Ordinary people are sitting at home, transfixed by the spectacle unfolding on their television screens. Their hearts are breaking as they watch the horrifying spectacle of an entire city drowned. Many have already contributed what they can to the American Red Cross, to the Salvation Army, to the other armies of compassion, and only wish they could do more.
What must they think of the talking heads who treat this as if it were another bit of minor grist for the political mills? As if this were another story about some politician’s war record or a nominee’s nanny issues. The callowness now on display goes a long way toward explaining why politicians and the media are held in public esteem somewhere above child molesters and below bankers.
Little pitchers have big ears, don’t you know. Shush with the “b-l-a-m-e” game or somebody might get the idea that somebody made a mistake.
Sometimes I wonder if these pundits ever talk to anyone but each other. Apparently, he doesn’t know that “ordinary people” have lots and lots of opinions about how the leadership of this country should behave in a catastrophe. They do not have this strange, fey reticence to engage in “the blame game.” They expect their leaders to take charge — and when the task is huge and unprecedented, they expect their national leaders to take charge and mobilize the nation to help.
Jesus, George W. Bush has spent the last four years babbling about his superior leadership on a loop.
From his stump speech in 2004:
There are quiet times in the life of a nation when little is expected of its leaders. This isn’t one of those times. This is a time when we need firm resolve, clear vision and a deep faith in the values that make us a great nation. (Applause.)
None of us will ever forget that week when one era ended and another began. On September the 14th, 2001, I stood in the ruins of the Twin Towers. It’s a day I will never forget. There were workers in hard hats there, yelling, “Whatever it takes.” I was trying to do my best to thank and comfort the firefighters and policemen and the rescuers. A guy grabbed me by the arm, and he said, “Do not let me down.” (Applause.) Ever since that day, I wake up every morning thinking about how to better protect our country. I will never relent in defending America, whatever it takes
This was what he ran and won on — the idea that he alone, the man in charge, wouldn’t “let us down.” But after Iraq — and now this — it’s become clear to many “ordinary Americans” that his stirring assertions of his own committment aren’t enough. There is massive failure and a complete lack of accountability. Actions speak louder than words. You don’t have to be a pundit to understand that when Americans are abandoned in flood waters — while the media were able to film their despair for days on end — that the government let us down.
The guy who said over and over again “my greatest responsibility as President is to protect the American people,” was selling people his leadership abilities in a crisis. And he let the country down. Ordinary people understand that quite well thank you. They aren’t confused in the least. Even if the state a local authorities weren’t on the ball it doesn’t mean that the president was. And he’s the man in the codpiece.
The sub-text of this crisis is that when the shit came down in an overwhelming way our national government failed.
This story about Bush using firefighters as props should be circulated far and wide. I think it is the perfect symbol of the photo-op presidency.
I would like to see it juxtaposed with another one:
Karl Rove believes that politics is TV with the sound turned off. And that’s mostly true. What he fails to understand is that people turn the sound way up during big stories like this. And they are feeling the cognitive dissonance between the images of horrible suffering and the president’s dull and meaningless babbling:
“So long as anybody’s life is in danger, we’ve got work to do. That’s why I want people to be assured we’re going to do it. And — but remember, this is a project that not only deals with the immediate, we’re going to have to deal with the long term, as well. The immediate needs are being taken care of right here, and I fully understand there’s a lot of work to be done.”
I think that there have been two important political comments these past few days. The first is this by William Kristol:
“He is a strong president . . . but he has never really focused on the importance of good execution. I think that is true in many parts of his presidency.”
“… an administration whose FEMA director knew less about on-the-ground conditions in the stricken city this week than the average TV viewer has a real vulnerability.
It will only address that vulnerability with a performance in coming days and weeks that is more in keeping with the GOP’s image as the “daddy party,” the party of competence, the party that can be trusted in times of crisis. That is the main thing.”
Daddy isn’t supposed to snivel about how the locals didn’t do their job. Daddy whining about “the blame game” makes the kids feel like Daddy still isn’t in charge and doesn’t know what he’s doing. And he should not be making excuses for his idiot cronies or relying on politesse and bureaucratic snafus to explain why he was late when the crisis hit. Daddy isn’t supposed to be late.
