Copyright 2005 Ben S. Pollock
Friday, September 2, 2005: Gulf War III.
This one is American, too, but it’s being fought on a different Gulf.
Thoughts about Hurricane Katrina.
In my morning paper today is a color insert ad, Heartland Honda of Springdale: four glossy pages on gas-powered portable generators. Now I know the biz, that inserts are weeks in the planning, but in mere days after Katrina, where we all wonder, what would we do in similar circumstances? Why, it’s pre-millennium paranoia and post-9/11 preparation: Bottle some water. Buy duct tape. We can watch TV with our generators. While we wait for the Guard to guard the homeland and not Babylon, Persia and Mesopotamia.
Interesting that the more right-wing gasbags focus on the looters in New Orleans. The human toll, the environmental questions, the lost structures and cost and timetable to rebuild, and lots of TV clowns focus on the petty thieves. Looting is bad, but it’s far from the whole story. Perhaps those it fascinates secretly harbor racist and classist bigotries?
Here is a daring editorial. (This NOW links to the overall newspaper of Waterbury, Conn., but this editorial no longer seems available online) Oy, Yankees. When lefties accuse my Democrat-Gazette of being conservative editorially, they should read this. My paper editorially consistently notes that there’s a place for charity but this is an appropriate time for government action. Almost Clintonian.
Do I agree with the published opinion of the Waterbury, Conn., newspaper? No; libertarianism is cool but mainly to bounce practical action plans off of, as a way of predicting then muting potential problems, not to follow. But the essay raises points that had yet to be made, and thank goodness Romenesko linked to it so more than Waterburians can read it and ponder.
I’d summarize or further comment on this piece, but you’re obviously online and thus can find analysis. In fact, the problem for me here is I have lots to say and little reason to post it; my thoughts cannot be unique or particularly persuasive; I am too far removed. Katrina is everyone’s topic, and few are shy about this one. (Obviously, my bit is worth posting, to me.)
Without going out of my way to find people hurting: A new co-worker has family in southern Mississippi and finally we learn they’re managing. A coworker in Little Rock, whom I know only electronically, has a number of relatives missing in the New Orleans area. I played recorders Thursday with a refugee from Slidell, La., and she doesn’t know if her house is still there. She borrowed the flutes; she did not pack hers.
Meanwhile, one debate that the Waterbury paper glances off of is, is it too early to criticize the government on Katrina? It’s not different from criticizing George II’s war in Iraq (Gulf War II) without criticizing our troops there. It is possible to discuss because observers of the debate can distinguish between the two foci. Only the fearmongers or the TV gasbags (Trillin’s term) claim people could be confused, that opposing Iraq intervention must always mean the naysayers simultaneously mean that our GIs are at fault.
(I do not know why people older than me mocked soldiers on their return from Vietnam (I was a child at the time). It wasn’t their fault then, either. Both the American left and right still have a lot to answer for.)
We have to make distinctions, now, and use them. Along the Gulf of Mexico, we can cry with the victims, with those who got out leaving their valuables, and with those too poor to flee and even those too proud/daring/silly/jaded/recklessly immature to go. I have had a hard time reconciling the last group all week — good riddance to home when you darn well know that official warnings are so uncommon that authorities do not cry wolf and meteorology has been reliable for decades. Now I feel for them, too. So what’s holding up the federal government? Incompetence? Other priorities?
You can keep your generators. That buys you what, maybe a week at home?
I told my wife a couple nights ago that we pack upon the first Emergency Broadcast System warning on any threat that we directly hear, never act on some local yokel’s rumor, crate the cats in the back seat, never mind about what won’t fit in the car. And go. -30-
