Grover's Bathtub II

Andrew Sullivan, at least to my ears, was once a good example of centrist thinking. Then Lewinsky happened. I don't pretend to know the particular psychology of why he and others suddenly found evil a man who, normally, would have won their hearts and minds with his policies: more cops on the street, actual reduced federal government rolls, actual reduced welfare rolls, a balanced budget, free trade, etc. In fact, many of those things pissed off a large sector of "traditional" liberals. So, that's quite a list to suddenly get all exercised over a blowjob, and the not so surpising effort to cover the dalliance by lying about it. On an outrage meter, one might think it falls as a 2 out of 10 or so on the grand scheme between running a toll-booth and say, genocide. (Remember, we're talking outrage here--outright revulsion and dumbfoundment.)

Andy only listed more to the waterline when 9-11 crashed into our collective psyches. His shrillness about fifth columns in the press and liberals aiding terrorists had me wondering what real demons he was wrestling with that he had to create such false ones to divert his attention and angst. He was not alone, of course, but again, I'll leave that to the pros. My interest is more in how people of seeming common sense vacate its power and corrective ability and fly off the handle. And, most of all, how they eventually, often grudgingly and painfully, self-right the capsize when the rock of reality hits them upside the head. I know it hurts. I do. The blood splatter is messy, and the wailing and flailing on the return leg is just as, well, discordant and flail-y.

But hey, it's the destination that counts, right? Andy's journey to Damsacus continues thanks to a very compelling conservative cop reader/emailer....

THIS SAYS IT ALL: Sometimes an emailer says it better than I ever could. Read this. Read all of it. You know why I endorsed Kerry last time? Not because I liked Kerry or ever dreamed of backing him. I'm not a liberal. I'm not a Bush-hater. I backed the war. Initially, I trusted and supported this president to the hilt at a time of great danger. But I was forced to back Kerry of all people because Bush's gross incompetence at a time of national peril was simply too great a risk to continue. Now we have the proof:

"I've considered myself a socially libertarian, fiscally conservative Republican for a very long time. I got along with the idea that I wasn't going to get a whole lot of help. College wouldn't be free. Job training would cost money and time. And I'm probably a decent example of up-from-not-much.

But after watching what's happening in New Orleans-an American city that I've loved, visited and have always wanted to return to - I can't ever vote for these people again.

Being a Republican means that you expect the government to do just a couple things for you and nothing else. Build a road. Defend us from enemies, foreign and domestic. Stuff that would be a lot less organized if we all had to do it ourselves. Everything else is just gravy.

And as we poured money into Department of Homeland Security, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, I thought, "Right on," because some of that money's bound to fall on my head.

Well, something else would fall on my head first.

I work for the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. And that means that if something really catastrophic happens in MY city, and they ask me to stick around, that's the job. We have A and B teams and I'm a disaster recovery specialist on Team A. I've drawn up plans with names like Drawbridge and Smoldering Crater.

Here's what these people would do for me.

They would leave me there to die.

Look at the facts. There's no coordination on the ground right now. The city has no fresh water, no electricity, no services. The floodwater has so much oil and toxins in it that it's flammable.

In psychology they have what is called a fight-or-flight response. When faced with danger, do you subdue it or do you flee? Some of it has to do with risk assessment, but in this case, there is no flight. There is nowhere to run. So flight means die. If my choice was to pull a pistol on a truck driver or Nat, Jarren, Jayson, or any of you dies, that's no choice at all.

I'm not talking about the looters grabbing big-screen televisions and basketball hoops. I'm talking about the ones that are chest-deep in water carrying bottled water and diapers. You can't tell me for three days to be patient, the bus is coming, and they're piling up bodies in the street median.

We have known that this sort of disaster could occur for a century. Hell, the tour bus driver told me about it on the plantation tour. This means that we have been able to envision the stark reality of this occurring for a week-the newspapers all said the storm would hit New Orleans last Thursday.

A week to get buses? A week to get fishing boats? Trucks? This is the United States! I read someone who said, "All the people who weren't bedridden, or had money, or had cars left. The people that are left had none of those things."

There are people tonight who are going to sleep on overpasses for the fourth straight night. There are prisoners who will do the same. There are people dying at a convention center because no one will tell them that no one is coming for them, and the National Guard is protecting the kitchens. There are police officers who are turning in their badges because they've lost everything, have no guidance, and don't want to be shot by a looter.

There are people tonight inside a concrete domed stadium with holes in the roof and no air conditioning who were told the buses are coming today, and they might, or they might not. There is no food. There is no water. There are bodies floating through the neighborhoods.

