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Jewish World Review Sept. 7, 2005 / 3 Elul, 5765 So many cooks, a rotten broth By Marianne M. Jennings
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
The New York Times, the paper that hailed Joseph Wilson and his social climbing, albeit undercover CIA agent wife, Valerie Plame, along with Richard Clarke, Jayson Blair, and a wide-ranging selection of ne'er-do-wells, has outdone itself. The Times' irrational exuberance over Louisiana po' folk arises because their misery provides proof that Mr. Bush is Beelzebub.
Thursday morning found us aroused to a Times editorial slamming the president for grinning, not believing in global warming and hence, causing Katrina. The big lug. David Brooks, the token Times conservative who became its token conservative by wringing his hands about conservatives, fretted about prejudice. He documented that following the Johnstown flood (he doesn't say which one, but 1889 was the largest) newspapers reported that Hungarians were drunk in the streets singing, cursing, and fighting. Benjamin Harrison probably believed in global warming so Brooks' fret du jour is that, as in the Johnstown aftermath, we conservatives would seize upon the race of New Orleans evacuees. Mr. Brooks is wrong. I hail from Johnstown and, being the granddaughter of Hungarian immigrants, can state unequivocally that the drinking, cursing and fighting most likely occurred; the singing would be out of character.
Paul Krugman and his goatee weighed in on Friday. The war in Iraq, Mr. Bush's alleged destruction of FEMA's abilities, and the administration's warmongering attitude caused the Big Easy bottleneck. Sniper fire and murder by the locals somehow escaped the withering eye of this economist turned flapping maniac.
Speaking of obsessed, Ms. Maureen Dowd added to the Times crackerjack analyses with "Bush couldn't have known about this just like he couldn't have known about Osama bin Laden and 9/11." It was downhill from there, especially once Al Sharpton came on the scene.
Ideologues and hacks use this catastrophe to lecture us on Mr. Bush, prejudice, and all things liberal. Their shamelessness aside, major catastrophes don't spring from one man, one agency, one thing. A confluence of policies with too much emotion and too little thought about consequences produce catastrophes. Disjointed, territorial, and beneficent groups create problems that come home to roost.
One of the reasons we could not get our arms or arrest warrants around planning and plotting drones in hives of terrorists here in the US was the Foreign Intelligence Security Act (FISA) of 1978, a tip of the hat to liberal paranoia and hyper-sensitivity to international thugs. In 1995, Clinton appointee Jamie Gorelick took FISA to new levels when she decreed that intelligence folks could not share information with criminal investigation folks and vice versa. The wall was born, and agencies full of agents with information operated in vacuums. I don't blame Gorelick for 9-11, but I do blame federal legislation, agency interpretations, and sycophantic bureaucrats for honoring a wall that obscured the puzzle pieces of evolving terrorist cells. Should we have another attack, I will blame, among other things, the politically correct federal policy of "random" airport searches as young Arab males with one-way airline tickets breeze by TSA.
The Katrina events were also a confluence of rotten policies. Corralling the poor into projects and grouping others into Section 8 housing created a subculture of poverty and dependence in New Orleans. The media focused on high poverty levels but skipped over the government dependence issue. Tragically, these welfare policies created a pool of evacuees who, unlike my ancestors in Johnstown, seemed incapable of doing much without the feds. One woman interviewed in Houston about her experience in the Super Dome whined, "We didn't have one hot meal in three days." With no power and 10,000 people to feed, beef stroganoff was not in the menu cards. A sense of entitlement does cloud perspective and create dependence. Local officials were aware of these immobile souls but only ordered departure. In what? The street cars?
Another federal policy, created because of squawking states and their rights, dictates no moves by troops, even amidst disasters, unless state and local officials navigate a maze of regulatory and procedural hoops. Michael Chertoff has labored mightily to explain these constraints to a media prepared to blame Mr. Bush for a thicket of policies that predated even his feckless service in the National Guard. I am stunned that story has not re-emerged.
There is one additional and wide-ranging policy issue that contributed to the Katrina chaos. Moral relativism ruled. I don't worry that the federal government was slow on the uptake. My hardy genes tell me we can tough it out. Nor am I concerned that local officials had trouble getting a grip on facilities and food. What scares me spitless was the lawlessness, in the streets and in the commentary. Circumstantial ethics and desperation rationalized it all. There's nothing like 7 pairs of Air Jordans from the local Footlocker and a DVD player to quench the thirst and halt hunger pangs.
FEMA's issues, our failure to fix the levee situation, and even our lack of coordination for massive rescue will not kill us. We can survive the missteps. The laws of probability and Mother Nature dealt us a tough hand. We've been through worse. What we cannot survive, post-hurricane, flooding, or terrorist attack, is a shooting, sniping game of survival and unfair criticism. We have met the cause and effect of New Orleans, and it is not Mr. Bush. Our emotional, piecemeal policies in everything from welfare to federal intervention have been stewing. We did not know about the mess until it percolated over with the volatile ingredient of moral degradation, all courtesy of Katrina. She weakened structures. Then the waters of the levee broke loose and washed away a seemingly spiffy superficial surface. Beneath was an underbelly that is both vulnerable and dark. Vulnerable we can fix. The repair of our dark side, so evident in the animalistic crimes and the politicization by the media and elected officials of tragedy via natural disaster, poses a different challenge.
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JWR contributor Marianne M. Jennings is a professor of legal and ethical studies at Arizona State
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© 2005, Marianne M. Jennings |
Arnold Ahlert | |||||||||||
