What Do We Do With Brooks?

On September 1, three days after New Orleans died, David Brooks wrote a column titled "The Storm After the Storm". Granting that we have to grade both Brooks and the Times on a sliding scale it was prescient: disasters like the 1927 Mississippi flood, the Johnstown flood, and the hurricane that destroyed Galveston, Texas, are followed by political reverberations. And while Brooks didn't name any civic arrangements he said had failed, he didn't exactly try to exempt any either.

There's the need for that sliding scale for you: it's when Brooks fails to defend his Party, when the megaphone goes silent, that we are to take it as criticism of the President or his associates. It's a measure of how well and truly fucked things are that we accept this as the best that can be expected. Look! In the face of a horrible human disaster George Nero Bush has ignored for 72 hours, David Brooks has sort of criticized him! Though not in actual words and only if we decide to read the code that way.

And without grading on a curve, Brooks' piece was both pedestrian and boneheaded. Hundreds of blogs had referred to the '27 Flood by then, and the class/racial component of the suffering was on everyone's mind, so the only significance of Brooks' piece was a) that it appeared in the Times, and b) that it didn't defend the indefensible. And in taking his examples from the first half of the last century Brooks ignores the fact that post-war natural disasters did not lead to noticeable political turmoil, because the federal government stepped in in a timely fashion. It was specifically this administrations actions this time which recall the Marie Antoinette response of an overtly racist age.

[Just one point I can't resist: Brooks says "The Johnstown flood crystallized popular anger, for the fishing club was indeed partly to blame." Partly, in that it was the poorly engineered private dam at that playground of the wealthy which burst. The rest of the blame falls on the water, presumably. And that damnable gravity.]

By Sunday Brooks was in what passes for high dudgeon. We're at "the bursting point". People are mad as h-e-double-hockey sticks.

But since such a shocking disregard for decorum may burn tender skin Brooks has the balm of sidewalk sociology at the ready. Katrina was "the anti-9/11", an observation so full of mercy he'd borrowed it from a right-theological blogger and had to lead off the column with a link (!). Brooks applies the stuff so thick you're tempted to imagine that he's the one with the itchy rash all over.

On Sept. 11, Rudy Giuliani took control. The government response was quick and decisive. The rich and poor suffered alike. Americans had been hit, but felt united and strong. Public confidence in institutions surged.

Last week in New Orleans, by contrast, nobody took control. Authority was diffuse and action was ineffective. The rich escaped while the poor were abandoned. Leaders spun while looters rampaged. Partisans squabbled while the nation was ashamed.

Now, this may come as a shock to you but I've never been one of Giuliani's admirers, and in the immediate aftermath my response to the easy Beatification of St. Rudy was "Wha?" He was better than average as a podium filler, I suppose; maybe if I were a New Yorker I'd have been more impressed, but I always had the feeling that the admiration of New Yorkers was more that the little dickweed whose guts they hated had stood up in time of crisis. At any rate, they soon saw the old Rudy when he "volunteered" to remain mayor for life, and I've never forgotten that he was personally responsible for keeping the official death toll at 2.5 to 3x long after it was known that 3000 was roughly correct, thus fanning the flames of the Pearl Harbor comparison by the same multiple.

So while my personal inclination in the face of Rudy nostalgia is to ask why, if Brooks needed one so badly, he didn't just make another one up, there's simply something wrong with the religious ardor over "9/11 bringing us together". Because we've seen what happened as a result, and it's no good pretending that the vertiginous descent of the United States into moral and military depravity can somehow be divorced from the great patriotic surge and the newly rediscovered faith in our institutions, and all the other sham lessons people like Brooks said we'd learned and which led to the unleashing of neocon bloodlust. What exactly is this desire for a unified Fatherland except the childish fantasy where everyone else does as I please? And you had that, David, and look what was made of it. Not by accident, and not by a mishandling of "the postwar environment", but because the omnipotent and grandly benevolent military adventure was neither. Time to quit dreaming and start admitting you were wrong. Blatantly, obviously, and criminally wrong.

In comments Pepper directed my attention to Brooks' performance on News Hour last Friday. There Brooks did single out Lake George's namesake, calling his Wednesday flyover "terrible. And the three days of doing nothing, really, was terrible." It's hard to credit this much coming from someone so publicly deluded for so long about the war. (His last column before Katrina was August 28's "Winning In Iraq".) Is it possible to believe that last week's actions were an eyeopener for Mr. Bobo? That he found it a horrible, even inexcusable, lapse in the appearance of leadership, and that this for him is more important that the actual lapses which led to uncounted deaths? Or distinct from the failure in Iraq? No, it's the strangled gasp of a man who has tolerated falsehoods in the service of his political instincts until the point that their logical conclusion suffered and died on the streets of Lake George right there on his television set. You don't get any points for your humanity just because it turns out you can't bear to watch the kind of suffering you're happy to have the military dish out when you can't see it.

