Now that things have died down a bit (though Mr. Brown's appearance before Congress this week suggests that the animosities aroused will smolder for a long time) I'd like to comment on what the recent hurricanes have to say about the current administration.
I won't tell you that the trials of the people in New Orleans were directly George Bush's fault. For one thing, a lot more people than just George Bush had to ignore the testimony of experts that the levees around New Orleans would not hold up to much stress.
I did hear someone diss one of the people who had directly warned that Katrina could cause a flooding disaster in New Orleans. It seems he had put his message in an email. The critic's comments were something like this. "I'm a manager and I get a lot of email. I don't have time to read it all. If something is really important they'll come to me in person."
Hey, dinosaur! Guess what? The twenty-first century arrived several years before 2000. Email is how we communicate. If you, as a manager, haven't caught on to that, how do you expect to keep your job? You get paid more than your subordinates because you are supposed to put time into being well informed. That data coming to you in email messages may be poorly written, and there might be a lot of extraneous material, but there's gold there to be mined and it's your job to mine it!
Listen, anybody can take a one or two day course and learn to read through voluminous written material and catch the key points. Maybe I didn't have time to read the whole email, but if I blew it off entirely then I have conceeded that I am NOT a competent manager and in return for having taken pay to be a competent manager when I was not I should be immediately force-fed through the nearest paper shredder.
Well, maybe that punishment is a little extreme, but the crime of stodgily refusing to join the 21st century with the rest of us while still insisting that it is your higher skills that earned you the right to make more than we do should not go unpunished. And it clearly gives the lie to the idea that the job market is competitive. If it really was these dinosaurs would be sitting on the flooded streets of New Orleans holding out cups in the hopes that passers-by would drop in a penny or two.
If you are a manager charged with preparing the nation for disasters, and there's a major hurricane headed for the coast, it shouldn't take you more than about ten seconds to browse through an email, see the words "New Orleans," "hurricane," and "flooding" and conclude that you needed to learn more. If you failed to act it isn't the fault of the man who felt this was important and used the fastest means of written communication available today. It's your own ____ fault!
So why were such incompetent people in charge of the nation's disaster preparedness? To those who have watched this country play dumb and dumber as a result the answer is clear -- September 11, 2001. True, the death of three thousand some odd people is shocking, particularly when coupled with the destruction of one of the nation's primary man-made landmarks. But for us to then pretend that Muslim lunatics in airplanes were the only threat we faced was stupid in the extreme, as Katrina and Rita have demonstrated.
George Bush did not immediately like the idea of a department of homeland security. But, to demonstrate they were as stupid as Bush, the Democrats then demanded it -- and got it. Now they want to blame Bush when that major power-grab left the nation defenseless against threats that arrive more often than terrorists.
Wake up, America! We are the ones who invented terrorism when we faced the powerful British army in search of liberty. Our fighters gained a great advantage by not playing by the rules of war. And we are the ones who created the grievances that have led so many Muslims to seek death through our destruction. And all the other threats to our security, including crime, weather, and our own indolence, have neither gone away nor abated.
What I'm saying is that everyone who thought the world was all about anti-terrorism after 9-11 shares blame for our unpreparedness this time around. Did Bush appoint cronies rather than experts to key administration posts? What president hasn't? Did Bush neglect New Orleans because the assets of his friends in the oil inudstry weren't particularly at risk? (His rapid response when the target was Houston may suggest exactly that.) What leader has ever truly had a balanced view of the concerns of his subjects?
Rita was a gold-wrapped present for the administration. It gave it the chance to pull out all the stops and be sure nobody was left unhelped after the second storm. The most recent impressions are usually the lasting impressions, and many people will go away with the general impression that Bush did pretty well.
What nobody seems to notice is that the response to Rita merely demonstrated what could have been done before Katrina, and therefore further condemn an administration that seems so out of touch with ordinary Americans.
Another fascinating observation has to do with the color of the faces left behind in New Orleans. Who were the ones too poor to drive out and too isolated to find help from friends or relatives? By far the bulk of them were African Americans. The left quickly pointed out that this demonstrated that racism still existed in the deep south and that Bush had done nothing to stop it and may even have encouraged it, even if only inadvertently.
Whereupon some conservatives quickly moved to put the blame on the Democratic leaders of Louisiana and New Orleans. There's plenty of blame to go around, we don't need to politicize this. And one African American conservative went on to say that the indolent and decadent black people of New Orleans were the main cause of their own troubles. Does that make them any worse than the indolent and decadent white people in Washington who "traveled over land and sea" to get themselves appointed to positions which gave them the responsibility to help when disaster struck? In the words of one particularly irritating nonconformist, "Let him who is without sin among you cast the first stone."
This adminstration may weather these storms (puns here and in the title intended) quite well. And should the freedom fighters in Iraq get tired of killing themselves with no impact on the future of their country before 2008, King George the second may leave office looking pretty good. Then the rest of the country will say to people like me, "How could you have been so hard on him?" But we'll have forgotten. He will have lost his power to destroy this nation and its reputation, and we'll be busy criticizing his replacement, be he (or she) Republican or Democrat.