Quality of Character in the Aftermath
There is a perspective to take today as we watch some small streams of hope reach the ghost town that is New Orleans; as voices harsh and unyielding fly by demanding to know what when wrong and, more importantly, who to blame. Why wasn’t the city prepared? Why had no one anticipated that the levees that held back Lake Poncetrain would crack, devastating a city that not even the mighty British army could plunder in 1812?
Why hadn’t the thousands of people who found hellish refuge in the Superdome been forced out, by gunpoint in necessary, before the disaster hit?
It’s a cliché to say we all now benefit from hindsight. In the days before Hurricane Katrina hit, television weather personalities were pulling no verbal punches in describing how damaging a storm with 100+ mile per hour winds would be on a city that sits eight feet below sea level. But it seemed then, even with all the hyped gloom and doom, that no one had any idea of just how big a calamity Katrina would be, and in the autumn hours when Katrina’s path shifted just enough to give everyone a sigh of relief that would prove as laughably ironic as it would false, most people, including myself, relegated themselves to the comfortable thoughts that this would be nothing more than your average (or perhaps slightly more severe than that) Gulf Coast strike.
No, I hadn’t preoccupied myself wondering if New Orleans had done everything it could to soften the tragedy that was only days away.
In politics, where there is both no shortage of mud and no shortage of people to fling it, targets have been selected all the way up and down the line from the mayor of New Orleans to the governor of Louisiana to the President of the United States.
I’m not an incredibly educated man, and I certainly had no grasp of what was to come, so I feel a little justified that the bitching about what had or had not been done before Katrina came knocking down our Cajun backdoor reeks of amateurish Monday-morning quarterbacking.
However, while many, including defenders of President Bush, have been arguing this point ad nauseum for weeks now, don’t think it lets anyone off the hook.
While the actions immediately before Katrina’s strike can reasonably be fed into a debate of mismanagement, negligence, or just plain bad luck, the actions after Katrina had done her havoc and moved on are very evident- and very embarrassing.
Those who have tried to play down the criticism against Bush make quite a few common sense points. Of course, Katrina was the not the result of Bush’s foreign or domestic policies. Nor, as leader of the executive branch of the federal government, is it his responsibility to override state and local matters such as hurricane preparedness and evacuations.
I’ll give Bush all of this and argue he was as blindsided by Katrina’s fury as the rest of us. But the fact that he failed in one key aspect of the crisis is undeniable- and unforgivable.
He failed to act like he even gave a damn.
The mediums of the late 20th Century have played a funny game not only on the ways we communicate, but our values in communication. In a situation like this- a major U.S. city just about destroyed through what could be called “an act of God” and the majority of its underprivileged citizens either left stranded, dying, or to devolve into lawless mobs, what would have been the best way to react? I’m not suggesting that Bush should have flown down to New Orleans as soon as the gales subsided. Quite the opposite- a man who requires a major law enforcement shift from whatever city he visits would best have stayed away. What few elements of police, fire department, and the National Guard that remained had enough on their shoulders already.
And this is my point. When did we get to the point when we equated location for truth? Bush could have done an effective job at calming the nation (don’t doubt it- we felt a fear similar to which we felt on 9/11- after all, a major American city had just been decimated) from D.C., from the White House. After Pearl Harbor, FDR didn’t have travel to Hawaii to communicate the horror of that “day of infamy.” When nuclear missiles were spotted in Cuba, Kennedy didn’t have to travel to the tip of Florida to express the new danger we all faced.
Each man had his own way of making menace seem real to the American public, but also reassure them that no threat stood taller to the will and experience of those who had been elected to lead them.
In the immediate hours- and then days- after Katrina there was a weak silence coming from the White House. Sure, the name got batted around, but more than one person observed that Bush seemed more preoccupied with getting John Roberts to fill the vacant Chief Justice seat left by the late William Rehnquist than rallying the American people in the midst of the greatest national tragedy since the attacks on New York and the Pentagon.
Where was the leadership? Where was someone to instill our faith that the American spirit would not let one of its daughters suffer and die so easily? Where was the strong and compassionate voice to tell us that those who had been left behind would now be looked after as if they were our own kin? Where was someone to encourage us to, once again, exhibit the best of ourselves when the country as a whole needed it the most?