I went through the LA riots in 92 and I recall that there was a delay in deploying the National Guard, ostensibly because they didn’t have enough ammunition.(It turned out that they didn’t have the proper locks on their guns.) The (possibly apocryphal) story that circulated at the time was that Pete Wilson, ex-marine, said, “Well then, issue one fucking bullet a piece and tell them to get their asses out there.”
I have no love for Pete Wilson (and the response of the guard was very tardy) but that’s the way people expect leaders to behave in a crisis. They want to see them making tough decisions, holding people accountable. Taking charge. That’s the manufactured image the Republicans have been selling for decades. The reality is little Lord Pontchartrain telling his political hack “Brownie” he’s doing a great job — and using fire-fighters as props for his latest costume pageant. George W. Bush is America’s deadbeat Dad.
I have clearly angered the geek gods in some way. I had a massive computer meltdown of both laptop and desktop within 4 days. I’ll be posting from odd distracting places for the time being.
BATON ROUGE, La. — They locked down the entrance doors Thursday at the Baton Rouge hotel where I’m staying alongside hundreds of New Orleans residents driven from their homes by Hurricane Katrina.
“Because of the riots,” the hotel managers explained. Armed Gunmen from New Orleans were headed this way, they had heard.
“It’s the blacks,” whispered one white woman in the elevator. “We always worried this would happen.”
I had the misfortune to be around some bigots this week-end as I watched the footage from New Orleans. I hadn’t heard some of this stuff so frankly admitted since I was a kid (when I heard it a lot.) The twisted, subterranean, politically incorrect world of racism has reared its ugly head.
This is just the latest chapter in the oldest story in America. We should be aware of it and understand it. And we should also be glad that it isn’t worse because in the past it certainly was.
Ever since 1791, there have been white Americans who get very nervous when they see a large number of angry black people in one place. That was the year that Haiti’s slaves rebelled and killed almost every Frenchman on the island. The fear of slave revolt — black revolt — entered the consciousness of the American lizard brain and has never left. From Gabriel Prosser to Nat Turner to Malcolm X to Stokely Carmichael and the long hot summers of 66 and 67, notions of barbaric vengeance being wreaked upon unsuspecting white people has lurked in our racist subconscious. During slavery it was the immoral institution itself combined with horrible inhumane treatment. After the civil war it was the knowledge of seething anger at Jim Crow. During the 60’s the anger became explicit and words like “by any means necessary” reached deep into the American psyche and fueled the backlash against the civil rights movement — and set the conditions for the Republican dominance of politics today.
Race is America’s deepest psychic wound that festers in different ways over and over again. It has lost much of its original blazing pain, but it is still there, buried and waiting to come to the surface.
The memories of Nat Turner are still fresh to many for whom the Lost Cause is their defining cultural benchmark:
Starting with a trusted few fellow slaves, the insurgency ultimately numbered more than 40 slaves and free blacks, mostly on horseback. The rebels traveled from house to house, freeing slaves and killing all the whites they could find; men, women and children alike. In all 55 whites were killed in the revolt.
In total, 55 blacks suspected of having been involved in the uprising were killed. In the aftermath, hundreds of blacks, many of whom had nothing to do with the rebellion, were beaten, tortured and murdered by hysterical white mobs.
In the summer of 67, the cities of this country went up in flames. The rhetoric was the same as what we heard coming from the right this past week. Peggy Noonan suggested that looters be summarily shot. And, in that summer of fire, they were. In large numbers. Only, it turned out, they weren’t necessarily looters or rioters — they were just black. Ordinary people, housewives, kids were gunned down by renegade cops and national guard who were given orders to shoot to kill. Every african american killed by police that summer became a symbol of collective punishment. If you were black, you could be asked to pay with your life for the sins of other blacks. That’s just the way it worked.
