That debbil GOP

Scratchings linked to our post about Lieberman the other day. I was interested to read one of his commentators accuse me of being a Republican.

I have been accused of many things, but this is a new one for me. Yet, in one way, it is a very just accusation. Lately, from my point of view (that of an extinct beast, much like the mastodon), I have been trying to sort out the relationship between the sense that this decade has seen the great American failure and the sense that the two party system here is broken. That sorting out begins with the premise that the parties are secondary to the real political life of the Republic. This premise is a hypothesis – I’m not going to defend it as the ultimate truth of the matter, but I think there’s a strong case to be made for constructing an analysis from it.

That analysis would trespass on the current verities of political analysis on my side, the liberal side. Given my premise, the question I want to put is: why did liberalism become so attached to one of the parties? I think there are good reasons for thinking that that attachment was devoutly wished by academic political scientists in the fifties and sixties, who felt that American political parties weren’t following the more rational European pattern – a pattern that sorted out the conservatives into a Conservative party, the Socialists into a Socialist party, etc. Rather, the American pattern was rather a jigsaw puzzle, in which populists would pop up as Republicans and segregationists would pop up as Democrats, etc. The rationalization of politics, according to the school prevailing in the fifties and sixties, would create parties as monopolists of ideologies.

This idea so sank into the framework of official political discourse that it is now presupposed. So when, for instance, a “radical” analysis of politics appears – for instance, Thomas Franks “what’s the matter with Kansas” – the problem goes something like: why don’t Kansans vote for their economic self interest, i.e. Democrats?

Myself, I think the process of this rationalization has been a disaster. The real question, to me, is: why have Kansas Republicans deviated from the old Progressive Republican norm? I think the answer is: the monopolization of ideologies by the parties has destroyed the machinery that made progressive politics possible in this country.

Take, for instance, Texas, where I live at the moment. The next Senatorial election here is going to be utterly predictable. The Republican candidate will be a rightwinger from hell. The liberal element in the state will concentrate exclusively on finding a Democrat of acceptable views to lose to him or her. The liberal element will devote an incredible amount of creativity and passion in a project that, intellectually, they know is doomed to failure. The Democrat they pick will, in the campaign, veer farther to the right than any New York State Republican. And that will be that.

Lefties will proceed to bitch and moan about the rightwing Dem, and propose that we all rush into the Green party. The right, which will have no competition whatsoever within the Republican party, will use its leverage to make its reactionary candidate even more reactionary – while at the same time guaranteeing that the freerider politics of borrowing and siphoning money disproportionately from the Federal government to Red states continues. This money will, in truth, be less than the money siphoned from the primary products extracted in the Red states which profit the investors living in New York City and the surrounding wealthy states.

Now, a fair question for a liberal to ask is: what is the weak link in this chain? To me, the obvious answer is: continuing to support the Democratic party unilaterally. By refusing to contact the Republican party, liberalism loses any of the leverage it used to have. Period. Instead of searching for Republican Yarboroughs, the liberal element will continue to stick with promoting losers at the statewide level. Instead of seeing that the Republican base is avid to exploit the government, as rational economic agents, the liberals will continue to affirm that the Republicans stand for small government – under the cover of which delusion Republicans will continue to maintain an expanded government. The reality is that this is a non-issue – in the Keynesian world system, the GDP taken up by a modern industrial state will probably range about the same percentage, regardless of the party in power. The last thirty years should have taught us that much, at least.

I had an Edward till a Michael Brown killed him

Tell o'er your woes again by viewing mine:
I had an Edward, till a Richard kill'd him;
I had a Harry, till a Richard kill'd him:
Thou hadst an Edward, till a Richard kill'd him;
Thou hadst a Richard, till a Richard killed him;
-- Richard III

In a previous post, the Counted and the Uncounted, LI wrote:

"One expects that the clearance of the Convention Center, since it is administered by thieves and murderers, will probably encompass hiding a number of corpses. This is evidence, after all, and you want to burn or bury evidence. So LI hopes that all those who knew the victims – the parents, or children, or friends – will not give up when the victims turn up in the “missing” list – will point the finger and make as much noise as possible."

This morning, in the LA Times, we read this:

"FEMA Wants No Photos of Dead
From Reuters

NEW ORLEANS — The U.S. agency leading Hurricane Katrina rescue efforts said Tuesday that it does not want the news media to photograph the dead as they are recovered.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, heavily criticized for its slow response to the devastation caused by the hurricane, rejected journalists' requests to accompany rescue boats searching for storm victims."

