The Aftermath Pt I

Media credibility washed away with the levees:

You wouldn't know it and you probably haven't heard it, but the American people -- unlike 90 percent of the media -- don't blame President Bush for the miserable handling of the Gulf Coast's brutalization at the hands of Hurricane Katrina.

As has happened before when under attack by the fifth column of the fourth estate, his approval rating actually shot up five points the week of the disaster. Still, a 45 percent rating is nothing to shout about except that it follows the annual braying about his vacation and the precipitous rise in gasoline prices.

But low though they may be, Bush's approval numbers still tower over those of the Congress and especially those of the media. As has been the case since the Vietnam War/Watergate era, the media still think themselves capable of shaping and shading the news rather than simply reporting it.

And for years they had been successful in their efforts. But today's alternative news outlets, returning to the basics forgotten or ignored by the old media, have opened the eyes of millions of Americans who have access to cable and the Internet. With the national undressing of liberal icons like Dan Rather, many viewers have finally perceived the whiff of an agenda, one they have been voting against for the last ten years.

Neither were well-maintained in the runup to the storm:

A republican form of government presupposes self-government -- the capacity of citizens to govern themselves according to reason -- and does not, if it intends to survive, champion them as "victims" when they don't. But the shocking lack of self-government demonstrated by New Orleanians is the one area of government that our republic's vapid media won't scrutinize in their post-mortems on the city's collapse.

Reporters keep shaking their fists at "the government," as if America were not a republic but a statist autocracy in which remote rulers can snap their fingers and make problems vanish for their subjects. Reporters also keep saying that the government's response last week was "embarrassing." What I find more embarrassing is the media's infantilizing of New Orleans citizens who chose not to evacuate despite loud and obvious warnings. Does personal responsibility mean nothing at this point? Aren't citizens "the government" too? What's disgraceful, and positively dangerous, in a republic that depends on self-reliance is a media that encourages a culture of victimization.

An honest media in a republic not wobbling toward statism would -- while acknowledging that some citizens couldn't evacuate for reasons beyond their control and showing compassion for those who could but foolishly didn't -- stop infantilizing and romanticizing these citizens as "victims" of government indifference.

An honest media would acknowledge that the civilizational vacuum into which New Orleans evaporated last week began with a breakdown of self-government and the absence of civilization's first government -- the family. The absence of fathers, not FEMA, explains the images of women and children stranded in the storm. The absence of culture transmitted through stable families, not the absence of government money (gobs of which have been poured into New Orleans for decades to no effect), explains the Lord of the Flies scenario that took shape not after days of desperate privation but immediately once opportunities for looting presented themselves.

In their scattershot criticism of the federal government's response, the media have demonstrated a childish petulance -- a juvenile demand born of the expectation of instant gratification that the government wave a wand and solve all problems -- while ignoring the most obvious causes contributing to the crisis. Causes that have nothing to do with the structures of this or that government agency. Causes that no faked-up commission in Washington, D.C. can solve. Causes that will produce fresh crises long after the media have pressured the government into the most bogus and superficial fixes.

Of course, honest media is like Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and a Republican trial lawyer---it doesn't exist.

It sounds like honest, competent cops in New Orleans are nearly as rare:

The stars of modern broadcast media take prodigious pride in the speed with which they can communicate to the masses. Of course, these artistes remain utterly oblivious of the poisonous concomitant of that speed, namely, the media's almost inane superficiality. Discovering the cause of the New Orleans tragedy will take months, perhaps years. In reading a brilliant history of Winston's Churchill's efforts to write his monumental history of World War II, which is about to be published here, In Command of History, I have been struck by the differing explanations of great events that historians accumulate in an event's aftermath. Doubtless, in the aftermath of the New Orleans tragedy there will accumulate many explanations. One thing that the historians will note for a certitude is that recriminations by public officials came in almost faster than aid and rescue relief -- and certainly in greater abundance.

This is a consequence of modern mass media. Instantaneous communication with the nation's millions of television screens and radios by media prodigies who have no greater talent or imperative than gabbing ensured the roar of recrimination that has almost overshadowed the other themes accompanying this tragedy, for instance the charity of the nation, the efficiency of the military. In time, historians will adjudge whether the President was slow or ineffectual in responding and ineffectual along with the possible failures of the governor, the mayor, and the local police department, hundreds of whose members deserted. Some were found driving their police cars through Florida. The Florida troopers who pulled them over thought they were thieves who had stolen the cops' vehicles. Is there any instance of such dereliction of duty by local police on this scale in all of American history?

Apparently they didn't know that their all-expenses-paid Vegas vacations lay to the West, not the Southeast.