In Rick Perlstein’s (as yet unpublished) new book, which I’ve had the privilege to read a bit of, this is the real crucible of the 1960’s. Here is just a little bit of what happened in Newark that long hot summer after the cops took off the gloves and started doing what Peggy Noonan and Jonah Goldberg have been agitating for this past week in New Orleans:
“The press was interested in making the carnage make sense. A turkey shoot of grandparents and 10-year-olds did not make sense. The New York Daily News ran an “investigation” of the death of the Newark fire captain [killed by police] and called it “The Murder of Mike Moran.” The Washington Post left his cause of death as more or less a blank. The alternative–that when law enforcement spent days spraying … rounds of ammunition, more or less at random, even white people can get killed–seemed too horrifying for mainstream ideology to contemplate. Twelve-year-old Joey Bass, in dirty jeans and scuffed sneakers, his own blood trickling down the street, lay splayed across the cover of the July 28 Life. The feature inside constituted a sort of visual and verbal legal brief for why such accidents might have been excusable. The opening spread showed a man with a turban wrapped around his head loading a Mauser by a window with the caption, “The targets were Negro snipers, like the one above.” In actual fact the photo had been staged by a blustering black nationalist by the name of Colonel Hassan, what the copy claimed was an upper-floor vantage onto the streets actually a first-floor room overlooking a trash-strewn back yard. “The whole time we were in Newark we never saw what you would call a violent black man,” Life photographer Bud Lee later recalled. “The only people I saw who were violent were the police.”
Here is a link to Bud Lee’s famous photograph of Joey Bass.
In a city racked by violence for a week, there was yet another shootout on Sunday. Contractors for the Army Corps of Engineers came under fire as they crossed a bridge to work on a levee and police escorts shot back, killing three assailants and a fourth in a later gunfight. A fifth suspect was wounded and captured. There was no explanation for it, only the numbing facts.
Perlstein reports on this incident from Newark:
And around 4 pm a group of citizens were milling around outside front of the Scudder Homes housing project off Springfield when three police cars turned the corner. The crowd assumed the police must be firing blanks at them,until a .38 caliber bullet ripped through Virgil Harrison’s right forearm.
Men took off their undershirts to wave them as white flags. The cops just kept on shooting. They said they were looking for a sniper on the upper floors of the building. But they sprayed their shots at ground level. That was how Rufus Council, 35, Oscar Hill, 50, and Virgil’s father Isaac “UncleDaddy” Harrison, 72, and perhaps Robert Lee Martin, 22, and Cornelius Murray, 28, lost their lives. Oscar Hill was wearing his American Legion jacket. Robert Lee Martin’s family reported that money was taken from his body. Murray’s body was missing $126 and a ring.
There indeed were three snipers in Scudder Homes. But they began their shooting in response to these fusillades. They killed a police detective, Fred Toto, 33, a father of three, about on hour later, though in later testimony police claimed the order of the shootings was reversed.
I’m not saying that’s what happened in New Orleans in the incident I reference above — or any others. I don’t know the facts. I am saying that’s the kind of thing that tends to happen when rumor and paranoia get out of hand.
Here’s the Council of Conservative Citizen’s web site:
Updates! Eyewitness accounts report that at least six people have been murdered inside the superdome. One dozen or more have been raped. Most of the rape victims are very young. A seven year old girl, an eight year old boy, and numerous teenage girls. The US media is extremely reluctant to report any of this because of political correctness!
Yet this doctor who was ministering to the sick in the Superdome reports nothing like this:
Perhaps it’s the stench that Dr. Kevin Stephens will remember the most. It was a stench that was a gumbo of human waste, sweat, and despair. For four days, Stephens, the Health Department director in New Orleans, administered to the sick in the Superdome, his primary patients being those in wheelchairs and nonambulatory. He watched conditions deteriorate from one of calmness on the eve of Hurricane Katrina crippling the city, to one of frustration by the time he was evacuated to the adjacent New Orleans Arena on Wednesday. He was taken to Baton Rouge on Thursday.
[…]
“I never felt threatened and I walked around the entire place,” Stephens said. “I was talking to people, administering first aid. But people were ready to get out of there. The conditions were horrid and horrible. The stench was unbearable. If we had electricity, it would have been so much better.”
“This place is going to look like Little Somalia,” Brig. Gen. Gary Jones, commander of the Louisiana National Guard’s Joint Task Force told Army Times Friday as hundreds of armed troops under his charge prepared to launch a massive citywide security mission from a staging area outside the Louisiana Superdome.
