New Orleans: Beaten by Katrina, Mishandled by Bush, Killed by Ideology

As the people of New Orleans watch their world revert to the conditions of barbarism while promises of such trappings of civil order as food, medicine, shelter, basic public provision, and basic human security are made and routinely broken, what we are seeing is less the incompetence of specific public officials, and more the final triumph of the discourse of privatism. While the drooling incompetence of the Bush “administration” is tragi-laughably on display, it is the now regnant Bush-Cheney-Reagan ideology that is killing people as they wait in vain for the agencies and stewards of modern government and public responsibility to arrive at last and perform their basic duties. The cavalry may be on its way, but unfortunately the cavalry no longer knows how to ride its horses or even what its basic functions are. The sheriff may ride in but can’t seem to do anything better than protect the property of businesses (most of which have been washed away with the rest of the antediluvian assumptions – but, oh well, we’ll just keep going through the same hollow motions of the same dead dance…), label struggling survivors “looters” and point guns at them as they try to drag sodden disposable diapers and canned goods out of the wreckage of doomed supermarkets. Remember, in the new conception, government power exists and may be legitimately exercised only to protect property rights of owners from the capering mobs of terrorists, extremists, populists, and lazy riffraff. In the new world order, to ask a public servant acting during a time of crisis (now known inanely as a “first-responder”), whose only known role is to protect stuff already privately possessed, to affirmatively care for human beings and provide for their human needs is as foolish as asking a pig to dance.

Oh, yes, everyone makes the right concessionary noises about meeting human needs, providing human service, and restoring public confidence, but pigs too can be dressed in tutus and trained to dance the Nutcracker on command. Watch the head of FEMA clumsily struggle to blame the media for “sensationalizing” the suffering of people who’ve been out of food and medicine and water for days on end, watch the president say words of concern that do not match his odd look of annoyance (at the bother of being forced to cut short his vacation?). The fact is, these folks really don’t understand what’s gone wrong, why things are falling apart. Why in the world is this happening, they wonder, why is everything falling apart just when we’ve finally completed all the hard work of pruning to the very verges the government that Ronald Reagan assured us was the problem at the heart of every public trouble? Why, they wonder, is everyone so angry at us when we’ve finally succeeded in convincing all the important thinkers and opinion leaders that what we need is an ownership society that relies on private efforts, private successes, private agency, and personal responsibility to meet individual or aggregated private needs? Why do they keep asking unintelligible (but vaguely embarrassing) questions about lapses of pubic responsibility and the incompetence of public efforts?

The chaos, panic, suffering, and humiliation of the poor, the fragile, and the marginalized we witness this week is the always-obvious and inevitable outcome of abandoning an ideology of public interest, public welfare, and shared responsibility. The corporate media struggles mightily but in futility to find any convincing stories of private provision; it’s not that there are not heroic stories of such acts of person-to-person kindness and basic human compassion carried out in the zone of private engagement, it’s just that it is painfully, achingly, glaringly apparent that the capacity of these private agents is vanishingly small compared to the scale of public human need. We see now, moment by moment, in sharp definition the irreplaceable value of public mobilization. And perhaps we faintly recall how, when they were -- once upon a time -- empowered and held accountable to carry out the people’s work, public agencies, public officials, and public servants using public spending, public utilities, and public programs, did, in fact, manifest actual public compassion. Can we recall now that public works can be the best manifestation of public values like kindness, care, and morality?

Can we now see that for a large, modern, plural, and populous people and nation it is by far wiser to put our collective reliance on law-and-democracy-based institutions rather than faith-based organizations and private corporations? The loss of public competence is the self-fulfilling prophecy of those who’ve barked at the moon for three decades and more in their fevered delirium of conservative ideology. In their ceaseless baying, drowning out rational discourse, they’ve succeeded in shaking our shared confidence in the capacity of public institutions, the potential competency of public agents and stewards to safeguard the public interest, protect the public weal, and provide for public needs. Their self-revealing ideology of self-interest and the alleged fallacy of altruism (tarted-up in the drag of pseudo-theories and shiny slogans having to do with nonsensical toy ideas like “tragedies of the commons” and “prisoner’s dilemma”, and blah and woof), broadcast night and day by a corporate lackey media, have so clouded the public mind that we can barely manage to think clear thoughts about public responsibility and collective action any longer. Thus benighted, our path back to sanity and a wholesome, hopeful, and human understanding of the public basis and nature of genuine democracy is only dimly perceptible, glimpsed fleetingly now in the flame of shared anger and frustration we feel at the images and realities coming to light in New Orleans.

Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980 in the middle of, and in reaction to, a breakdown of our public competence. Our economy staggered under the combined bloat of crippling debt and deficit and the weight of rocketing gas prices, our national interest wandered about blindly , lost somewhere in the sands of middle-eastern hatred and reaction to American policy gone awry, and our sense of having failed ourselves and our shared history of the struggle for democracy. Government would not be the solution, Ronald Reagan scolded those of us who might be tempted to force it to reform and recommit to progress and justice; government, he sneered, was the problem. Isn’t thirty-five years of intimidated deference to this tired, cramped, and paranoia-fueled ideology enough? Isn’t it time to wake up and see who is empowered when government is turned to the protection of wealth already achieved, who is impoverished when public institutions are converted to private centers of profit, who is served when public service is turned over to the likes of Charles Colson and Pat Robertson, who is helped and who is harmed by an ideology of ownership and privatism as the basis of social life? Who is lifted up, who is left behind? What is cherished, who is protected, and who is neglected? Who is welcomed as a neighbor and who dismissed as a refugee, a vagrant, a beggar, a ravening terrorist, a clinging dependent? Who wins and who loses in the world according to Bush? The answers flicker now before us, the code becoming clarified. Just watch the images streaming out of the ravaged coastal South.