Public Service Announcement

Hi. I'm former major league pitcher John Rocker. When I had a career, "saves" were something I worked hard to earn. The Federal Emergency Management Agency reminds you that in an emergency you need to earn your "save", too. FEMA will be there to help you, eventually, even though you probably brought it on yourself. So get on the team with FEMA. And remember, you'll be so glad to see our buses, you won't care who you have to sit next to.

Where's the Outrage?

Just over eighteen months ago this country experienced a major case of gastric distress (later determined to be psychosomatic) over the exposure of Janet Jackson's breast jewelry. But after an unconscionable delay the Bush administration has been exposing its assholes repeatedly for the last 72 hours and nobody says nothin'.

Yeah, Hugh, There's Always That One Guy in the Back of the Class Throwin' Spitballs. And That Guy is Me.

I was planning on a two sentence response to Hugh Hewitt, even though he'd like a truce, of sorts:

I do not doubt that the full-throated attack on president will continue over the long weekend. But perhaps it will grow just a bit less hate-filled, and the recovery effort a bit more energetic, if the center-right just refuses to return fire on a Labor Day weekend which occurs just as a very long labor comes into focus.

It's a brave stance all right, calling for a unilateral cease-fire when your side is out of ammunition, but Hugh manages some dry firing just to keep spirits up:

I will simply note that I am confident that many of these critics will find themselves in a position very similar to that of many of the speakers and most of the crowd at the memorial service for Senator Paul Wellstone in the fall of 2002. The speakers and the crowd that night were full of passion and conviction. They were sure they were right, and the echoes of applause and cheering came back at them and they were convinced they had made huge persuasive points with America. I am sure Jack Cafferty and many other of what Michelle Malkin called the "arm chair first responders" on the program today are quite certain of their own virtue, the president's terrible culpability, the impeachment that will surely follow, and the political realignment this will all lead to.


They are sure of it.


I am sure they are having their memorial service moment, and that the country is indeed watching everything very, very closely, and drawing very different lessons about who they would want managing the relief effort if disaster comes to their city or region.

Time will of course tell.


But the one thing that is truly low is the diminshment of the heroics that have been underway since early Monday morning and which continue at this hour, whether in the Coast Guard helicopters, the patrols of National Guardsmen in the city who have been there on duty for for hours and hours already, for the engineers scrambling to find a fix, for the bus drivers and the Dome workers, the medical personnel and the thousands of unnamed, unselfish, and now slighted federal, state, and local workers who are giving their all.

It's a pretty little speech, Hugh, what with that Harvard Law command of praeteritio an' all. I'm sure it bucked up more than one of the boys in the trenches. "Yes, I know that things look bleak, but just as we once made political hay out of seaweed and that PC closed captioning stuff with Wellstone, we can do it again by claiming Jack Cafferty called for impeachment and the Liberals are disparaging our men in uniform." I gotta admit, I do admire the spirit of the thing.

All of which almost made me forget the spitball I had all loaded up for him in the first place.

I am confident that the private side of the effort will flower in the days, weeks and months ahead. About the government's response I am not so sure. Appropriating money is easy; spending it wisely and to good effect is not.

Yup. The worse we make government, the more we starve its legitimate functions, pick the pockets of the less fortunate, and hand over its vital positions to political hacks, the more people will come to realize that government can't be trusted with those functions in the first place.

Time will of course tell.

Sounds Fair

I could thank Julia every day, but kudos, especially, for her Lake George link dump which led me to this and a lot of other good work:

OK, I propose a deal. For every low-income person's home we don't rebuild in New Orleans or Gulfport because those cities are flood-prone, we rip down one mansion in fire-prone Malibu. And if we run out of mansions in Malibu, we can start dismantling the gazillion-dollar vacation cottages and golf courses around Cape Hatteras. Or is it that we should only employ least-risk models for redevelopment when the people who live there are poor?

Just one minor addition: people were flooded out of New Orleans not because a natural disaster struck them like it strikes Cape Hatteras. They were flooded out because government-constructed flood walls failed. If anything they have a much greater claim to federal reconstruction aid.

I Think I've Got Some Platform Shoes You Can Borrow

David Brooks:

As a result, it is beginning to feel a bit like the 1970's, another decade in which people lost faith in their institutions and lost a sense of confidence about the future.

