In a segment at the top of the show on the surge of evacuees to the Texas city, Barbara Bush said: "Almost everyone I’ve talked to says we're going to move to Houston."
Then she added: "What I’m hearing is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality.
"And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this--this (she chuckles slightly) is working very well for them."
Sadly, there is no surprise to be had there; this is, after all, the person admired by none other than Richard Nixon because "she knows how to hate". Truly her continued existence only reinforces the old cliché about only the good dying young.
But my favorite all-time quote from this beastly woman has to be this one:
"Why should we hear about body bags and deaths," Barbara Bush said on ABC's "Good Morning America" on March 18, 2003. "Oh, I mean, it's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?"
It was offhand quips like that, fraught with such careless arrogance and shameless insouciance, which eventually brought about the French Revolution. And you can't say that Barbara Bush has no standing simply because she's not in power -- clearly Junior runs to Mommy and Daddy to bail his useless ass out every time there's thinkin' to be done and excuses to be made for another screwup.
Babs' comments dovetail neatly with Junior's incompetence and indifference. They are of a piece, in that since neither of them has any clue what working-class (not to mention truly impoverished) Americans go through on a day-to-day basis. They have never known what it's like to have to live from paycheck-to-paycheck, where real wages stagnate while prices steadily creep upward. They have never had to choose between survival and health care.
I can't afford health insurance; if I get in a wreck somewhere along the 35-mile gauntlet each day to or from work, I'm fucked. My whole family would be destitute, and I'm sure I'd lose my house to pay the hospital. Tens of millions of Americans live in that very situation, day after day after day. Life should not be a gamble, and yet it most certainly is. And every day in every way, George W. Bush demonstrates with his retarded bromides and his feckless actions that what he knows about the world was learned at the knee of the troll who birthed him, inflicting him upon an unsuspecting world.
A small start in the direction of good faith might be to take the $230 million "Bridge To Nowhere" we're building for Republican douchebag Don Young in Alaska, and dedicate that money -- surely a drop in the bucket -- to aiding victims of Hurricane Katrina. That would show that someone gives a shit, which is why it's not gonna happen.
And in all this, the Republican-driven evisceration has gone almost completely unnoticed and unmentioned. Except for the estimable Jon Carroll, who frames the dilemma concisely, as always:
Grover Norquist, the well-connected leader of Americans for Tax Reform and an eerily ubiquitous chat show pundit, famously said this about his political philosophy:
"I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."
Well, it looks as if he got his wish. Government was drowned in the bathtub of New Orleans, and it turns out that maybe it wasn't such a hot idea after all. It turns out that taxes actually have a purpose, and that when you cut the budgets of governmental agencies, bad things can happen. Hurricanes are unimpressed by the market economy.
....
Modern civilization seems to me more and more like a lie we have all agreed to tell. Human beings slowly developed this series of institutions that they decided to call "government" that allowed them to cluster in cities, invent things, make art, have healthy children and worry about gridlock. But despite all the infrastructure, government is just an idea; if we stop believing in it, it goes away. Grover Norquist and his ilk -- the ilk in power -- want it to go away, so all the big dogs can form into packs and ravage the countryside.
Two weeks ago, that last sentence would have sounded like hyperbole, but Katrina has scratched the veneer and made us see how thin it is. Two weeks ago, Norquist's quip at the top of the column would have seemed like just neocon inside-the-Beltway wit. Now it seems like a blueprint for what actually happened in New Orleans.
Fuckin' A. The evidence of the problem is all around us. The electrical and transportation grids are rapidly deteriorating (again, except for Don Young's stupid fucking bridge). FEMA has been sapped to pay for Iraqi quagmire, and turned over to an idiot whose previous job experience was running (and being forced to resign from) the International Arabian Horse Administration.
Because when you vet prime candidates for handling catastrophes and natural disasters that can claim hundreds or thousands of lives, the first guy you think of is some schmuck who got fired because too many equestrian show judges were on the take.
Are we starting to detect a pattern here? Rich people who always have somewhere else to go when the shit hits the fan, and always have another vehicle to get them there. Had they spent 1/10th of the time making sure the Gulf Coast had what it needed, as they have trying to make sure that Paris Hilton gets to keep every hard-earned dime she has, we might get somewhere.
Politics, as we all know, has become ever more tribal in the public arena. It's a tangle of heuristic messages and visceral impressions. I characterize it in the primal sense of football rivalries. Democrats versus Republicans. Raiders versus Niners. Elemental affiliations that frequently cause loyalty to transcend common sense.
Whatever the case, the idea was one of belonging, of being part of a team. That team, of course, should be Team America (Fuck yeah!), but I have to wonder at the lower-income Republican that still is too dense to comprehend that he's nothing more than a bench-warmer on Team Republican. Oh, they'll use him for the cynical "gay married terrists wanna take away yer Bible" play they always run. And they're always happy to send his kids over to fight their wars for them. But that's about the extent of it.
So while we're concentrated on the immediate horror of the hurricane, the flooding, the evacuation, and the aftermath, we would do well to keep an eye on the larger picture -- the picture of the housing bubble that cannot continue indefinitely. Paul Krugman puts it correctly when he says that Americans sell each other houses with money borrowed from the Chinese. One or the other has to change eventually; gravity works.
Rising (probably permanently) gas prices are a bellwether, not only a reliable indicator but something of a cause for a potential recession. Because we're at peak oil now, new refineries as investments are eventual dead weight. So oil companies, never full from record profits, will want to recoup that investment sooner rather than later. Even money says gas never goes back below $3.00 per gallon, not for long anyway. We've already indicated we'll pay it; what's the incentive for them to lower the price?
But gas prices also impact the cost of doing business, which impacts wages. Now may be the time to cash in on your house, get another one in a cheaper state on a hill with a gate, send your kids to private schools, and maybe get a couple guns. Post-apocalyptic paranoia? No, not for a while anyway. Many of these forces are glacial; the "Long Emergency" Jim Kunstler prophesies could take a while to develop, if it ever truly does.
The problem is, if we don't start mending our ways, and preparing for foreseeable eventualities, and investing in our infrastructure, there will eventually be some sort of conflagration between the dwindling number of haves and the increasing number of have-nots.
And if W's execrable excuse for a mother is still around to see it, no doubt she'll have some sort of arrogant bullshit to throw at it. That's all people like her are ever good for.
Tremendous post. Well-written, well-thought-out, articulated neatly. Rational as well as sobering.
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