I’m not going to suggest that the abysmal response sits on Bush’s conscience alone. The day after 9/11, Congress reconvened to pass an unheard of block of legislation- everything from new defense and appropriations bills to relief for families of the victims. When a judge ordered Terry Schiavo’s feeding tube removed, Republicans returned from vacation on a Sunday to draft bills to reverse the process.
Congress eventually did reconvene. It waited until the end of its scheduled vacation- four full days after Katrina had come and gone.
Why? Simple. There was no political capital. With Schiavo, conservatives could add one more little footnote of their pandering resume to the reactionary wing of the Religious Right. With 9/11, no one, red or blue state, wanted to appear to be lethargic or apathetic in the midst of an attack on our sovereign soil. Those who survived Katrina’s devastation only to inhabit a city flooded by its own sewage, foraging for food, and trying to stay alive in a scenario where all observable bounds of law and order had disintegrated, might have been better off if all of it had been the result of a terrorist attack. At least then no one in our government would have spared time or expense in responding to the situation, if only so they could later issue a campaign flier boasting how they are pitching in during the “war on terror.”
During a television address Thursday night, Bush took full responsibility for the insufficient government response to the disaster. This was a minor miracle for an administration whose game plan has been to deny that a train is coming even when it’s five feet away. But here, the critical mass of embarrassment could not be overcome. As stories leaked out about FEMA’s disembowelment and “repurposing” to simply be another “we must be vigilant” anti-terrorism agency the political waters began rising faster than the flood waters of Lake Poncetrain. Even more sickening was the blatant, (and much to the chagrin of the Bush administration) unspinnable incompetence of FEMA director Michael Brown. In an a moment so painfully ridiculous it could have been a header sketch on Saturday Night Live, Nightline anchor Ted Koppel exposed Brown’s ignorance of events when he got the FEMA director to admit that he had had no knowledge of survivors waiting for rescue in the New Orleans Civic Center, even when most media outlets had been reporting of conditions there for over three days.
Brown, a former college buddy of Bush, revealed a long standing and stinking truism in the Bush administration- that party (and personal) loyalty is far more valued than experience and competence. Bush finally came to his senses, ousting Brown and installing R. David Paulison, a former firefighter who has had almost three decades of experience in managing the response to disasters. But like every stroke or measure in this game, it has proven to be far too little, far too late.
Bush’s decision to accept responsibility was a curious twist in a dynasty that has been loathe to discuss any degree of complexity or aberration in the practices it keeps. This has resulted in a curious disconnect from reality. Bush has often (and glibly, as if he is proud of it), claimed that he doesn’t read the newspaper- he prefers to get his information strictly from aides and advisors. In one light, this makes sense- I mean, who the hell wants our foreign policy based on the op-ed ravings of The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal? But for a president, the media serves as not a source of information, but a window to the people he is leading. Newspapers and the nightly news are fantastic ways to sample the issues people are talking about and the way they see the world. A president, especially one who has done everything but write ballads about his so-called “simple” nature and his connection to the ordinary people, ignores this window at his own peril, especially when he is surrounded by aides who feel more comfortable simply telling him what he wants to hear. The last president to be so alienated, so isolated from the mainstream was Richard Nixon, who also boasted that he never read the newspaper.
Those who have tried to defend Bush have made the argument: So, he isn’t a great speaker? Isn’t that a minor quality for a man who has to lead the free world? Uh- no. A president is more than a commander-in-chief- he is a statesman who takes it upon himself to negotiate, warn, or cajole other heads of state in a delicate verbal dance whose stakes would put the fear of God in lesser men. And, the President is our leader, our caretaker, the one who we turn to when our nation encounters dark days. He’s the one who tells us we have nothing to fear but fear it self, or to encourage us to ask what we may do for our country. We saw none of this after Katrina- no measure of character worthy of man holding the highest office in the land. Sure, Bush went south to hug refugees who were being graciously sheltered by an African-American church. This doesn’t show he cares. This shows that he knows that the Republican party desperately needs to make a play for the African-America vote.
No, Bush did not cause Hurricane Katrina to strike New Orleans. No, there isn’t anything (save perhaps leaving FEMA alone to do its job) he could have done to prepare for the unthinkable. His biggest transgression was to be an absentee landlord. After we got the first pictures of the jewel of the Old South underwater, we turned, confused and scared, to the man who we have been trained since birth to look to when things look their worst.
