Dateline: U.S. 39 rolling north through central Illinois, 2 September 2005
So much blame to go around.
New Orleans is revealed, to no one's surprise, as a woefully loose-ruled environment barely managed by a corrupt, incompetent government.
Support networks in the poor, rural coastal areas are revealed as meager and painfully brittle.
State governments are revealed as low-ballers on a host of long-term investments in infrastructure and network resiliency, only to be superceded by the federal government's enduring penchant for unfunded mandates.
Federal relief agencies are revealed as surprisingly incoherent in their "coordinated response," begging the question, How many 9/11-like shocks must there be before Washington gets its lines of authority straight?
The military, which has gone to untold lengths to brag every chance it can since 9/11 that homeland security is job #1, still seems to be under the impression that it requires an engraved invitation from a Constitutional Congress to get off its collective ass and respond rapidly to a domestic emergency.
And perhaps most damaging of all, the Bush Administration is revealedóyet againóas strangely incapable of grabbing the bull by the horn when disaster strikes, as though such leadership is only to be summoned once it becomes a public relations damage-control function.
Sad to say, the best-working aspect of the emergency response to date has been the mediaóthe MEDIA for crying out loud!
A lot of long-held biases are likewise revealed.
The Fed's tendency to wait until local and state resources are depleted or overwhelmed is revealed as hopelessly antiquated in this connected age. By then, too much damage is irreversible and a long-term recovery is locked-in. This is a national emergency, not some bureaucratic means test. The "I'm-with-stupid" approach to chain of command just doesn't cut it when disaster strikes
The military's strong bias against involving itself with civilian situations reveals itself as a weird sort of inability to take charge in situations that naturally demand it. For a culture that prizes decisiveness in challenging, austere environments, the military tends to tip-toe around whenever it's called into action domesticallyótalking a big game but never leading. I mean, where's the cigar-chomping general who couldn't give a rat's ass about pissing off the locals because he's got a job to do and he doesn't take no for an answer. Because wherever he is, he's missing his best chance to jump-start a presidential run in 2008.
[Then I wake up this morning (3 Sept) in my hotel room to find: a) a small, strangely cuddly Chinese female in my bed; and b) a cigarette-smoking, casually "Goddam'ing" African-American Lt. Gen with a Cajun-sounding name (Honore) doing a Patton-like tirade on a street-corner (can anyone say, "Answer Man"?), screaming at soldiers to put their weapons down and ordering trucks around like he's really pissed off, which is good, because we need a public face for "pissed off" instead of the happy-glad stuff from Laura and Bush uttering "adequate" over and over and over again. Because, you know what? Babies dying from dehydration and old women slumped dead in their wheelchairs isn't "adequate."]
The usual bias of the two political parties is revealed all too predictably: the Republicans look incapable of caring and the Democrats look incapable of leadingóexcept in correctly pointing out their opponents' odd detachment from a sense of personal responsibility. Good God, the Bush people look almost startled that the country expects them to lead!
The Bush Administration may well be fatally wounded by this crisis. With its legacy of tax cuts, budget cuts everywhere save the military and national security (and look what that's gotten us to date in this response!), unprecedented budget deficits, andómost damaging of all right nowóits tendency to alienate our allies even as it ambitiously seeks to reshape the world, the Bush White House seems dangerously out of step with history's demand that we face globalization's rising complexity with our own increasing ingenuity. Instead, we seemed plagued by leaders who have outsourced vision to God knows where. This is what "Who's next?" "Bring it on!" and "Let's roll!" takes you: absolutely nowhere you're prepared to go.
And so New Orleans looks like Port-au-Prince overnight, right down to the infantile behavior of its lowest residents, who never seem to notice the cameras rolling as they descend into acts most of us wouldn't put up with from a well-trained dog. Where have these people been living up to now to think that all bets were off once the lights went down?
