NO VACCINE FOR BDS IN SIGHT

All McKinneys now (James Bowman, The New Criterion, October, 2005) –free registration required

It is only one more indication of the melancholy truth, touched on with some frequency in these columns, that in our threadbare public culture everything that is not already politicized must and will be politicized. In the first hours after the storm hit, Louisiana’s Democratic leaders, Governor Kathleen Blanco and Senator Mary Landrieu, were vying with each other to praise Michael Brown, FEMA’s director. But when the evacuation failed and public order broke down, both sides scrambled to be the first to blame the other. And why not, when it was obvious that finding someone to blame was going to be the response to the disaster both of the political and of the media cultures? Within ten days Brown was demoted and a no-nonsense admiral had taken his place. Once “the blame game”—as defensive administration officials inevitably but no less accurately called it—got going, it was pretty clear where most of the blame was going to go.

And if any blame, why not all? From slackness about taking over the control of relief efforts from local officials to a deliberate policy of abandoning the poor and black citizens of New Orleans to their fate seemed an easy leap to some. The despicable nature of such a wild charge might once have seemed shocking even to the President’s most determined opponents, but in a world where a member of Congress, Representative Cynthia McKinney, has publicly accused the President of being complicit in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, we have grown inured to such things. The irrepressible Rep. McKinney popped up on this occasion too, announcing that “as I saw the mostly African-American families ripped apart, I could only think of slavery. Families ripped apart, herded into what looked like concentration camps.” This, by the way, of those who were rescued—not that that should interfere with similar imputations against those who had previously failed to herd them into what looked like concentration camps. Earlier, Jesse Jackson had described those abandoned, as he saw it, by the federal authorities as “desperate, perishing, dehydrated, babies dying. It looked like Africans in the hull of a slave ship.” Against such a rhetorical backdrop, I don’t know why anyone bothered to appear surprised when the “rapper” and well-known moralist Kanye West announced that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people!”

Mr. West, who also believes that AIDS is a plot of the white government and power structure against black people, is not, perhaps—or not yet, anyway—the most respectable of witnesses. But that didn’t prevent the media of seeking, however gingerly, to ally themselves with him in this instance. “I don’t think Kanye West can support his view that George W. Bush just doesn’t care about black people,” announced Jacob Weisberg of Slate. “But it’s a demonstrable matter of fact that Bush doesn’t care much about black votes. And that, in the end, may amount to the same thing.” That “may” sounds to me to be the product of a deservedly bad rhetorical conscience, for they are not the same thing at all. Politically, Bush would be a fool to “care” about black votes in the sense of trying to win more of them by seeking to placate the Kanye Wests of the world. Not only would he find it impossible to win the good opinion of those who are so ready to believe the worst of him, but he would also alienate the great majority of his own supporters who sincerely believe that the sorts of things he would have to do to win more black votes would amount to bad policy. All this is no more than to say that Bush is not a Democrat and is unlikely to become one. But only the most cynical and jaundiced of commentators could imagine that this obvious fact “amounts to” a callous disregard for the lives of American citizens on the grounds that they didn’t vote for him.

Unfortunately, the media’s cynicism in more places than Slate seems well up to making such assumptions. We are all Cynthia McKinneys and Kanye Wests now. Moreover, such hyperbolical language makes it more difficult to see where politics really does come into the relief efforts. On the front page of The New York Times, a leaked report from within the administration confirmed what should have been intuitively obvious, namely that political considerations made any earlier intervention highly problematical. “Can you imagine how it would have been perceived if a president of the United States of one party had preemptively taken from the female governor of another party the command and control of her forces, unless the security situation made it completely clear that she was unable to effectively execute her command authority and that lawlessness was the inevitable result?” said the Times’s anonymous source. But inside the paper, such analytical sophistication seemed utterly beyond the likes of Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich, Tom Friedman, Bob Herbert, Paul Krugman, and Nicholas Kristoff, to say nothing of the paper’s own editorialists. Throughout this crisis, as throughout all the others since 9/11, none of them had anything more to say than the latest reiteration of the first theme of the first lustrum of the third millennium—namely “I hate Bush,” repeated with ever more ingenious variations.

Posted by Peter Burnet at October 4, 2005 2:58 PM