And the response we got was, “I’ll get back to you when my vacation is over.”
Why hadn’t the thousands of people who found hellish refuge in the Superdome been forced out, by gunpoint in necessary, before the disaster hit?
It’s a cliché to say we all now benefit from hindsight. In the days before Hurricane Katrina hit, television weather personalities were pulling no verbal punches in describing how damaging a storm with 100+ mile per hour winds would be on a city that sits eight feet below sea level. But it seemed then, even with all the hyped gloom and doom, that no one had any idea of just how big a calamity Katrina would be, and in the autumn hours when Katrina’s path shifted just enough to give everyone a sigh of relief that would prove as laughably ironic as it would false, most people, including myself, relegated themselves to the comfortable thoughts that this would be nothing more than your average (or perhaps slightly more severe than that) Gulf Coast strike.
No, I hadn’t preoccupied myself wondering if New Orleans had done everything it could to soften the tragedy that was only days away.
In politics, where there is both no shortage of mud and no shortage of people to fling it, targets have been selected all the way up and down the line from the mayor of New Orleans to the governor of Louisiana to the President of the United States.
I’m not an incredibly educated man, and I certainly had no grasp of what was to come, so I feel a little justified that the bitching about what had or had not been done before Katrina came knocking down our Cajun backdoor reeks of amateurish Monday-morning quarterbacking.
However, while many, including defenders of President Bush, have been arguing this point ad nauseum for weeks now, don’t think it lets anyone off the hook.
While the actions immediately before Katrina’s strike can reasonably be fed into a debate of mismanagement, negligence, or just plain bad luck, the actions after Katrina had done her havoc and moved on are very evident- and very embarrassing.
Those who have tried to play down the criticism against Bush make quite a few common sense points. Of course, Katrina was the not the result of Bush’s foreign or domestic policies. Nor, as leader of the executive branch of the federal government, is it his responsibility to override state and local matters such as hurricane preparedness and evacuations.
I’ll give Bush all of this and argue he was as blindsided by Katrina’s fury as the rest of us. But the fact that he failed in one key aspect of the crisis is undeniable- and unforgivable.
He failed to act like he even gave a damn.
The mediums of the late 20th Century have played a funny game not only on the ways we communicate, but our values in communication. In a situation like this- a major U.S. city just about destroyed through what could be called “an act of God” and the majority of its underprivileged citizens either left stranded, dying, or to devolve into lawless mobs, what would have been the best way to react? I’m not suggesting that Bush should have flown down to New Orleans as soon as the gales subsided. Quite the opposite- a man who requires a major law enforcement shift from whatever city he visits would best have stayed away. What few elements of police, fire department, and the National Guard that remained had enough on their shoulders already.
And this is my point. When did we get to the point when we equated location for truth? Bush could have done an effective job at calming the nation (don’t doubt it- we felt a fear similar to which we felt on 9/11- after all, a major American city had just been decimated) from D.C., from the White House. After Pearl Harbor, FDR didn’t have travel to Hawaii to communicate the horror of that “day of infamy.” When nuclear missiles were spotted in Cuba, Kennedy didn’t have to travel to the tip of Florida to express the new danger we all faced.
Each man had his own way of making menace seem real to the American public, but also reassure them that no threat stood taller to the will and experience of those who had been elected to lead them.
In the immediate hours- and then days- after Katrina there was a weak silence coming from the White House. Sure, the name got batted around, but more than one person observed that Bush seemed more preoccupied with getting John Roberts to fill the vacant Chief Justice seat left by the late William Rehnquist than rallying the American people in the midst of the greatest national tragedy since the attacks on New York and the Pentagon.
Where was the leadership? Where was someone to instill our faith that the American spirit would not let one of its daughters suffer and die so easily? Where was the strong and compassionate voice to tell us that those who had been left behind would now be looked after as if they were our own kin? Where was someone to encourage us to, once again, exhibit the best of ourselves when the country as a whole needed it the most?
I’m not going to suggest that the abysmal response sits on Bush’s conscience alone. The day after 9/11, Congress reconvened to pass an unheard of block of legislation- everything from new defense and appropriations bills to relief for families of the victims. When a judge ordered Terry Schiavo’s feeding tube removed, Republicans returned from vacation on a Sunday to draft bills to reverse the process.
