David Brooks has written an interesting column for the New York Times. I say 'interesting' not because I necessarily agree with it, but rather because it throws some light on how people like him think.
On Sept. 11, Rudy Giuliani took control. The government response was quick and decisive. The rich and poor suffered alike. Americans had been hit, but felt united and strong. Public confidence in institutions surged.
Last week in New Orleans, by contrast, nobody took control. Authority was diffuse and action was ineffective. The rich escaped while the poor were abandoned. Leaders spun while looters rampaged. Partisans squabbled while the nation was ashamed.
The first rule of the social fabric - that in times of crisis you protect the vulnerable - was trampled. Leaving the poor in New Orleans was the moral equivalent of leaving the injured on the battlefield. No wonder confidence in civic institutions is plummeting.
OK, I question his conclusion that confidence in civic institutions is plummeting. Does he have data to support this? My guess is that the crisis of confidence is more or less confined to a couple of groups of people: the poor people stuck in New Orleans who naturally wonder why the government didn't do more to get them out, to take care of them, and who are also wondering what will become of them. Their houses and jobs are gone. They must be feeling despair the like of which I pray none of the rest of us ever face in our lives.
The other group having the confidence 'problem' is lefties who hate George Bush and see Katrina as the realization of all their hopes for a disaster that they can wrap around his neck. They tried and failed to hang 9-11 on him; the really loopy ones believed that he knew it was going to happen and did nothing to stop it, and the REALLY loopy ones think he was actually involved in organizing and planning it. They've tried to make the Iraq war into a disaster; the president's poll numbers (and lefties live and die by them) have taken a hit, but Americans haven't quite gotten into the full Vietnam mode of holding mass protests on the Mall and throwing dog s*** on our troops.
Now they've got Katrina. HOORAY! Why didn't BUSH spend more money on the levees? Why didn't BUSH have the Army sitting in New Orleans ready to instantly rebuild the city? Why didn't BUSH give a better speech? If there is a crisis of confidence in our public institutions, it's media-made.
Why do I say this? Look at the Red Cross website and see how much money people are donating to that organization. Have a look at news broadcasts and see refugees from the Gulf Coast being cared for in cities like Houston. The National Guard and the regular military are on the scene in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast: people can SEE them working to repair the levees and pull people off of rooftops.
And the key fact to understanding why this is such a huge cultural moment is this: Last week's national humiliation comes at the end of a string of confidence-shaking institutional failures that have cumulatively changed the nation's psyche.
Over the past few years, we have seen intelligence failures in the inability to prevent Sept. 11 and find W.M.D.'s in Iraq. We have seen incompetent postwar planning. We have seen the collapse of Enron and corruption scandals on Wall Street. We have seen scandals at our leading magazines and newspapers, steroids in baseball, the horror of Abu Ghraib.
Public confidence has been shaken too by the steady rain of suicide bombings, the grisly horror of Beslan and the world's inability to do anything about rising oil prices.
Each institutional failure and sign of helplessness is another blow to national morale. The sour mood builds on itself, the outraged and defensive reaction to one event serving as the emotional groundwork for the next.
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.
My hat's off to Brooks: he managed to connect Abu Ghraib with Katrina. THAT take some journalistic skill!
I was pleasantly surprised to see that he had the grace to mention that the BM has had it's share of 'scandals'. Now THERE'S an institution that IS having a documented crisis of confidence. A large fraction of the American people are becoming increasingly skeptical of what they read in the major newspapers (like the NYT) or see on news programs.
Note to Brooks: Op-eds like this don't do anything to increase public confidence in much of anything.
Oh, and while I'm beating up on the BM, what does he mean "pictures of bodies falling from the twin towers [and] beheaded kidnapping victims in Iraq"? The BM hardly ever shows pictures of the Twin Towers being hit, and I don't think they've ever shown the video of actual beheadings. They're protecting our delicate sensibilities, you see, and also doing their bit to make sure that Americans aren't reminded why we're fighting the war there are no anti-Muslim sentiments whipped up in the country. Pics of Abu Ghraib, on the other hand...
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.
"Rats on the West Side, bedbugs uptown/What a mess! This town's in tatters/I've been shattered," Mick Jagger sang in 1978.
Midge Decter woke up the morning after the night of looting during the New York blackout of 1977 feeling as if she had "been given a sudden glimpse into the foundations of one's house and seen, with horror, that it was utterly infested and rotting away."
Um, I think if Americans could survive the Great Depression AND World War II AND the beginning of the Cold War in the span of a bit more than a decade, I think we can survive this.
This interests me very much: "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."
SOME Americans, notably lefties, have had to do this. Those of us on the more realistic right already knew about all these things. This is why we're strongly in favor of a powerful national defense, strict enforcement of laws, capital punishment, etc, and less in favor of dope-smoking-hippie-feel-good liberal policies that seem to be grounded in the belief that if we're only NICE enough, everything will come out right.
Two of the American people's responses to the terrible decade of the 1970s gave the libs a fit: Ronald Reagan and Rudy Guiliani. Both of them realized that evil (do libs recognize this concept except as it applies to George Bush?) has to be confronted with strength and determination. So, they both got put down as a pair of neo-fascists, racists, homophobes, and whatever other invective the left could hurl at them. When George Bush showed strong leadership after 9-11, he was mocked, too.
Americans in 2005 are not quite in that bad a shape, since the fundamental realities of everyday life are good. The economy and the moral culture are strong. But there is a loss of confidence in institutions. In case after case there has been a failure of administration, of sheer competence. Hence, polls show a widespread feeling the country is headed in the wrong direction.
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.
You can practically see him drooling over the prospect of 'progressive resurgence' (read: more liberal democrats running the government). Strange sort of wish: if this time in our history is 'Hobbesian', then why in the world should we elect and appoint leaders from a group that has a demonstrated inability to deal with such hard realities? Again, Brooks is engaging in wishful thinking and simultaneously demonstrating what Katrina REALLY means to liberals: PEOPLE ARE SUFFERING! HOORAY! MAYBE THEY'LL ELECT US!
I don't think people are 'mad as hell'. Oh, then again, maybe they are, but not necessarily for the reasons that Brooks thinks (hopes) that they are. Those of us on the right are angry because:
1. We aren't kicking the hell out of terrorists the way we want. I'm talking about Iran and Syria. Why is Assad still in power, and why are the Iranians being allowed to build a Bomb unmolested?
2. Why are our borders not being controlled?
3. How could the local and state authorities in New Orleans and Louisiana have been so bloody stupid? And how dare they try to shift the blame for their incompetence to the federal government?
4. How is it that the minority party in Congress seems to be calling the shots?
5. Why is Teddy Kennedy not in jail?
Yeah, I guess Brooks actually IS right: I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore.
I agree with the author.
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Posted by: Bill | September 22, 2007 at 06:40 PM