Apt. 11D

The First Day of School

For the past two days, I stopped reading op-eds and blog posts on Katrina. Not because I was starting to become a creepy, obsessed blogger. I am quite happy being a creepy, obsessed blogger. No, I had to stop because I had to get the kids ready for school.

No talk about Katrina this afternoon (except do read this one post by Andrew Sullivan). Just kid stuff below the fold.

Okay, So This is Why I Like David Brooks

I've been reading the op-ed columns from the Times most popular e-mail list, which is one of the most valuable tools on the internet.

All of the recent columns are good. Krugman. Dowd. Rich. All hit some of the main themes of the past week. The hidden underclass was exposed. There were graven inequities of this disaster. There was a failure of leadership at all three levels of government. And I, who have been full of righteous anger for a week, found good company.

But, you know, I liked Brooks's column the best. He's talking about the long term ramifications of Katrina's relief effort.

Brooks reverses his position from his column a couple of weeks ago, which spoke of a new era of virtue. Now Brooks writes:

The scrapbook of history accords but a few pages to each decade, and it is already clear that the pages devoted to this one will be grisly. There will be pictures of bodies falling from the twin towers, beheaded kidnapping victims in Iraq and corpses still floating in the waterways of New Orleans five days after the disaster that caused them.

It's already clear this will be known as the grueling decade, the Hobbesian decade. Americans have had to acknowledge dark realities that it is not in our nature to readily acknowledge: the thin veneer of civilization, the elemental violence in human nature, the lurking ferocity of the environment, the limitations on what we can plan and know, the cumbersome reactions of bureaucracies, the uncertain progress good makes over evil.

As a result, it is beginning to feel a bit like the 1970's, another decade in which people lost faith in their institutions and lost a sense of confidence about the future.

Ya gotta admire a guy who can do a 180 that swiftly. And then he says what I've been saying around here. Big changes are going to happen.

Katrina means that the political culture, already sour and bloody-minded in many quarters, will shift. There will be a reaction. There will be more impatience for something new. There is going to be some sort of big bang as people respond to the cumulative blows of bad events and try to fundamentally change the way things are.

Reaganite conservatism was the response to the pessimism and feebleness of the 1970's. Maybe this time there will be a progressive resurgence. Maybe we are entering an age of hardheaded law and order. (Rudy Giuliani, an unlikely G.O.P. nominee a few months ago, could now win in a walk.) Maybe there will be call for McCainist patriotism and nonpartisan independence. All we can be sure of is that the political culture is about to undergo some big change.

We're not really at a tipping point as much as a bursting point. People are mad as hell, unwilling to take it anymore.

Yeah, things are going to change big time. First of all, who can seriously talk about small government now? These events demonstrate the vital necessity of governmental services to protect the public, to plan for the future, and to care for the needy. Libertarianism has been dealt a serious blow.

Secondly, many people are apparently surprised that there were a lot of poor people in New Orleans. I'm not really sure how this could have been such a shocker, but it apparently it was. Never before have middle class Americans watched seven days of poor, black people on television. I was worried needlessly about Americans generosity. Houston and other cities have opened up their towns to the displaced and opened their minds to the fact that not everybody has a job, a home, or car. Perhaps this will lead to more consciousness of the poor in their own backyard.

Thirdly, I can't find a Bush supporter in the house. When the FOX newscasters are surly, things are bad. There is so much anger about Katrina and the on-going war, Republicans are going to have hard time getting elected to dog catcher.

Fourth, the peace movement just got a shot in the arm. One of the major accusations of the relief effort was that troops couldn’t be sent in to Jefferson Parish, because they were in Falluja. The war just ended.

Fourth, there is going to be a lot of rebuilding going on. Not just in New Orleans, but in Washington. Institutions and levees are going to torn down and rebuilt.

I have to believe that these changes might really bring about Brooks' Age of Virtue.

Katrina Links

Oh, feel the wrath of the bloggers.

Mark Kleinman looks at a picture of school buses under ten feet of water and asks why didn't NO have a plan to use them in such a situation. (Actually, Kleinman has been good all week. I've been thinking about this post for a couple of days.)

Andrew Sullivan writes, Earth to Bush: the breaching of the levees had been foreseen for decades. If anyone wanted evidence that this president was completely divorced from reality, that statement was Exhibit A. It didn’t help coming after a five-week vacation, when most Americans are lucky to get two.

Tim Burke says I do honestly beg your pardon for saying so to those of you who are regular Republican voters, because I know you’re not necessarily at all the same as the people who now represent your party on the national stage. Hell, I vote Republican on occasion, when the man or woman so nominated is a worthy one. But goddamn it, you folks who do so regularly, you’ve got to stand up now and be counted. This is your hour to call in your chips and make your party start to be something closer to what you imagine it to be. I

Bipartisan Anger

Liberals and conservatives seem to be on the same page for the first time in a long time. Everybody agrees that relief efforts were bungled. On Saturday, things began running smoothly making the contrast between the previous days more stark. Everybody agrees that government did not work properly.

They pundits are called for the head of FEMA's director, Michael Browne. Sullivan and Malkin agree.

Actually, all of Malkin's recent blog posts were extremely critical of the relief effort. She criticizes Bush for patting Brown on the back.

After reading the Post editorials this week, I think the only difference between the liberals and conservatives on their Katrina coverage was when the looting began. The conservatives emphasized that law and order was needed before relief happened; snipers would interfere with the medivac helicopters and evacuation. There was a lot of talk of zero tolerance. Liberals were concerned about the looting, but seemed to feel that the looting would end after people were able to leave the city with a full belly.

