[NYTr] Katrina: On the Question of Patriotism

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Axis of Logic via CubaNow - Aug 27, 2007
http://www.cubanow.net/global/loader.php?&secc=10&item=3195&c=2


Katrina: On the Question of Patriotism

By Rick Perlstein

Cubanow.- The second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina is coming. We'll
be writing about it all week here at The Big Con. It's the signal
conservative failure, the sine qua non of all we warn about here at the
blog. In fact, we could write about nothing else, and teach our lesson
just as well: that conservatives can't govern, because of their
contempt for government.

It also allowed us to gauge our conservative fellow Americans' moral
level.

I remember my first introduction to Katrina. It was the night before
landfall, and the blogger Atrios shared a weather report:

Most Of The Area Will Be Uninhabitable For Weeks...Perhaps Longer. At
Least One Half Of Well Constructed Homes Will Have Roof And Wall
Failure. All Gabled Roofs Will Fail...Leaving Those Homes Severely
Damaged Or Destroyed.

The Majority Of Industrial Buildings Will Become Non Functional.
Partial To Complete Wall And Roof Failure Is Expected. All Wood Framed
Low Rising Apartment Buildings Will Be Destroyed. Concrete Block Low
Rise Apartments Will Sustain Major Damage...Including Some Wall And
Roof Failure.

High Rise Office And Apartment Buildings Will Sway Dangerously...A Few
To The Point Of Total Collapse. All Windows Will Blow Out.

Airborne Debris Will Be Widespread...And May Include Heavy Items Such
As Household Appliances And Even Light Vehicles. Sport Utility Vehicles
And Light Trucks Will Be Moved. The Blown Debris Will Create Additional
Destruction. Persons...Pets...And Livestock Exposed To The Winds Will
Face Certain Death If Struck.

Power Outages Will Last For Weeks...As Most Power Poles Will Be Down
And Transformers Destroyed. Water Shortages Will Make Human Suffering
Incredible By Modern Standards.

The Vast Majority Of Native Trees Will Be Snapped Or Uprooted. Only The
Heartiest Will Remain Standing...But Be Totally Defoliated. Few Crops
Will Remain. Livestock Left Exposed To The Winds Will Be Killed.

Here was a spur to the President of the United States...to stay on
vacation.

And, three days later, to utter one of the most astonishing lies of his
administration?"I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the
levies"?though it had been anticipated to his face, and on video.

I learned a lot in the next weeks about my fellow Americans. I remember
especially my furious anger with the small circle of conservatives with
which I've been debating politics for many years by email. I remember
how Katrina become their spur to...stay on vacation.

A moral vacation, I mean. What I mean is: every time I would come to
them with yet more evidence of one of those manifest calamities brought
on by the conservatives in charge of our federal government that would
come back?with more anger than I had been able to muster?about some
smaller sin of the overwhelmed government of New Orleans: it was all,
of course, the Democrats' fault. One of my friends is a citizens of the
Free Republic. I'll never forget how he believed he had clinched the
argument. He pulled out an aerial photograph (above) of school buses in
a flooded parking lot. That proved it: New Orleans had means, motive,
and opportunity to evacuate the stranded and miserable hurricane
victims from the Superdome. They just didn't care!

Well, the Freepers would have been right; if the Freepers had been
magic wizards. If they could have, as Snopes pointed out, wished into
those buses fuel, food, water, and qualified drivers; fluttered a
workable logistics plan down from on high; and, to top it off,
sufficient funds from a cash-strapped municipality to make this miracle
happen?and a guarantee, in any event, that these thousands of people in
buses wouldn't have been stranded, unprotected, in the path of another
oncoming hurricane or flash flood. And a guarantee that those buses
actually worked. And that they weren't (as it appears they were)
already stranded in a yard of brackish water.

This same friend of mine, the Freeper, happens to be from Alabama. He
had another argument for why conservative government hadn't failed:
that Alabama had done just fine, because the competent and public
spirited folks running his state had outstanding emergency management
plans. As if Alabama municipalities had been hit by anything more than
a fraction of the force of New Orleans. It was nuts.

It didn't matter. The arguments served the only transcendent moral
purpose conservatives know: abjuring the idea of that there exists an
American national community, to which we all owe mutual obligation.

It was then that I was reconfirmed in a vague notion I'd been carrying
in my mind for years. It concerns patriotism and its paradoxes.
Conservatives, of course, claim to be patriotic. They claim to be the
most patriotic souls of all. Sometimes?say it ain't so!?they've been
known to say other kinds of Americans are not patriotic, because they
don't believe the right things about preventive war, theology, and
uncritical worship of the President (if the President is a Republican).

But patriotism has a simple definition: love of country and willingness
to sacrifice for it.

This is, of course, something progressives have no problem doing.
Because it means, simply, that all Americans are every other American's
concern. It means always acknowledging a national community, one to
which we owe a constant obligation, parallel to our more local
networks. It means that there is a certain level below which no
American should be allowed to fall: in rights, in services, in
solicitude from Washington. That no one who lives under that flag can
ever be left behind. Even if they have the misfortune to live in a city
that was hurt more by a hurricane than your city; and even if one city
proves tragically less prepared to cope with a hurricane than another.
That being an American means: step up. Our nation will sacrifice for
you. That is what patriotism means.

Conservatives, on the other hand, were glad to let a certain group of
Americans flounder and rot?to gloat that certain supposed local
failings trumped national obligation, and use "clever" graphics and
just-so stories to shirk that obligation.

It proves they aren't patriots at all.