Guests of the Louisiana penal system didn't have the opportunity to hightail it out of town complete with government vehicles.

Perhaps the environmentalist wackos ought to join them:

With all that has happened in the state, it’s understandable that the Louisiana chapter of the Sierra Club may not have updated its website. But when its members get around to it, they may want to change the wording of one item in particular. The site brags that the group is “working to keep the Atchafalaya Basin,” which adjoins the Mississippi River not far from New Orleans, “wet and wild.”

These words may seem especially inappropriate after the breaking of the levee that caused the tragic events in New Orleans last week. But “wet and wild” has a larger significance in light of those events, and so does the group using the phrase. The national Sierra Club was one of several environmental groups who sued the Army Corps of Engineers to stop a 1996 plan to raise and fortify Mississippi River levees.

The Army Corps was planning to upgrade 303 miles of levees along the river in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas. This was needed, a Corps spokesman told the Baton Rouge, La., newspaper The Advocate, because “a failure could wreak catastrophic consequences on Louisiana and Mississippi which the states would be decades in overcoming, if they overcame them at all.”

But a suit filed by environmental groups at the U.S. District Court in New Orleans claimed the Corps had not looked at “the impact on bottomland hardwood wetlands.” The lawsuit stated, “Bottomland hardwood forests must be protected and restored if the Louisiana black bear is to survive as a species, and if we are to ensure continued support for source population of all birds breeding in the lower Mississippi River valley.” In addition to the Sierra Club, other parties to the suit were the group American Rivers, the Mississippi River Basin Alliance, and the Louisiana, Arkansas and Mississippi Wildlife Federations.

The lawsuit was settled in 1997 with the Corps agreeing to hold off on some work while doing an additional two-year environmental impact study. Whether this delay directly affected the levees that broke in New Orleans is difficult to ascertain.

Lileks, on the other hand, takes no prisoners:

Oh, the lessons we learned from Katrina. Bush’s refusal to invade New Orleans tells everything you need to know about Republican racist perfidy. The local government’s incompetence tells you nothing whatsoever about Democrats ability to govern at the micro level. Lethal storms can be turned aside months in advance by signing the right treaties. Or so they’re saying in the reality-based community.

Check the blogs: they’re calling President Bush’s response to Katrina “My Pet Goat pt. 2.” It’s a reference to the idea,
so beloved of the Michael Moore enthusiasts and Osama Bin Laden, that President Bush’s initial reaction to the 9/11 was to give a what-me-worry grin and keep reading a kid’s story, because he wanted to know how it ended. These people seem to believe that a complete set of evacuation plans – including the removal of the entire city, buildings included, to Manitoba – were slapped down on the President’s desk the moment Katrina was just a stiff breeze, and Bush said nope. Call me when gas hits nine bucks a gallon, and besides, the town’s just full of Democrats; let ‘em float out in those Cadillacs they bought with welfare checks.

That’s what the frothier elements on the left seem to think. One Air America host said as much; various rappers and actors have blamed Bush for not calling Superman on the hotline and blowing the storm away with Superbreath. One theory – and it’s an interesting one, as Howard Dean would say – suspects the Administration of deliberately flooding New Orleans to test the nation’s ability to deal with a nuclear strike. That makes sense. Sure. Why bother to drill to learn lessons that can be applied in other cities when you can drown a city and learn nothing about the hazards of radioactivity? The latter method has the added virtue of a conspiracy, which means there’s a good chance someone in the chain will breach the levee of secrecy, leading to what the Founding Fathers called Super Extra Immediate Impeachment Plus.

Crazy, yes. But this is what it’s come to. According to the choir of professional carpers, President Clinton spent half his two terms personally drawing up plans for new levees - when he wasn’t sneaking around Afghanistan in camo paint trying to apprehend Bin Laden, that is. By contrast the Bush Junta sent 100 percent of the National Guard to Iraq, which meant the 12th Airborne Plunger Brigade couldn’t descend to the Superdome with jetpacks and unstopped the overflowing toilets. Doesn’t matter that New Orleans had hundreds of school buses unused for evacuation – blame the Feds who cut matching funds for bus-driver instruction back in 1927.

This level of incandescent lunacy isn’t new. In the 90s there were people who believed that President Clinton would use Y2K to herd us into FEAM-run gulags to have barcodes tattooed on our necks, but these people confined themselves to rants at 3 AM on Art Bell’s radio show. By 2006 their ideological heirs on the left will be the evening line-up of MSNBC guests.

Meanwhile, Californians pay no heed.

I, on the other hand, am paying attention and doing my small part.

Tomorrow night, I'll be working the 11pm to 2 am slot at a local phone bank supporting the Hurricane Katrina Relief Telethon. Posting will be light as a result.