NYT's Business Section headline writer:

It's That 70s Feeling. But the World of Oil Has Changed.

More to say about Bobo's piece later.

Two Faces Have Ay-Ay-Ay...

Left: The Fabulous Condimelda Rice V 2.0, Secretary of State edit.
Right: The Alabama native showing the strain of six full hours back on the job.

I'm no beauty expert, but either the famous workout regimen isn't working out so well, or the makeup team whipped out Revlon's "Haggard 67" for the occasion.

Hell Ships

In the Second World War 70,000 Allied prisoners and Asian slave laborers were transported in Japanese merchant ships across the Empire. The ships became known as the Hell Ships. Prisoners were typically crowded below decks, in cargo holds, in appalling conditions, or crammed onto available space on deck, unprotected from the elements. They were abused and neglected, given little in the way of food or water. As many as 22,000 died.

One such ship was the Oryoku-maru, a 15,000-ton luxury liner built just before the war. Sixteen-hundred Allied prisoners of war who had been kept on Luzon were marched out of Manilla and massed in her two holds. It was stifling hot and there was little ventilation. They had been fed a nominal meal, but given no water since morning. A few buckets were lowered down for waste; these soon overflowed and feces and urine were tracked everywhere. Their agitated movements and cries for water exhausted the available oxygen. Men suffocated. Men went mad. Deadly fights broke out. Men murdered their fellows to drink their blood. There were as many as a hundred dead by morning.

I don't repeat the story to make an easy analogy with New Orleans. These were men who had undergone the horrors of war and the brutalities of their Japanese captors. They had little freedom of movement and little air, and many had given up hope long before. And I don't repeat it for some easy moralism about how these men did not sacrifice so their children and grandchildren could be treated by their own country in much the same way, whether through incompetence or actual neglect; today that moral argument doesn't need my repeating.

You've heard the overt racism and the covert concern over "lawlessness". Those are the voices of an immense political problem, our political problem, but they also condemn themselves.

Instead, what I'd like to ask is why the cable nets and others flogged the looting story for three days before they ever stopped to consider the humanity down below. I know the proper response now is gratitude that they woke up to the suffering long before our government did, and many have been merciless advocates for the victims. And I am grateful. I'll be even more grateful if the attitude continues.

But it is, I think, the minimum decent human values require. The airwaves are filled now with compassion for "people living paycheck to paycheck" and there's no longer any tolerance for that "people who refused to move caused their own problems" shit. The focus has been kept on the outright lack of concern on getting people out beforehand or sustaining life afterwards, even after all the press conference bullshit and the Presidential photo op. And a distinction is made between people taking what they had to to survive and the looters of expensive consumer electronics.

Still, one asks, "What took so long?" What was the fascination with property violations compared to the vast human tragedy visible below? How could they blithely repeat the official line that people would have to stay in the Superdome for weeks with no apparent understanding it already was a hell hole? We didn't need to see inside after the roof was breached to know that. Why wasn't anybody screaming about it on Tuesday?

I may have singled out CNN producer-turned-reporter Kim Segal before. I don't remember at this point. But it's worth repeating that on Wednesday afternoon she was still spouting vile Crackerisms like, "you can't talk sense to these people!" with no one prepared to pull the plug on her. "[The looters] are taking advantage of suffering people," she said, speaking of shop owners whose personal circumstances she knew nothing about. The only people we could be sure were suffering at that point were "those people".

I'm glad they've turned this around, but it's not particularly comforting that it took scenes of massive suffering, of the young and the elderly and the infirm, to rouse them to the level of simple humanity. There's been great work under unbelievable circumstances by many people, and Tony Zumbado's work at the Convention Center probably saved many lives. But along with fully examining the criminal incompetence of our own government, we need to look at why it took the media so long to find up from down.

Condimelda

I did want to mention Condimelda's press conference, at least in passing, but it became a separate topic with Chris Clarke's brilliant new moniker for the Scary Spice* of international diplomacy. Condimelda turns up on Friday, just like Bush's other wife, only any decent person would have been ashamed to show her face, let alone commandeer fifteen minutes of air time in a sorry charade that did not even achieve the level of pretending she was doing anything. Condimelda should have simply announced that her resignation would be on the President's desk when he returned and fled the stage never to return. That fifteen minutes could have been used to help missing persons find each other, or to locate some more people in dire straits for the Secretary of Homeland Security [sic] to rush supplies to as we speak.


* For once, I apologize for any offense to any Spice Girl living or dead or in between.