I mean, I understand the cagedñanimal mindset of Iraqis living for decades under a brutal dictatorship, but how to excuse the criminally feral behavior of that many people at the drop of a hat? All of us have experienced shocks in our lives, but not all of us are instantly plunged into a primitiveness that seems to revel in its inhumanity to others in clear pain. Communitiesóreal communitiesóaren't atomized overnight. Someone let New Orleans reach this latent state of brutality a long time ago. And in that process, virtually everyone is too blame: parents, churches, politicians, companies, schoolsóeveryone. We are watching the Gap's seering pain revealed right here in America in a manner that should humble us all, because there's a whole lot more broken in the Big Easy than the levee. The physical disconnectedness on display here is nothing compared to the social and even spiritual disconnectednessóand that runs from the lowest looter right up to the mayor who couldn't bother to stay with his city.
Finger-pointing is all directions has already begun, with the vast majority of these heat-seeking missiles naturally coming round to President Bush himself, who remains white-hot from the emotional scorching put on him recently by Cindy Sheehan, in what can only be described as the revenge of Michael Moore (don't tell me you don't see the similarities between her quest and Moore's breakthrough documentary "Roger and Me"). You'd think his handlers would have learned from "Fahrenheit 9/11" that silence is deadly when it comes from leaders who hesitate to lead at moments of obvious crisis.
Honestly, that crew makes Jon Stewart's job such a frickin' cakewalk that the man should send his Peabody's to the White House as a thank-you.
The presidential election of 2008 began on Tuesdayófor all of you who didn't pick up on that. Bush's second term ("Oh why does America ever bet on sequels!" the self-righteous blogger types furiously as his "vol. II" is being printed in vast numbers this very day) is now cast irretrievably as a two-and-a-half-year effort to live down its past mistakes: the systematic alienation of allies from day one, the tax cuts, the lack of peace in Iraq (andósadly but not justifiablyóthe war in Iraq by extension), and now this. We are witnessing the earliest onset of post-presidency ever.
And that's more than bad, it's tragic. Bush's instinct for action and leadership is his best quality, but he seems often to put it on the shelf in a strange sort of blind trust in the people he picks for positions of leadership around him. Frankly, other than Rummy and a few of his direct managers, I don't think I'd pick any of the rest of this administration's senior people for my team. They're just plain mediocre, despite all the past job titles. There simply isn't much imagination with this crowd: they know what to cut but not what to add. I don't anticipate any initiatives worth mentioning from this bunch absent Rummy's continued push to revamp the Pentagon. The rest, including Rice, just seem to be treading water. Rove seems lost now that he's won Bush's re-election. The ambition just isn't there any more (Remember the big push on Social Security? Won't that be a great Trivial Pursuit question years from now?). Instead, Bush looks increasingly uncomfortable, like the dog that caught the car. He has his second term, besting the old man, but all that seems to have gotten him is the resurrection of the ambivalent, rather aimless politician he was so often accused of being in the past.
I mean, what exactly did we reelect him to doóother than not be a Democrat?
It's weird, but six months before the election I remember writing here that it was Rumsfeld that was the biggest burnout of the crew, and the one most needing jettisoning. Now, he remains the one figure in the crowd likely to enjoy a big legacy: the reshaping of the force from its Cold War mindset to the beginnings of the SysAdmin's profound emergence.
With a Bush White House on its heels, expect the midlevel bureaucrats who really run Washington to be largely in control through the remainder of the term, and here the System Perturbation that is Katrina will likely prove Chernobyl-like in its impact: spurring the system toward a profound rethinking of what security really is in this increasingly interconnected world (the loss of the node that is N.O. being the biggest horizontal scenario for the long haul, revealing as it does critical infrastructural weaknesses in our economy). Rebuilding the devastated coast will be a lot like shrinking the Gap, because to create real resiliency there we'll end up creating lots of new infrastructure where we now realize there was noneóor at least not nearly enough.
This will not be a rebuilding, but a re-imaginingójust like we need to do in the Gap. And here I think the country will end up regretting giving Bush four more years becauseóagainóthis crowd lacks imagination.
Still, it's not just the military's turn toward the SysAdmin function that's likely to be accelerated, we're likely to see a new empathetic resonance across previously firewalled sectors, like urban renewal and foreign aid, overseas crisis response and homeland security, and public versus private responsibilities for ensuring social resilience.
And in this process, I really believe we'll get stronger, get smarter, and move this pile. In getting a real dose of what the Gap feels like within our borders, we should start noticing the larger picture, the larger challenges, and the larger opportunities.
Wednesday, September 7, 2005 at 6:38PM 