We saw them crushed in life, jeered at as they struggled to survive, and burned furtively by the criminals that rule in D.C. We can only offer a voodoo hope that the murdered of New Orleans will be revenged in one way or another.

tales from FEMA

I don’t know if I’ve told this story in some post. But here goes…

I once worked, temporarily, for FEMA. I was in Santa Fe, trying to write a novel. I needed a job, so I went to a temp agency and was sent out on various jobs.

The instructions I’d get from the temp agency sometimes merely consisted of an address. One morning I set out for one of those addresses. The previous night I’d been at a party, and indulged in a little doobie. I still felt a bit of the pleasant bloodborne vertiginousness of the joint in my system as I found myself driving into the parking lot of what looked like a police station. Vertigo turned immediately into paranoia. I went into a building that seemed occupied by cops, and went down several flights of stairs until I found the office I was to report to.

It was FEMA.

The place was crawling with ex military. My boss was recently retired from a fat gig with NORAD, about which he liked to reminisce at lunch time with the other ex Norad boys – the times they would commandeer planes and go to Labrador on fishing expeditions, or parties to which they would fly in girls, etc. It sounded like the defense of our nuclear capability was a lot of fun if you were in the right circles. That first day, however, when I was briefed as to what they wanted me to do, I had this feeling that I must have smoked more than pot the night before. This was their plan: they wanted me to transcribe into a computer a typed up list of places in New Mexico that had, check one, toilet facilities, check two, kitchen facilities, three sleeping facilities. This list was supposed to be pulled out in case of nuclear attack. My boss even, helpfully, pulled out a diagram illustrating nuclear attack on a city, with circles of the various degrees of salvation radiating out from the dead center.

I should point out that this was 1993. I should point out that my boss wanted this work done because they had the funding to do the work, even though, as he acknowledged, it might not be the most useful work. I should point out that the list I was using was last updated in 1970.

So for the next two weeks I became an expert on where New Mexicans could take a dump in 1970.

…
In my last post, I was trying to analyze the culture of busyness that, I believe, intersects with the macro ineffectuality which plagues all plans floated in the Bush culture. The emphasis here is that busyness can operate even better as the content of busyness – the acts of busyness – tend towards zero. At zero, there can be complete speed and control. The ur-Bushites – Bremer and Brown – were peculiarly talented in pushing busyness towards the zero. My little FEMA job (under Good King Clinton, it should be added) was no more nor less busy than other jobs I have had, but it is distinguished by its outstanding uselessness. It had one justification – it was funded.

Those who would say, hey, that is the government. Private enterprise can’t afford such luxuries should study the exemplary career of the CFO of Enron. Profit is not a sign of content, as any hedge fund trader could tell you.

...
Eventually, I was displaced from my office at FEMA by the Governor of New Mexico, as a real moral panic arose in the state. There was an outbreak of a hantavirus carried by field mice that seemed especially potent, and the Governor commandeered an office in FEMA to make it seem like he was in charge.

pissing while

“Many people use their social activities to mark time rather than the other way around. In parts of Madagascar, questions about how long something takes might receive an answer like "the time of a rice cooking" (about half an hour) or "the frying of a locust" (a quick moment). Similarly, natives of the Cross River in Nigeria have been quoted as saying "the man died in less than the time in which maize is not yet completely roasted" (less than fifteen minutes). Closer to home, not too many years ago the New English Dictionary included a listing for the term "pissing while"—not a particularly exact measurement, perhaps, but one with a certain cross-cultural translatability.” – Robert Levine.


It is no news that the President was not born the twin of industriousness. But blaming Bush’s indolence doesn’t really get us too far in understanding the culture that allowed New Orleans to drown, and the cornered class to either fight or starve; nor does it explain the spectacle of seeing the governing class and its thugs in the press jeering at drowning wheelchair victims for “not getting out when they were told” while waiting for their “welfare checks” (which is apparently what a social security payment has become).

That culture – the Bush culture – precedes, of course, its namesake. But Bush, a garbage fly in human form, is as wonderfully implicative of the American governing class as the garbage fly is of a garbage can: if one is buzzing around a can, you can guess there is rotting meat in it. Similarly, the buzzing of the President’s men tells us a lot about the decaying assumptions that are embedded, over the last thirty years, in those circles that have money and power.

How to approach the thing we have all seen, and still can’t comprehend?

