I have been ruminating on the Katrina disaster, and how it is such a microcosm of the Bush administration’s stunningly potent combination of ignorance and arrogance. As much as anything, I have been struggling with the underlying question in all of this which is, “What is the moral of the story in the eyes of John Q. Public and what will really change as a result?”
The genesis of this question is three-fold. One, to watch the horrors of the aftermath of Katrina as it has unfolded on TV, in print media and across the blogosphere, the natural impulse is to say, “Wake up call. A lot is going to change as a result.”
Two, I bookend this impulse with an editorial by Maureen Down in The New York Times called, “United States of Shame,” that rhetorically challenges the administration’s response to the disaster by questioning, “Who are we if we can't take care of our own?”
She goes on to showcase the administration’s well-earned reputation for shooting messengers bearing bad news and rewarding incompetents as a means of face-saving at all costs (just ask former CIA director, George Tenet about his “just deserved” Medal of Freedom award for supporting the president’s WMD falsehoods), capping it with the following excerpt:
Michael Brown, the blithering idiot in charge of FEMA - a job he trained for by running something called the International Arabian Horse Association - admitted he didn't know until Thursday that there were 15,000 desperate, dehydrated, hungry, angry, dying victims of Katrina in the New Orleans Convention Center. Was he sacked instantly? No, our tone-deaf president hailed him in Mobile, Ala. , yesterday: "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."
Three, I try to rationalize what is right and logical with what is politically probable given the cynical, hypocritical and value-bereft nature of our administration, when I hit upon Fred Wilson’s A VC blog talking about Katrina's impact on political pragmatism.
His post espouses that, “It's time we get back to electing people to govern who know something about leading, operating, and managing. We need pragmatic moderates who make the hard decisions without caring about the political impact. We need civil servants in the mold of George Washington, Teddy Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower. We need people who care about the details of governing rather than the details of getting elected.”
And I struggle with the original question of morals of story and what changes as a result because while I think that Wilson’s sentiment is dead on, I also think that the great divide between blue state and red state (or regional pocket) – something that the last election showcased pretty clearly – is maybe a bit bigger in its lasting destructive impact than Katrina.
Let’s face it. Recent presidential elections have been reduced to "binary" party platform planks (god/abortion/creationism, Post-911 national defense, trickle down economics), and this relegates the concept of moderate pragmatism, to just that, good in concept, unlikely in practice.
Why? Because our reality (today) is a two party system where right wing zealots control one party and are winning with the afore-mentioned binary planks and brutally effective control of their party. They have no basis to move to moderation until it proves to be a losing hand – Iraq quagmires, complete destruction and lawlessness in the Katrina zone, and a president that took three days to end his vacation in its wake – notwithstanding. It’s not like the other party has a wing, a plank a leader or a prayer to stand on to counter this status quo.
To be clear, I am the most optimistic guy in the world, and I believe that the pendulum will swing back the other direction if for no other reason than even the best designed house of cards ultimately collapses upon itself.
But, I think that you have to start from the perspective of coming to terms with where we are in PRAGMATIC terms to figure out how to get to a place where real change occurs, honest conclusions are reached and ineptitude is duly “rewarded.”
