of command and busted from one-star to bird-colonel, our newspapers were still printing the story above-the-fold, trying to find a way to damage the Bush administration.

Well New Orleans is going to be rebuilt (or swept away) for years. Years. It will be like lifetimes and lifetimes worth of effort.

Our media will jackhammer this thing into the ground. It will make “Passion of the Christ” look like a quick earlobe-nibbling session with your date. So long as there remains one single traffic light, parking meter or newsstand that needs to be carted from one end of the freshly-rebuilt New Orleans, to the other end, our media will regurgitate the obligatory lines about that disaster in late-August of 2005, brought on by hurricane Katrina and that horrible, ineffectual FEMA that was part of the incompetent George W. Bush administration.

It’s a shame, really. It’s been said that even the staunchest small-government libertarian-anarchist-guy is in favor of having a fire hall, and just about all of us can get behind the idea of government being prepared to respond for a natural emergency like this. Clearly, that government — or those governments, when & where they are expected to communicate with each other — failed us. That failure is a clarion call for a good, purifying light of journalistic watchdoggery, which could serve us best by creating a long, comprehensive list of places where those failures originated, and how they metastasized.

And what we get to look forward to, are indictments of the George W. Bush administration.

Which on January 20, 2009, won’t be around anymore anyway.

We need our media. They have a great opportunity to demonstrate to us how much we need them. They’re about to blow it.

The last time Democrats won at anything, they stopped their guy from being removed from the White House during an impeachment scandal. Every Republican victory since then, has lifted us up another thousand feet, and another, and another. Now we’re at the summit. We’re about to drop from that summit, with a 21st-century Lyndon Johnson or Jimmy Carter administration. Get ready for twenty years of tax increases, tea parties with terrorists, exotic legal arguments for releasing perverts and rapists from jail, gun control up the ass, and a maximum wage that’s about five bucks an hour higher than the minimum wage.

And VERY little sincere post-mortem about what happened in New Orleans.

Hate to say it, but that’s my prediction.

[…] cards from Christmas, eat, sleep and work. Back in aught-five, that must have been our June 21; I noticed this at the time. I think I pegged that one right. But I had no idea the “Obama winter” […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 08/08/2014 @ 06:14

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SummitSaturday, September 3rd, 2005

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Saturday, September 3rd, 2005