Gross, if not criminal, negligence behaviour that recklessly disregards the lives and safety of others is on display in New Orleans. A federal government gutted by ideology is delivering grossly inadequate and tardy assistance to poor citizens of a hurricane-gouged city, thus condemning many to death by lack of food, water and medicine.
For a chronology of Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) policy and flood-control projects in New Orleans under the George W Bush administration, click here
Is such negligence, and the deeper evisceration of Americas once-vaunted social safety-net, an impeachable offence? Ill argue that it should be, but in modern Americas mental state of stunned bliss (a toxic blend of anxiety and complacency) the Bush ship of state, though taking on water, will probably sail on through 2008. Before it sinks, those on the upper decks almost surely will, like the affluent citizens of New Orleans, zoom to safety, probably on boats and SUVs rented exorbitantly from Halliburton.
openDemocracy writers examine the political fallout of Hurricane Katrina:
Mariano Aguirre, The Hurricane and the Empire
Ian Christie, When the levee breaks
Terry Lynn Karl, Bushs second Gulf disaster
Godfrey Hodgson, After Katrina, a government adrift
Michel Thieren, Katrinas triple failure: technical, ethical, political
Andrei Codrescu, New Orleans or Baghdad?
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Were criminal negligence a path to impeachment, Iraq the recklessly unplanned and incompetently executed aftermath, if not the fraudulently marketed invasion would have removed Bush by now. However, he was re-elected in 2004 amidst daily evidence of mounting deaths and chaos in Baghdad and much of the country. The lesson is sobering: despite stark and vividly illustrated federal failures in New Orleans, dont expect Bush to be held accountable his party controls both houses of Congress, the leaderless Democrats are a feckless opposition, and (above all) most Americans remain credulous and numb, tipsy on Uncle Sams favourite brew: Old Wishful Thinking.
So, expect little or no real accountability until and unless the American people wake up and realise that it no longer is (if ever it was) morning in America; that behind the soundbite rhetoric of security economic, social, police, military is metastasising disorder on the ground; and that our vaunted homeland is in deep trouble.
Such a popular awakening is unlikely soon, for several reasons, not least the absence of oppositional leadership. More deeply, reflective criticism runs counter to the exceptionalist, promised-land, manifest-destiny, rose-coloured script that enjoys increasingly high ratings on the screens where most Americans obtain entertainment-cum-news: movie theatres and television sets. That America-the-beautiful script found renewed vigour in Ronald Reagans imagistic brilliance, his cheery willingness to overlook misery and failure, while celebrating superficial accomplishments (remember the liberation of Grenada, forget the Beirut barracks debacle that preceded it).
Our capacity for half-blind self-congratulation reached its apotheosis (so far) in Bushs post-9/11 bombast that launched the Iraq misadventure, then claimed false victory (mission accomplished) and palmed off Abu Ghraib as an embarrassing aberration outside his administrations carefully wrought policy sanctioning torture.
A perilous evasion
America enjoys, and suffers from, an almost childlike willingness to buy patriotic narratives that flatter our sense of decency, potency and authority, even in the face of serious contrary evidence. This reality is not that this nation is indecent, impotent or incapable of responsible leadership but rather that our capabilities, like those of all other nations, are partial and flawed.
The key corollary is likewise chronically overlooked in American political life: that uncritical overestimation of ones capacities and ignorance and underestimation of adversarial forces, be they terrorists or storms, sooner or later leads to tragedy, a lesson people ignore at their peril - and if like America they are powerful, the worlds peril.
Telling proof of both tragedy and our capacity to misunderstand and repeat it preceded Hurricane Katrina by just a day when Bush, in Salt Lake City, finally acknowledged the combined thousands of American deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq and then pleaded: We owe them something. We will finish the task that they gave their lives for." We who lived through the Vietnam debacle shivered in this echo of Lyndon B Johnsons futile argument to send more American boys to die in order to prove that those who preceded them didnt die in vain.
This tautological sophistry had and has special appeal to Americans, not just those with family members in the military. Bush, always the artful propagandist, employed it in part to shore up his declining popularity and portray Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq who camped outside his much-used vacation ranch, as something of a traitor. Her crime was to deliver a message painful (for her) and inconvenient (for Bush): that her son and over 1,800 other American kids did die for a lost cause in Iraq because Bush, the executor if not architect of the imprudent and unnecessary war, was and remains guilty of gross negligence.
Most Americans didnt wish to believe it and, when the water and corpses settle in Louisiana, wont want to believe that the deaths there were the result of criminal neglect. Why? Partly because most of the dead were black and poor. Partly because a hurricane is a so-called act of God, a natural disaster, and one like Katrina had never before hit New Orleans, just as no planes like those that hit the Pentagon and World Trade Centers on 9/11 ever before so incinerated American structures and symbols of power.
How, Bush will ask, can you protect against such unique events? And, in dull chorus, despite the many expert warnings, most Americans will chalk up Katrina, like Osama, to aberrant forces beyond governmental control and, therefore, accountability.
Beyond wishful thinking
Such popular capacity for evasive disbelief is endemic. We quickly ignore the facts of death and destruction and deny the possibility that our government, the greatest democracy in the world (where half the electorate routinely doesnt vote, but no matter) might have been complicit in crimes of nonfeasance (New Orleans) or malfeasance (Iraq).
The complicity extends widely: policy blunders that give uncritical support to Israel; that train, arm and then provoke into outrage Muslim extremists; that decimate government programmes, leaving the military overstretched and New Orleans inadequately protected; that make adequate rescue efforts even more difficult in part because one third of Louisianas national guard is bogged down in Iraq.
Many Americans still believe that, though our levees, intelligence agencies and generals might fail, our democratic system and the man it chooses to lead us are virtually above close scrutiny, at least on matters of deeper significance and complexity than illicit sex and the routine falsehoods it engenders. Impeach the philanderer, not the man responsible for mass deaths a statement not so much of national priorities but of a childish mindset, a willingness to focus on the titillating and salacious but not on matters of complex risk-assessment, fiscal and resource allocation policies.
Wishful thinkings prime symptoms are cries of say it isnt so! or I cant believe it! These expressions belie a people so reluctant to face hard facts that we can pretend that they, or rather their documented causes and implications, do not exist. However, history suggests that even the obdurately faithful will abandon false deities and narratives when their prayers and hopes are dashed too often or their faith abused too crassly. Perhaps in the 2006 election, if Karl Rove doesnt wag a new dog to erase memories of New Orleans and Baghdad, enough Americans will remember these and the many other examples of the Bush crowds mendacious ineptitude, gross economic and policy blunders, ideological fanaticism and shameless rapacity. If so, we may see Congress return to the confused, weak, leaderless but well-intentioned hands of the Democrats.
Do no harm, an oft-ignored credo of doctors, may in these sorry times prove to be the best we can hope for, at least in the short run. The long run? It is not, at least so far, in the American political vocabulary. And therein lies a longer and even more fraught story.