Shut Up, A Continuing Feature

Witness at the birth of the Bias of Liberal Technology, John Podhoretz:

So it took the federal government somewhere between 72 and 96 hours to go on full mobilization after the disasters of Katrina. At any time in history before the present moment, that would have been considered lightning-fast. Even as little as five years ago, we wouldn't have gotten the horrifying reports out of New Orleans that we got from Shep Smith and others using light cameras and videophones -- and by the time the extent of the nightmare would have become widely known, the relief operation would have been fully underway.

I've been watching the Corner Kids a bit the last few days, mostly for an idea I'm not quite ready to hatch about the basic human dignity some have displayed vs. their pressing need to design a public relations campaign to pull their president out of the muck while answering emails from people who think the principles of federalism are too important to worry about a few hundred deaths from dehydration or worse. I'm stopping the data collecting right here.

I've been reading and watching the news for forty years, and I have never, ever, seen a response to disaster even approach such criminal tardiness. Yes, even back in the days of land lines and black and white teevees the Guard was mobilized, and generally on the scene, within 24 hours. I say generally, but I don't recall a single instance where that wasn't the case. Hell, most mine cave-ins were resolved before four days had passed, even with moving in equipment to drill new shafts. Because they had to be.

Ultralight cameras are a great thing; one may have saved hundreds of lives at the Convention Center. But that was four fucking days after the event. Nothing, repeat, nothing, will ever excuse that. And, y'know, JPod, you can look this up: other technologies have advanced over the years as well. If we can find someone with a tiny camera we can get to them with large helicopters or amphibious vehicles far beyond anything we had in the days before the microwave oven. That might have been the second part of your brilliant observation, if you weren't engaged in stupidity for the sheer enjoyment of it.

I Didn't Know Eleanor Roosevelt. But You're Still No Eleanor Roosevelt.

Jeez Louise, why did they bother animating Laura Bush (a process we now know takes 72-96 hours)? They calculated the need for one more photo-opper out there to push all the bad news off the screens for a day? To put a "human" face on the failure to get water to infants for three days?

I said, somewhere, that I was glad Bush was at least out there, even if it was Bush. But Laura undid my half-assed good will. They put her down in some carefully selected setting (the same handlers, probably, who had her face the wrong direction that time so the news photos would have a flag backdrop) and she uses the opportunity to say that things aren't as bad everywhere as they seem on teevee? Shame, shame, shame, shame.

Anything in the News Today?

• Bush lands in Mobile (more on that in a moment) and MSNBC chooses that oportunity to put up an elapsed time counter ( "4 Days 4 Hours 38 Minutes") on the right hand side of the screen. Somebody there has been paying attention and has a sense of humor I'd never seen in evidence before.

• Dennis Hastert (Blob of Protoplasm-Ill) says New Orleans should be bulldozed, then says he was just talking about Federal assistance, then takes a nap, then says of course all he was trying to do was assure that we'll rebuild the bestest damn city there ever was and he was just thinking about all those poor suffering people.

• Just in case no one else has done it, I emailed the Speaker explaining that a) the City of New Orleans is actually a port of some minor importance and b) the New Madrid Fault is active, and considering the general state of earthquake preparedness and the structural integrity of buildings throughout the Midwest, if God decides to punish all the gays in Illinois Hassert will be representing a pile of bricks. Which would be fitting, I admit.

• George Nero Bush spends two days packin' up all the vacation photos and the bike helmets and makin' sure there haven't been any overnight brush emergencies. Takes a flyover of what used to be the Gulf Coast and pronounces it "devastated". Spews some platitudes from the Rose Garden. Sleeps eleven hours, spews more platitudes. Sleeps another eleven hours, wakes up "angry", decides the results are "not acceptible". Hops on Air Force One, flies to Mobile, and tells Mike Brown what a tremendous job he's doing. After hearing Bob Riley and Haley Barbour tell him what a tremendous job he's doing.

• The Astrodome is full, somehow, at half the number they said they'd take. Handicapped bathrooms are on the second floor, hot food is on the fourth floor, they're short of volunteers, and the people in last night's buses have nowhere to go. This is taking a serious toll on the pasted-on smile of the Buffy reporting from the parking lot.

• MSNBC's Lisa Daniels, subbing on the Ron Reagan Jr/ Monica Crawley show which has been All Looting Loops All The Time for four days, just cleaned the grill of Rep. Bobby Jindal, the Republican who represents suburban New Orleans.

• Breaking News: CNN reports that the cavalry has arrived (4 Days 5 Hours 20 Minutes, clock courtesy MSNBC) and Lt. Gen. Russel Honore is on the ground directing traffic. Exactly what was needed. I told my wife last night that Patton would have been there two days ago. Godspeed and good luck. And I mean it.