Reading notes

Sebastian sums up a list of red-flag warnings about our present U.S. state of preparedness for Big Events:

Most seriously of all, Katrina exposed the government’s incapacity to prepare for emergencies. The failure of response to a predicted flood in New Orleans is only the tip of the iceberg. Name just about any potential disaster, from a bioterrorism attack to avian flu, from an interruption in the flow of Saudi oil to a crash in the dollar. Are the feds prepared? Of course not. They are not even preparing for problems that are 100 percent assured, such as the coming baby bust.

I’ve been thinking lately that all of us welcome — and usually insist on — competence from every professional service provider we pay for and interact with, whether it’s barber or accountant or airplane pilot or heart surgeon.

I don’t willingly put my head under the shears of an incompetent barber any more than I bare my chest to an incompetent heart surgeon. I expect a barber to have spent a long time learning his craft, and a heart surgeon to have spent years perfecting hers.

So why the hell should I tolerate incompetence from my government leaders?

By incompetence I mean services provided by people unqualified for, and untrained in, the areas of expertise for which I’m consulting them. What’s been visible to some all along in the Bush administration’s commitment to cronyism, and what Katrina has now revealed to many more, is that we’re not talking about insufficiently qualified people here; we’re talking people in positions of authority who have no freakin’ clue what they’re doing.

It ought to be an affront to nearly everyone who’s spent years of their lives becoming really good at something — whether blue-collar, white-collar, or no-collar — to have knowledge/training/experience/skill completely dissed like this.

A few hours later: I acclaim the substantial numbers of qualified, committed, and highly clueful people I know are out there, people who get no press but deliver beneficial results day after day. It’s really easy to let highly visible incompetence eclipse a scattered army of hell-and-high-water heroes.

But demoralized competence falls far short of what’s possible. And half-assed leadership that neither knows nor cares about delivering quality results is a demoralizing force par excellence. I notice that Jane Bullock, “a 22-year veteran of FEMA, and former chief of staff to [former FEMA director] James Lee Witt,” says that “even before Hurricane Katrina, employee morale at the agency was at an all-time low.”