In Detroit during the riots there in 1967, Perlstein reports:
“I’m gonna shoot at anything that moves and that is black” an arriving National Guardsman declared.
(He also reports that the federal government and state blame game almost perfectly mirrors the current crisis. When things are hurtling out of control, politicians will dither until they figure out what the play is, I guess. Too bad about the dead bodies.)
The story to which I linked at the beginning of this post concludes with this:
By Thursday, local TV and radio stations in Baton Rouge—the only ones in the metro area still able to broadcast—were breezily passing along reports of cars being hijacked at gunpoint by New Orleans refugees, riots breaking out in the shelters set up in Baton Rouge to house the displaced, and guns and knives being seized.
Scarcely any of it was true—the police, for example, confiscated a single knife from a refugee in one Baton Rouge shelter. There were no riots in Baton Rouge. There were no armed hordes.
But all of it played directly into the darkest prejudices long held against the hundreds of thousands of impoverished blacks who live “down there,” in New Orleans, that other world regarded by many white suburbanites—indeed, many people across the rest of the state—as a dangerous urban no-go area.
Now the floods were pushing tens of thousands of those inner-city residents deep into Baton Rouge and beyond. The TV pictures showed vast throngs of black people who had been trapped in downtown New Orleans disgorging out of rescue trucks and helicopters to be ushered onto buses headed west on Interstate Highway 10. The nervousness among many of the white evacuees in my hotel was palpable.
.
It’s that last that we need to look for now. The evacuees are a diaspora all over the country. They are “infiltrating” a bunch of cities and towns in large numbers. Many whites fear blacks in large numbers, especially those from the big city, those who are desperate. Most especially, they fear those who are angry. (Why if they get it in their heads to be mad about how they were left behind to die like animals, who knows what will happen? Lock the doors!)
I don’t honestly think there is any racist conspiracy at work. There doesn’t need to be. All it takes is a reactivation of long held racist beliefs and attitudes — attitudes that led the president to say that they had “secured” the convention center on Friday night — which we all saw in that amazing FoxNews footage actually meant that the desperate survivors had been locked inside the sweltering hellhole. It was the attitude that had tourists staying at the Hyatt hotel being given special dispensation to go to the head of the lines at the Superdome. It was the attitude that made my racist companions disgusted by the “animals” at the convention center because they were living in filth fail to grasp that these people had been expecting to be rescued at any moment for more than four days.
It’s that attitude that led these people to talk endlessly about rape with lurid imagery and breathless, barely contained excitement. This too is part of the American lizard brain.
I have no doubt that there was criminality on the streets of New Orleans. When the law disappears, that’s what happens. But when you looks closely at our history you see that whenever large numbers of african americans are featured, this is the kind of thing that is said and thought and done. It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t believe it or that criminals shouldn’t be brought to justice. But our history suggests that when we hear reports of cops gunning down looters, snipers and rapists in the street, we should at least maintain a normal skepticism. Far too often in our history it has been shown later that things were not as they seemed at the time.
This, by the way, is not a neat black and white thing and never has been. Some black Americans have the same lizard brain reactions as do whites. In 1822:
Perhaps inspired by the way slaves coordinated their slave revolution in Santo Domingue (know today as the Haitian Revolution), [Denmark Vesey] planned what would have been the largest slave rebellion in U.S. history. His insurrection, which was to take place on July 14, 1822, became known by about 9,000 slaves and free blacks throughout Charleston who were to participate. The plot was leaked by slaves loyal to their white owners who overheard talks of rebellion, and 131 people were charged with conspiracy by Charleston authorities.
Nobody will be surprised to learn, I assume, that recent scholarship indicates Desmond Vesey was framed.
Everyone has undoubtedly seen that dramatic and heartbreaking footage of Aaron Broussard on Meet the Press yesterday. But I wonder if most people saw Haley Barbour directly afterward. He completely ignored Broussard’s emotional plea and implied in a particularly unctuous tone that something was wrong with Louisiana because everything was going very well in Mississippi:
MR. BROUSSARD: Nobody’s coming to get us. Nobody’s coming to get us. The secretary has promised. Everybody’s promised. They’ve had press conferences. I’m sick of the press conferences. For God sakes, shut up and send us somebody.
