Reading notes

As usual, William Rivers Pitt writes with power:

“The trauma [New Orleans residents] are experiencing,” continued [professional psychologist Anne] Gervasi, “is so profound that we have no cultural term or machinery set up for it. The dead and nameless bodies by the thousands rotting in the water, arriving dead on the buses with them, or dying next to them in the shelters, are a huge festering wound that no one dares mention. This is a true Diaspora the likes of which we haven’t seen since Reconstruction. …” …

The extent of this disaster has not yet sunk in. Even those among us who want to understand, to face, to know, veer away at the last second because this horror movie come to life “is so profound we have no cultural term for it.” Our society fears and denies and covers up death instinctively anyway, spritzing it with perfume. There is no perfume and no denial strong enough to cover this mountain of the dead.

Aside: Those who give of themselves attending the dead in St. Gabriel and elsewhere, handling bodies, identifying them, honoring as best you can each person now departed: I am in awe of your skills and dedication. I admire you. I salute you.

Back to William:

Mortui Vivis Praecipant. What have the dead taught the living in the last two weeks? We have learned that priorities matter. We have learned that the conservative small-government model is a recipe for catastrophe. We have learned that government is sure to absolutely fail its citizens when it is run by people who hate government. We have learned that massive budget cuts and agency downsizing are not theoretical or political exercises. Before Katrina, we were learning that an irresponsible and unnecessary war in Iraq was making us less safe at home. After Katrina, we have learned exactly how unsafe we are as four years of tough talk about defending the nation has been exposed by the wind and the rain. We have learned that leadership matters, and that the absence of leadership is deadly.

As occurred to me back in July while reading Boy president in a failed world?, “The lights are on in the cockpit … but the crew is stoned.” We’re on autopilot. And it’s broken.

We have been hearing from Bush and his friends that now is not a time for the “Blame Game,” as if an assessment of responsibility is nothing more than another political football to be punted down the field. A New York Times editorial from Wednesday stated, “This is not a game. It is critical to know what ‘things went wrong,’ as Mr. Bush put it. But we also need to know which officials failed — not to humiliate them, but to replace them with competent people … disasters like this are not a city or a state issue. They concern the entire nation and demand a national response — certainly a better one than the White House comments that ‘tremendous progress’ had been made in Louisiana.” …

I think the Republican spinners don’t really comprehend what accountability means. They seem to like the idea of “order,” but the reality is that without accountability — establishing who is answerable to whom for what, and following through on that responsibility as accepted — then there can be no order.

Establishing accountability and analyzing performance needn’t be personal, and usually isn’t. It’s about stopping in its tracks a potentially endless progression of failures by decisively stripping away incompetence in favor of competence, decisively stripping away what isn’t working and replacing it with an alternative that can.