Shock waves of indignation after the flood
The hurricane Kristina disaster, and the inadequate response, particularly by the Bush administration, has predictably become the backdrop for politicians defining themselves in relation to civic responsibility, the role of government, and the ability to seek and speak truth rather than mouth conventional pieties.
Those politicians who have calculated that being in the "responsible" center, i.e., we're all in this together and we need to pull together and not assign blame -- there'll be time later for politics -- may well have miscalculated. With 9/11 this seems to have worked: the ruse that "it wasn't foreseen" was easily foisted on a traumatized public, and the "enemy" could be demonized as foreign.
In New Orleans, it will be very difficult to make the "it wasn't foreseen" ruse stick; even the MSM seems to be on top of the story, and willing to openly criticize officialdom. Postmortems, in this case versus 9/11, will be clear that such a disaster was well foreseen, on virtually any timescale, in the face of which Federal preparation and planning was intentionally diminished over the past few years, and almost entirely absent for the past few days of hell in New Orleans. In the immediate wake, the administration's lack of adequate response and competence is now patent,with 5 days of scrambling being unfavorably compared to the logistical attention to Iraq infrastructure efforts, to Tsunmi response, as well as to the general representations of the administration after 9/11 of supposed infrastructure changes to optimize disaster response. The emperor, and his entire court, have no clothes.
The public will see this as an American crisis for a great city and not just the marginalized poor people the administration would like to ignore or sub-optimize in mounting their response to the disaster. While the administration seems to have no conscience, and has sought to program the citizenry into Bush-consciousness, stark reality (overwhelming the government's spin machine) seems for the moment to have trumped newspeak, doublespeak,and mind control. If the administration can fail to respond adequately to the needs of N.O., they can fail to respond adequately to my city's needs, my needs. And the price at the pump, for many on the economic scale whose finances are stretched, is hammering the message home as we speak.
Perhaps the forces that would rather have Americans continue to exist in a bubble of ignorance will close ranks in the days, weeks and months ahead, while the New Orleans area continues to suffer. Maybe, instead, we are at a turning point never anticipated by the people behind the forces inflating that bubble -- for their own greed and agrandizement. Whichever, the opportunity now exists for the forces of relative sanity to begin to take back our country.
The cautious, make-no-waves center is not the correct posture in the face of this tragedy, politically or emotionally.
Those politicians who have calculated that being in the "responsible" center, i.e., we're all in this together and we need to pull together and not assign blame -- there'll be time later for politics -- may well have miscalculated. With 9/11 this seems to have worked: the ruse that "it wasn't foreseen" was easily foisted on a traumatized public, and the "enemy" could be demonized as foreign.
In New Orleans, it will be very difficult to make the "it wasn't foreseen" ruse stick; even the MSM seems to be on top of the story, and willing to openly criticize officialdom. Postmortems, in this case versus 9/11, will be clear that such a disaster was well foreseen, on virtually any timescale, in the face of which Federal preparation and planning was intentionally diminished over the past few years, and almost entirely absent for the past few days of hell in New Orleans. In the immediate wake, the administration's lack of adequate response and competence is now patent,with 5 days of scrambling being unfavorably compared to the logistical attention to Iraq infrastructure efforts, to Tsunmi response, as well as to the general representations of the administration after 9/11 of supposed infrastructure changes to optimize disaster response. The emperor, and his entire court, have no clothes.
The public will see this as an American crisis for a great city and not just the marginalized poor people the administration would like to ignore or sub-optimize in mounting their response to the disaster. While the administration seems to have no conscience, and has sought to program the citizenry into Bush-consciousness, stark reality (overwhelming the government's spin machine) seems for the moment to have trumped newspeak, doublespeak,and mind control. If the administration can fail to respond adequately to the needs of N.O., they can fail to respond adequately to my city's needs, my needs. And the price at the pump, for many on the economic scale whose finances are stretched, is hammering the message home as we speak.
Perhaps the forces that would rather have Americans continue to exist in a bubble of ignorance will close ranks in the days, weeks and months ahead, while the New Orleans area continues to suffer. Maybe, instead, we are at a turning point never anticipated by the people behind the forces inflating that bubble -- for their own greed and agrandizement. Whichever, the opportunity now exists for the forces of relative sanity to begin to take back our country.
The cautious, make-no-waves center is not the correct posture in the face of this tragedy, politically or emotionally.
