All Are Punished.

With apologies to William Shakespeare.

Charles Krauthammer writes today an article that could only have been written by a level-headed conservative. A wickedly partisan conservative would have glossed over the administration's failures while piling on Mayor Nagin and Governor Blanco with every last shard of broken levee. He puts the lie to the big arguments now in the pitching rotation coming from those on the left who are trying to make Katrina Bush's Waterloo.

Instead, he ranks all those to blame:

1. The Mayor of New Orleans.
2. The Governor of Louisiana.
3. The head of FEMA.
4. The president.
5. The congress.
6. The American people.

Yep, we get the hammer, too. But I would have gone farther than merely citing energy policy. I understand where Mr. Krauthammer is coming from, but I think he missed an opportunity to spank the populace for supporting waste, incompetence and corruption. The best lines in the whole thing are:

Now is not the time for constructive suggestions. Now is the time for blame, recriminations and sheer astonishment.

And he picks up Mayor Nagin's quote about New Orleans being a party town. I see his quip as being the NOLA interpretation of that old Bush plain talk.

While the left is set on gunning for a demonstrative party president and his krewe, the right is busy plugging its ears and screaming "federalism" and small-r republicanism, all the while ignoring the time line of events and the contradictory statements from administration officials.

What we are left with is our own bit roles in what has become a national passion play with The Big Easy cast as our Christ. New Orleans appears to have been sacrificed for all our sins yet we feel little redemption and refuse forgiveness to our tormentors. What attack, political gamesmanship and war could not do, Nature has accomplished.

Not that it is right or just to blame Nature of actually doing what Nature does. Leave it to an amoral force to relieve holy partisans of their last remaining tethers and allow them to float freely along with no discernible steering currents.

Ironically, it takes an old partisan himself, Newt Gingrich, to be thinking about what better government and reconstruction would look like while Speaker Hastert muses about bulldozers and Howard Dean does his very best Al Sharpton.

About that reconstruction. It's going to be very hard to follow without a scorecard. Both the right and the left can be found on at least two sides of the debate. Those wanting reconstruction are already warning of Disneyfication and the "secret" plan to defuse New Orleans' black population, as if there was some shadowy Rove electoral strategy just in case a CAT 4 hurricane hit. The irony with either argument is that given the opportunity to return to brand-spanking new shotgun houses, many, though no one can tell how many, will likely make the decision to stay where they landed.

There will not be any plan for NOLA that will satisfy. Either you have wrecked the special character of the city and its neighborhoods or you haven't done right by those displaced.

The shoddy work of officials further exposes our own childish expectations for government. We have come to think of government as being outside ourselves, benefactor and deity, all powerful and charged with instantly gratifying every need, which is a farce. Anyone who has stood in line at the DMV or applied for a passport knows that on a good day, the wheels of government are stuck in the mud. Why is everybody so amazed when we run into actual mud?

We should be willing to neither point our fingers away nor demand immunity from blame. Saying all are culpable is certainly not the same as saying none are.

So let me be the first to say it: It's my fault.

I voted for Bill Clinton and George Bush (after voting for Gore), our last two presidents. That's 13 years so far of some fairly lackadaisical leadership, culminating in an almost utter void at the moment. I supported a congress that cared more for bridges to Nowhere, Alaska than for reclamation projects where my fellow citizens really live, and I have rarely spoken out. I have done no special service, save cutting several checks a year to dull the sharp fact that as an able bodied citizen I could at least find some way of volunteering for something. I never wore my country's uniform. I've spent some time collecting and distributing aid in past disasters, but I can certainly do more.

Anyone want to join in, be my guest. I hereby give myself and all my fellow Americans permission to be angry, frustrated and demanding: at and of our government, of each other and of ourselves.

We truly have lost a brace of kinsmen for winking at our discords and we now see what a scourge has been laid upon our hate.

I'm not sure that there are many other than those honestly unable to help themselves that deserve a pardon. Whatever, whether by fate or mistake or delusion we have found ourselves in more toxicity than Lake Pontchartrain. There will be some who will attempt escape, while lives, careers and psyches will be ruined. Yet all are punished. Or at least should be.

Comments

[thc]

To the list of people to blame, I would add the people of New Orleans who were totally unprepared for a disaster that was so imminent. Hundreds of thousands refused to leave and then complained that it took government so long to rescue them. I cannot think of a better example of welfare mentality. I also believe that very few of those who stayed behind really didn't have the means to leave.

[Daniel]

You're absolutely right. I should have included that. Thanks for adding it, thc.

[Richard Z. Chesnoff]

US STRUGGLES & ALLIES GLOAT
by Richard Z. Chesnoff, NY DAILY NEWS, 9/11/05

Suddenly the roles are dramatically reversed. The great giver is in dire need.
And the image of some 50 foreign nations, including some of the world's poorest,
offering aid to an America devastated by Katrina should be deeply heartening to
every American.

Less heartening is the smugness that seems to accompany much of the
international help offers. While voicing sympathy for the victims, a foreign
legion of gabbers have been quick to blame America and American policy for the
horrors of Katrina.

First are the glasshouse critics - those who conveniently overlook their own
failures to protect their populations in dire emergencies. The French press has
been clucking about America's "inability to save its own population of the
forgotten."

But remember when France was hit with a horrid freak heat wave two summers ago?
An estimated 15,000 people died because France's much-vaunted social and
hospital system - under pressure from a public welfare program France can't
afford - found it couldn't care for them.

Most of the victims were elderly, many dying because their families failed to
interrupt their paid summer vacations to check on grandpère or grandmère. So
much for French family values.

Then there are the prophets of doom, like German Environment Minister Juergen
Trittin, who say Katrina was nothing less than a direct result of the Bush
administration's policies on global warming - specifically, its failure to
support the Kyoto Accord.

"By neglecting environmental protection," Trittin recently pontificated,
"America's President shuts his eyes to the economic and human damage that
natural catastrophes like Katrina inflict on his country and the world's
economy."

What Trittin and other environmental "experts" forget is that America has been
battling devastating hurricanes since long before the days of three- and
four-car families or fuel-driven heavy industry.

The problem is that much of the world, especially Europe, suffers from
schizophrenia when it comes to the U.S. While admiring, even envying our
accomplishments, they revile our standards, policies and way of life.

It's fair enough to question how the administration handled (or mishandled) the
aftermath of the storm. But it's downright dumb to blame racism for the chaos
gripping much of the Gulf Coast. Ditto the war in Iraq: It's one thing to oppose
it, but simply silly to insist that our efforts to bring democracy to the Middle
East are what has left the United States without resources to handle natural
disasters.

Some foreign reaction has been nutty. Several Islamic "scholars" have informed
their faithful that Katrina was a direct result of "America's war on Islam."

Not to be outdone, a wacko rabbi in Jerusalem declared that Katrina struck
because the Lord was angry with President Bush for forcing Israel to withdraw
from Gaza (Oy Vey!). I'm sure there were some equally enlightened Christian,
Buddhist and other religious screwballs with similar "I told you so" theories
about America and its millions of sinners.

Thanks for the aid offers and advice, foreign friends. But try to give without
gloating!

Originally published on September 11, 2005