The Other Shoe Drops; or One of Them
The other shoe drops, or one of them.
New Orleans mayor Nagin is not looking so dumb anymore after Houston tries to evacuate and manages mostly to create gridlock and suck all the gasoline out of the area.
I bet you dollars to doughnuts Nagin was driven to his decisions in part by intuitive awareness of how impossible it is to evacuate a major city completely. Maybe the wind will pass and lives (as in that exploding bus outside Houston) not be lost in the process of evacuation, plus looting of houses left behind by the criminals of a notably lawless city.
Not the best thinking but no excuse for FEMA officials to suck thumbs, confident that picking up the pieces was primarily a "local responsibility."
First responders, yeah right. What about the Second Responders? Who, before Bush and Karl Rove,thought no one else had any obligation???
It can't be new to anyone in America -- anyone who knows history that is -- that one of the functions of the Federal government is to handle things that the States screw up, or that are too big for local imaginations. Lots of brain trust and broader vision are needed to run a giant nation, and perhaps these aren't even the skills that a local politician needs. These folks go to Washington, get power ... and owe the rest of us as a moral obligation of repayment.
For most of our history, the Federal government has had a true intuition that it has a backstop-and/or-reform role. It's needed and it has been carried out just for that reason.
The fly in the ointment has been that the rich and capable have mixed emotions about any sense of responsibility for this function of government. I have no idea why they think they could function as well as they do if they didn't have a huge, and heavily-government-supported economy and social structure behind them, assuring the predictability of the world in which they make big money. I don't know why they can't see that most of the world is not like this, much less predictable and harder to get wealthy in without direction corruption and violence.
Most likely, to see it that way would undermine their sense of personal achievement.
But it's true. The Federal government is a huge part of the conditions that create super-wealth in this country and the passion to limit taxation represents the bad faith of many of the rich who want the benefits of this but not the bill.
Local is never enough to support any richesse but that of the local warlord -- the real kind, with guns, goons and jus primae noctis.
You want super-wealth on the American scale, you pay some taxes, buddy ... or you lose not only New Orleans but everything else that underlies your satisfying sense of personal competence.
New Orleans mayor Nagin is not looking so dumb anymore after Houston tries to evacuate and manages mostly to create gridlock and suck all the gasoline out of the area.
I bet you dollars to doughnuts Nagin was driven to his decisions in part by intuitive awareness of how impossible it is to evacuate a major city completely. Maybe the wind will pass and lives (as in that exploding bus outside Houston) not be lost in the process of evacuation, plus looting of houses left behind by the criminals of a notably lawless city.
Not the best thinking but no excuse for FEMA officials to suck thumbs, confident that picking up the pieces was primarily a "local responsibility."
First responders, yeah right. What about the Second Responders? Who, before Bush and Karl Rove,thought no one else had any obligation???
It can't be new to anyone in America -- anyone who knows history that is -- that one of the functions of the Federal government is to handle things that the States screw up, or that are too big for local imaginations. Lots of brain trust and broader vision are needed to run a giant nation, and perhaps these aren't even the skills that a local politician needs. These folks go to Washington, get power ... and owe the rest of us as a moral obligation of repayment.
For most of our history, the Federal government has had a true intuition that it has a backstop-and/or-reform role. It's needed and it has been carried out just for that reason.
The fly in the ointment has been that the rich and capable have mixed emotions about any sense of responsibility for this function of government. I have no idea why they think they could function as well as they do if they didn't have a huge, and heavily-government-supported economy and social structure behind them, assuring the predictability of the world in which they make big money. I don't know why they can't see that most of the world is not like this, much less predictable and harder to get wealthy in without direction corruption and violence.
Most likely, to see it that way would undermine their sense of personal achievement.
But it's true. The Federal government is a huge part of the conditions that create super-wealth in this country and the passion to limit taxation represents the bad faith of many of the rich who want the benefits of this but not the bill.
Local is never enough to support any richesse but that of the local warlord -- the real kind, with guns, goons and jus primae noctis.
You want super-wealth on the American scale, you pay some taxes, buddy ... or you lose not only New Orleans but everything else that underlies your satisfying sense of personal competence.
posted by Nellmezzo | 10:42 AM
1 Comments:
Hi, Nellie M.,
I just saw this, and it reminded me of a favorite factoid from whatever the standard history now is of the Great Influenza of 1918-19. 650,000 Americans, out of a population of 100 million, died in 13 weeks. The federal government not only did nothing, it said nothing. There was no official acknowledgement of, or even reference to, what was happening, or had happened. In 1918, public health was solely a state and local concern. Our feeling that a national emergency is Federal business has developed almost entirely since 1933.
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