Given that there were so few cops on the streets at the time, there was this real tension of priorities -- order or relief -- not only on the blogs but within the relief command structure as well.

Could This Have Happened in Detroit?

I just saw Geraldo Rivera holding up a baby and crying. He demanded to know why people were forced to stay in the Astrodome; people have been actually prevented from walking away from the hell hole, down the highway and over to the next city. Geraldo shouted at the camera, "let them out of here. Let them out of here."

O'Reilly and Hannity talked to their Fox correspondents on the street in NO and tried to coax them into finding something positive to say. Instead, the correspondents almost yelled at them. When the Fox network can't find a kind word for the Bush administration, you know things are bad.

Could this have happened in Detroit? If a disaster of equal proportions hit Detroit, would things have gone so wrong?

I think not. Even if Detroit has its problems, the state government is in working order. The South does not have decent state governments. While the Northern states professionalized in the seventies as a result of humiliations and supreme court cases, the Southern states never did. In some states, the governors have no staff, have one term limits, and have few constitutional checks over the legislature. States, like Kentucky, have legislatures that meet only every other year. The South just doesn't have the capacity and experience of Northern state governments.

Even if New Orleans was as impoverished and corrupt as some other Northern cities, it also didn't have a proper state government to step up to the plate.

So much rebuilding is going to happen in the next decade. Professionalizing Southern political infrastructure has to be part of the package deal, I think.

The Fox people were unable to come up with a silver lining tonight. I have one. Chicago 1871.

In Chicago 1871, Mrs. O'Leary's cow tipped over an oil lamp igniting the hay, the barn, and eventually the whole city. Chicago was raised to the ground. To rebuild the city, city leaders brought in the finest architects and urban planners from the country, who were able test new ideas and create great beauty on a blank canvas. (And yes, I have taken the architectural walking tour of Chicago about a billion times.) I hope that the same will be done in the South.

(I'm blogging this weekend whenever I can sneak away from the guests and get to the computer.)

Race and Class

It is obvious now that the vast major of those hit worst by Hurricane Katrina were poor and black. Yes, I'm sure that even Ann Rice's house in the ritzy area was severely damaged, but those who are penniless, jobless, and being housed in foul stadiums are poor.

How much does this explain the lag tag in recognizing the scope of the problem? How much is this going to explain the relief effort's success? Maybe nothing at all, but these questions must be entertained.

There was a huge lag time before the major media and even the major bloggers understood how bad things are down there. Without the media, the politicians didn't know. Relief agencies didn't know. There was a lost day.

Was there this lost day, because so many of the people and areas hit by the storm were extremely poor and socially isolated? There was no one there with connections in government or journalism. No key people making phone calls to find out what happened to Aunt Mabel.

I'm not arguing that anyone purposely ignored their plight, but that the social isolation of those communities meant that elites were left in the dark.

I am also concerned about the image of large groups of poor people yelling at the TV cameras that they want water and housing now. Lots of people already assume that poor, black, urban people are freeloaders. Are they going to want to help the "Welfare Queens?" Are people more likely to want to help Sri Lankans than the poor in their own country?

I don't know. Just things I am worrying about as I pack up the kids for the park.

Things Get Worse

Another three hours camped out in front of cable TV tonight and then another 45 minutes reading the blogs. Thank God for alternative media.

It's almost impossible but things are worse tonight then they were yesterday. Journalists, social workers, and doctors in the trenches have stopped waiting for help and face the cameras with masks of exhaustion. Commentators have stopped pointing out that help isn't there. Residents are giving up and dying on folding chairs in the street. The mayor isn't bothering wait for the buses anymore; he's going to march the people out of the city. This is where we are at -- resignation and desperate measures.

And now the social order is unraveling. Police stations are setting themselves up to defend the stations tonight. Snipers are shooting at medivac helicopters. What the hell is going on?

They can't find Fats Domino.

Links on Katrina

Andrew Sullivan -- It seems to me inconceivable that we cannot impose basic law and order in a major American city five days after a hurricane has hit. This is a very basic governmental responsibility and all I can say is that I see no evidence of competence or effectiveness so far. FEMA had no solid evacuation plan? The feds had no plans to maintain order in such a situation? The explosion of complete lawlessness is beginning to make Haiti look like a pleasant place to live. This is America?

Glenn Reynolds has a pile of links to organizations. Megan McArdle has a post on one town's need for help.

Ed Kilgore reports that Dennis Hastert told a suburban Chicago newspaper that spending billions of dollars to bring the city back "doesn't make sense to me." 

Nicole Gelinas of City Journal has an excellent piece on New Orleans shaky infrastructure. (via Opinion Journal)

And the locals and outsiders who try to help New Orleans in the weeks and months to come will do so with no local institutional infrastructure to back them up. New Orleans has no real competent government or civil infrastructure—and no aggressive media or organized citizens’ groups to prod public officials in the right direction during what will be, in the best-case scenario, a painstaking path to normalcy.

The truth is that even on a normal day, New Orleans is a sad city. Sure, tourists think New Orleans is fun: you can drink and hop from strip club to strip club all night on Bourbon Street, and gamble all your money away at Harrah’s. But the city’s decline over the past three decades has left it impoverished and lacking the resources to build its economy from within. New Orleans can’t take care of itself even when it is not 80 percent underwater; what is it going to do now, as waters continue to cripple it, and thousands of looters systematically destroy what Katrina left unscathed?

Lots more links from Kieran Healy.