An outsider's perspective

[MDM4AU 332]

Sometimes those a little removed from a problem have a lot more insight than

those closer to it. That certainly seems to apply to this Canadian editorialist.

DavidWarrenOnline

ESSAYS ON OUR TIMES

SUNDAY SPECTATOR

September 11, 2005

Blame throwing

There's plenty wrong with America, since you asked. (Everybody's asking.)

I'm tempted to say, the only difference from Canada, is that they have a few

things right. That would be unfair, of course -- I am often pleased to

discover things we still get right. 

But one of them would not be disaster preparation. If something happened up

here, on the scale of Katrina, we wouldn't even have the resources to arrive

late. We would be waiting for the Americans to come save us, the same way

the government in Louisiana just waved and pointed at Washington, D.C. The

theory being, that when you're in real trouble, that's where the adults

live.

And that isn't an exaggeration. Almost everything that has worked in the

recovery operation along the U.S. Gulf Coast has been military and National

Guard. Within a few days, under several commands, finally consolidated under

the remarkable Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, it was once again the U.S. military,

efficiently cobbling together a recovery operation on a scale beyond the

capacity of any other earthly institution.

We hardly have a military up here. We have elected one feckless government

after another, who has cut corners until there is nothing substantial left.

We don't have the ability even to transport and equip our few soldiers.

Should disaster strike at home, on a big scale, we become a Third World

country.  At which point, our national smugness is of no avail.

From Democrats and the American Left -- the U.S. equivalent to the people

who run Canada -- we are still hearing that the disaster in New Orleans

showed a heartless, white Republican America had abandoned its underclass.

This is garbage. The great majority of those not evacuated lived in assisted

housing, receive food stamps and prescription medicine and government

support through many other programmes. Many have, all their lives, expected

someone to lift them to safety, sans input from themselves. And the

demagogic mayor they elected left, quite literally, hundreds of transit and

school buses parked in rows to be lost in the flood that could have driven

them out of town.

Yes, that was insensitive. But it is also the truth; and sooner or later we

must acknowledge that welfare dependency creates exactly the sort of

haplessness and social degeneration we saw on display, as the floodwaters

rose. Many suffered terribly, and many died, and one's heart goes out. But

already the survivors are being put up in new accommodations, and their

various entitlements have been directed to new locations.

The scale of private charity has also been unprecedented. There are yet no

statistics, but I'll wager the most generous state in the union will prove

to have been arch-Republican Texas, and that nationally, contributions in

cash and kind are coming disproportionately from people who vote Republican.

For the world divides into "the mouths" and "the wallets".

The Bush-bashing, both down there and up here, has so far lost touch with

reality, as to raise questions about the bashers' state of mind.  Consult

any authoritative source on how government works in the United States, and

you will learn that the U.S. federal government's legal, constitutional, and

institutional responsibility for first response to Katrina, as to any

natural disaster, was zero.

Notwithstanding, President Bush took the prescient step of declaring a

disaster, in order to begin deploying FEMA and other federal assets, two

full days

in advance of the stormfall. In the little time since, he has managed to

coordinate an immense recovery operation -- the largest in human history --

without invoking martial powers. He has been sufficiently Presidential to

respond, not even once, to the extraordinarily mendacious and childish

blame-throwing.

One thinks of Kipling's "If --" poem, which I learned to recite as a lad,

and mention now in the full knowledge that it drives postmodern leftoids and

gliberals to apoplexy -- as anything that is good, beautiful, or true:

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,

Or being hated, don't give way to hating,

And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise...

Unlike his critics, Bush is a man, in the full sense presented by these

verses. A fallible man, like all the rest, but a man.