In the UNITED STATES.

Some people say that you can't hold the President responsible for this. Oh, yes you can. Because when he looked over at John Ashcroft after the jets hit the towers and said, "I want you to make sure this never happens again," it was not meant to be specific to "no more planes hitting large buildings on the East Coast, right, boss." It was meant that no American should have to run for his life through an American city. While Americans may perish in a senseless, unforeseen disaster, we'd save the ones we could.

And the Cabinet appointees were mushwits and he could barely speak a complete sentence and we're sending people overseas for God knows how long to help people who are indifferent at worst and hostile at best, but they were going to protect us. In 2004, that's all a lot of us needed. Well right now, it's obvious that they can't.

Ask yourself this: What if Al-Qaeda blew up the levees instead of the hurricane? Would the response have been any different?

No. It wouldn't. That city flooded in a day. And if it were Las Vegas, I would have been in some operations center watching people try to decide who gets to starve to death and who gets to get on a bus to Los Angeles or Phoenix. And there would be no certainty that I'd be on that bus in time to protect my wife and kids.

But one thing sure would have been different.

They wouldn't have had a whole week to sort it out and know what's coming. They were supposed to KNOW this already. It will have been FOUR YEARS next weekend since someone probably said, "Hey, what if..."

And for that, the whole stack of them should be fired.

I've had it. I'm done. And if the other bunch of assholes can't figure out that what's important is that babies don't starve to death here (and I'm not talking some metaphorical goo-goo thing with school lunches and welfare, but real, actual starving) and we get people out of harm's way, we'll get rid of them too. And so on.

Because this is about leadership, not about bitching on CNN how no one's in charge, or listening to Peggy Noonan furrow her brow at the Governor's performance, or bragging that we've sent in one National Guardsman for every 200 people, or actually having the audacity to say that "we had no idea the levees would break."

Today, I saw my country favorably compared to Indonesia and Thailand, (always our traditional benchmarks of infrastructural success) while the elderly die of thirst in the street. We sneered at France when this happened during a heat wave.

No more."

The "new and impoved FEMA." Another shining example of pennies for common sense, billions down the rathole of grandiosity. This whole episode, deaths and blunders, like this whole administration, demonstrates the danger of R-Complex politics--most important, the folly of not trying to understand the underlying irrationality which once again, puts a whole raft of Americans in harms way needlessly. If you're tired and want to sort out--truly--what's at work here, carve out some time and ponder:

Fear or anger, anger or fear? - 1-23-04

[a snip] ....Opposite of Bush, Dean suggests shredding the system--at least, that's the reportage of it. This makes people queasy, especially those vested in the status quo. Of course. The implicit anger that underlies Dean's message is frustration with the charade that is "the system", the institutional shell game. As a doctor, Dean inquires, not knowing where his questions will lead him. That is the discipline of Medicine. Dean wants to know the facts and circumstances. As far as I can tell, he interprets them to reveal a patient doing everything it can to ensure it's early demise. He views current conservative prescriptives in exacly the way Grover Norquist and his "Club for Growth" conservatives present them--You know, starve the government of funds so Grover "can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."

Reminded of the implications of this, Americans realize that that's their safe food, predictable electricity, and reliable, available medical attention being euthanized in one sentence, all in the name of shifting their dollar from a government to a corporation. They know it, they sense it, they feel it to be true. But, again, suggesting this impolitesse raises hackles in the quarter-to-quarter reporting world and in the day-to-day assessment universe that the pilots of the status quo live and breathe.

This clumsiness, this "anger", is what perturbs some segments of America, and energizes others. The drawback is that those who are energized by the message have the quietest voice, and the most to lose or gain. They teeter on the edge of a prosperity the influentials are comfortably ensconced in and delight in debating in the abstract. Bush offends, and Dean attracts, this group. And it is growing exponentially.

Feeding the "anger" is the fact that here are you and I, suffering through the choices of leadership--enduring the rollercoaster--all the while being told not to consider being upset by our circumstances, but to buck up, to wait for the better times. We are told to fear and not fear at once, to shop and not contribute, to trust our "betters" on this one...

Geez, you still here? You're a kind and brave soul. Well, to get the real R-complex run-amuck pondered by yours truly, go straight to some posts about the thing itself as applied to busines and politics:

Reverse Crystal Ball - Part II

The Neocon: Why Patriot Batteries make for better inaugurations.

Neocon, Neocon, what is a neocon?

[edited for slapdash and typos: 11:03]