MR. RUSSERT: Just take a pause, Mr. President. While you gather yourself in your very emotional times, I understand, let me go to Governor Haley Barbour of Mississippi.
Governor Barbour, can you bring our audience up to date on what is happening in your state, how many deaths have you experienced and what do you see playing out over the next couple days?
GOV. HALEY BARBOUR, (R-MS): Well, we were ground zero of the worst natural disaster ever to hit the United States. And it’s not just a calamity on our Gulf Coast, which is decimated, I mean, destroyed, all the infrastructure overwhelmed. We have damage 150 miles inland. We have 100 miles inland, 12 deaths from winds over 110 miles an hour.
Saturday night before this storm hit, the head of the National Hurricane Center called me and said, “Governor, this is going to be like Camille.” I said, “Well, start telling people it’s going to be like Camille,” because Camille is the benchmark for how bad–it’s the worst hurricane that ever hit America, it happened to hit Pass Christian, Mississippi. Well, Tim, Katrina was worse than Camille. It was worse than Camille in size. It was worse than Camille in damage. And so we’ve had a terrible, grievous blow struck us.
But my experience is very different from Louisiana, apparently. I don’t know anything about Louisiana. Over here, we had the Coast Guard in Monday night. They took 1,700 people off the roofs of houses with guys hanging off of helicopters to get them. They sent us a million meals last night because we’d eaten everything through. Everything hasn’t been perfect here, by any stretch of the imagination, Tim. But the federal government has been good partners to us. They’ve tried hard. Our people have tried hard. Firemen and policemen and emergency medical people, National Guard, highway patrolmen working virtually around the clock, sleeping in their cars when they could sleep. And we’ve made progress every day.
So, basically he said that Mississippi was getting the help it needed early on. I wonder if Mississippians agree with that?
In a sign of the political pressure facing Bush, Mississippi Republican Sen. Trent Lott, a former Senate majority leader, said he has been battling the Federal Emergency Management Agency and its Mississippi counterpart for help for his state and urged Bush to cut red tape.
After a one-on-one meeting with Bush in Poplarville, Lott said: “I am demanding help for the people of Mississippi to recover from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.”
Haley Barbour is hitching his wagon to Bush and it makes sense. He’s really never been anything but a political hack. But if things aren’t going as well in Mississippi as he says it is — and I doubt it is — then he’s playing with fire. I’d put my money on Lott. I have a suspicion that he understands the zeitgeist a little bit better that Barbour does.
…there are critics, particularly Jackson residents who are desperate for gasoline, and country folk still forced to scrounge for food and clean water in a world without electricity. And, there are those who say Barbour may have been too soft on early evacuation decisions.
The gulf coast was devastated. And people there are feeling overlooked in the shadow of the horrors of New Orleans. It’s going to take a long time to re-build and things will not go completely smoothly. If people get impatient with this endless happy talk coming out of Barbour and the rest of the Republican leadership, there could be hell to pay. They’d better hope that Bush can deliver.
If I am confirmed, I will pay special attention to volunteers and non-governmental organizations responding to disasters. Fire fighters are frequently the first to respond to a disaster. Faith-based groups like the Salvation Army play critical roles in disaster relief, as does the American Red Cross. And the individual actions of neighbors helping neighbors by donating time, food, and clothing should never be underestimated. These are the people who make a vital difference, without any expectation of thanks or recognition.
Joseph Allbaugh, George W. Bush’s campaign manager at his confirmation hearing to be head of FEMA, February 13, 2001.
The government’s job is to give money and recognition to charity organizations, not to actually do anything except encourage people to start a telephone prayer tree or squeeze their eyes shut tight and wish with everything they have not to die. After all, everybody wants the government out of their lives.
This is clearly the philosophy of FEMA under George W. Bush, his campaign manager and his campaign manager’s roommate “Brownie.” In other words, put your head between your legs and kiss you ass good-bye suckers. We aren’t in the business of federal disaster relief.
Arthur has posted a couple of awful, frustrating stories. There are so many.
This little detail, however, stands out:
…for the entire time Bush was in the state, the congressman said, a ban on helicopter flights further stalled the delivery of food and supplies.