Congress eventually did reconvene. It waited until the end of its scheduled vacation- four full days after Katrina had come and gone.
Why? Simple. There was no political capital. With Schiavo, conservatives could add one more little footnote of their pandering resume to the reactionary wing of the Religious Right. With 9/11, no one, red or blue state, wanted to appear to be lethargic or apathetic in the midst of an attack on our sovereign soil. Those who survived Katrina’s devastation only to inhabit a city flooded by its own sewage, foraging for food, and trying to stay alive in a scenario where all observable bounds of law and order had disintegrated, might have been better off if all of it had been the result of a terrorist attack. At least then no one in our government would have spared time or expense in responding to the situation, if only so they could later issue a campaign flier boasting how they are pitching in during the “war on terror.”
During a television address Thursday night, Bush took full responsibility for the insufficient government response to the disaster. This was a minor miracle for an administration whose game plan has been to deny that a train is coming even when it’s five feet away. But here, the critical mass of embarrassment could not be overcome. As stories leaked out about FEMA’s disembowelment and “repurposing” to simply be another “we must be vigilant” anti-terrorism agency the political waters began rising faster than the flood waters of Lake Poncetrain. Even more sickening was the blatant, (and much to the chagrin of the Bush administration) unspinnable incompetence of FEMA director Michael Brown. In an a moment so painfully ridiculous it could have been a header sketch on Saturday Night Live, Nightline anchor Ted Koppel exposed Brown’s ignorance of events when he got the FEMA director to admit that he had had no knowledge of survivors waiting for rescue in the New Orleans Civic Center, even when most media outlets had been reporting of conditions there for over three days.
Brown, a former college buddy of Bush, revealed a long standing and stinking truism in the Bush administration- that party (and personal) loyalty is far more valued than experience and competence. Bush finally came to his senses, ousting Brown and installing R. David Paulison, a former firefighter who has had almost three decades of experience in managing the response to disasters. But like every stroke or measure in this game, it has proven to be far too little, far too late.
Bush’s decision to accept responsibility was a curious twist in a dynasty that has been loathe to discuss any degree of complexity or aberration in the practices it keeps. This has resulted in a curious disconnect from reality. Bush has often (and glibly, as if he is proud of it), claimed that he doesn’t read the newspaper- he prefers to get his information strictly from aides and advisors. In one light, this makes sense- I mean, who the hell wants our foreign policy based on the op-ed ravings of The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal? But for a president, the media serves as not a source of information, but a window to the people he is leading. Newspapers and the nightly news are fantastic ways to sample the issues people are talking about and the way they see the world. A president, especially one who has done everything but write ballads about his so-called “simple” nature and his connection to the ordinary people, ignores this window at his own peril, especially when he is surrounded by aides who feel more comfortable simply telling him what he wants to hear. The last president to be so alienated, so isolated from the mainstream was Richard Nixon, who also boasted that he never read the newspaper.
Those who have tried to defend Bush have made the argument: So, he isn’t a great speaker? Isn’t that a minor quality for a man who has to lead the free world? Uh- no. A president is more than a commander-in-chief- he is a statesman who takes it upon himself to negotiate, warn, or cajole other heads of state in a delicate verbal dance whose stakes would put the fear of God in lesser men. And, the President is our leader, our caretaker, the one who we turn to when our nation encounters dark days. He’s the one who tells us we have nothing to fear but fear it self, or to encourage us to ask what we may do for our country. We saw none of this after Katrina- no measure of character worthy of man holding the highest office in the land. Sure, Bush went south to hug refugees who were being graciously sheltered by an African-American church. This doesn’t show he cares. This shows that he knows that the Republican party desperately needs to make a play for the African-America vote.
No, Bush did not cause Hurricane Katrina to strike New Orleans. No, there isn’t anything (save perhaps leaving FEMA alone to do its job) he could have done to prepare for the unthinkable. His biggest transgression was to be an absentee landlord. After we got the first pictures of the jewel of the Old South underwater, we turned, confused and scared, to the man who we have been trained since birth to look to when things look their worst.
And the response we got was, “I’ll get back to you when my vacation is over.”
posted by Michael Sean McGowan at 8:39 PM
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