Has anyone else heard that?
I suppose that as long as he wasn’t getting a haircut that caused no inconvenience whatsoever, no one will cause a stink. But, let’s face facts. This was a photo op for purely political purposes. There was nothing he couldn’t have seen by simply turning on television over the last 5 days. People were dying out there.
“It seems to me that the poor should have had the EASIEST time leaving. They don’t need to pay for an extended leave from their home, they could have just packed a few belongings and walked away to start over somewhere else. What did they have to lose?
When the wealthy evacuate, they leave behind nice houses, expensive cars, possibly pets that they treat as members of the family, valuable jewelry, family heirlooms, etc. This makes it emotionally difficult for wealthy people to leave. But by definition, the poor do not have this burden: they either rent their homes, or they are in public housing; their cars are practically junk anyway; and they don’t have any valuable possessions. This is what it means to be poor. These people could just pick up their few belongings, buy a one-way bus ticket to any city and be poor there. Supposing they even had jobs in NO, it’s not like minimum wage jobs are hard to come by.”
More at the link if you can stand it.
I’m going to have one stiff drink. And then another. I don’t recognize that as a fellow human much less a fellow American.
Update: For the record, that comment and all the others shown on Corrente are not made by Jane Galt herself. They are comments from her readers. I’m not sure what that says about her, but the post to which this is attached seems to have been written by a member of the human species.
Bill O’Reilly is trying with all his might to make this story about “thugs” and bad Democrats but both Fox news reporters on the ground are having none of it. Shepard Smith and Steve Harrigan are both insisting that the story is about people dying and starving on the streets of New Orleans. Smith is particularly upset that the mayor sent buses to the Hyatt today and took tourists over to the Superdome and let them off at the front of the line.
O’Reilly says “you sound so bitter” and said they need a strong leader like Rudy Giuliani. Smith replies that what they needed “on the first day was food and water and what they needed on the second day was food and water and what they needed on the third day was food and water.”
O’Reilly is practically rolling his eyes with impatience at Smith’s pussified outrage about the plight of a bunch of losers who were asking for it. He really, really wants to talk about scary black boogeymen and steppin-fetchit politicans. It doesn’t work out. He looks relieved to move over to the Natalee Holloway story.
NOT A NATIONAL DISGRACE [Rich Lowry] A dissent from this column I wrote yesterday:
It is not. It is – or ought to be – a disgrace and an embarrassment to Louisiana and New Orleans. I see the way Florida prepares for and responds to hurricanes; I see the way Mississippi and Alabama are dealing with this one; I’ve seen the Carolinas and Virginia deal with hurricanes, too. I’ve been in Miami and Norfolk when hurricanes hit, though not as severe as this one, and seen folks come together to support each other in the crisis. I see the outpouring of support from surrounding states and from the federal government heading to Louisiana as fast as it can.
And then I see citizens of New Orleans shooting, raping, burning, and plundering while their government officials stand by helplessly…
Fox News reporters have played this story pretty straight (for them) and it’s making the stars extremely uncomfortable. Somebody’s going to have to have a talk with the supporting cast. They are going off script.
Update: Sean’s up now and he’s equally uncomfortable with Shep’s story about the thousands still stuck on freeways and bridges with no food and water — who have been ignored for days now. He’s been covering one single bridge for days and nobody knows why they haven’t been helped yet. He’s almost shrill.
Now Geraldo comes on and he freaks out, begging the authorities to let people still stuck at the convention center walk out of town. Shep comes back and he says they have checkpoints set up turning people back to the city if they try. (wtf?) They are both on the verge of tears.
Sean says they need to get some perspective and Shep screams at him “this is the perspective!”
This was some amazing TV. Kudos to Shep Smith and Geraldo for not letting O’Reilly and Hannity spin their GOP “resolve” apologia bullshit. I’m fairly shocked.
Vines also said U.S. troops in Iraq whose family members were injured or killed by Hurricane Katrina may be allowed to go home, but those who have no confirmed casualties among family members will have to stay in Iraq.
If their families are mere refugees, I guess it’s tough shit.
They could come home if Jonah Goldberg and his friends took their place, though. Surely they’ll be willing to make that sacrifice, right?