Here’s one small approach. The latest issue of Social Research is devoted to busyness. This is one aspect of that culture which we saw, in appalling living color, last week, fail at every juncture. An understanding of busyness is essential to understanding how “Brownie” did an outstanding job last week in helping to kill ten people in the Civic Center, one hundred in Chalmette, and so on.

We think that you should start with Robert Levine’s article, “A Geography of Busyness.” Levine, who teaches at California State University, Fresno, has been studying cultural differences in the perception of time – and his researchers have gone so far as to clock the speed of your average walker in cities in Brazil, Germany, the U.S., etc., to understand the use of time, under the sign of busyness, in two respects:

“I propose that the subjective experience of feeling busy has two main components: speed and activity.

Speed refers to the rate at which an activity is performed. It is the amount of activity per unit of time. The speed may be measured over brief and immediate periods of time, as when one experiences rapidly oncoming traffic or an upcoming deadline; or over longer, more sustained intervals, such as when we speak of the accelerating tempo of modem life.

The second component of busyness, activity, is the absence of unscheduled time. It is the amount of time that is consumed with activity; or, the ratio of doing things to doing nothing.”

Levine hypothesized that walking would be faster in European countries than in Brazil and the middle range of developing countries, and faster still in the U.S. He found that “pedestrians in Rio de Janeiro walk only two-thirds as fast as do pedestrians in Zurich, Switzerland,” for instance. This was important, insofar as walking is emblematic of speed as a measure of busyness. It is also exemplary of one variety of the emptiness entailed by busyness. The value of that walk is purely in its being completed with speed from the perspective of busyness. It is, in a sense, clipped out of life. It is dead time.

In another sense, nothing can be clipped out of life, which is made up of all of its parts. Of course.

Now, LI’s feeling is that the men around Bush are busy men. The Homeland Security Secretary, the director of FEMA, they are of that quality that no one could deny them busyness. It is also our feeling that their busyness is at the root of their incompetence. And that they reflect a kind of incompetence-in-busyness endemic to the managerial class.

Levine makes an interesting observation, contrasting event time with scheduled time:

“Keeping time by natural events has become increasingly less useful, or even impossible, in most contemporary urban cultures. There is, however, a variation on this type of timekeeping, what we might call "event time," that continues to be dominant in much of the world. In clock-time cultures, the hour on the timepiece governs the beginning and ending of activities. When event time predominates, scheduling is determined by activities. Events begin and end when, by mutual
consensus, participants "feel" the time is right. The distinction between clock and event time deeply divides cultures. Sociologist Robert Lauer (1981) conducted an intensive review ofthe literature concerning the meaning of time throughout history. The most fundamental difference,
he found, has been between people operating by the clock versus those who measure time by social events.”

In a previous post, we noted the interesting coincidence of two functions that give us the two faces of the “then:” the logical then, which moves from a possible condition to an entailment; and the narrative then, which sequences events. Busyness complicates this relationship, and might explain why planning has become a lost art, in the Bush culture. We will expand on this in a later post. Meanwhile, we recommend the issue of Social Research, if you can get ahold of it.

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Another account

Read this account of the escape from New Orleans, and the escape from the government’s idea of a refugee center (hint: they seem to have gotten their plans for it from Buchenwald)for the escapees from New Orleans, by Michael Homan. Let’s not let these histories go down the drain. Even if nothing changes, even if the monsters still rule us and the thugs in the press still ritually praise them and the whole mill grinds inevitably forward, making bonemeal of our bones, we can still preserve a record of how things really were in the U.S.A., circa 2005:


Here’s an excerpt:

“But then in the end I left. I learned that my father-in-law was flying to Jackson Saturday, and Friday those guys in the airboat showed up. I was very worried because I had heard that they were not letting people evacuate with their animals. But these guys said that had changed, and so I put my computer and a few papers in my backpack, loaded the dogs, let the birds go, and put Oot the sugar glider with food and water in Kalypso's room to await my return, much like Napoleon leaving for Elba I suppose. We drove in the boat all over the city looking for people. It was so surreal with the helicopters and all the boats up and down Canal Street amidst all the devastation. Towards dusk on Friday I arrived at I-10 and Banks Street, not far from my house. There they packed all of us pet owners from Mid City into a cargo truck and drove us away. They promised they would take us to Baton Rouge, and from there it would be relatively easy for me to get a cab or bus and meet the family in Jackson.

But then everything went to hell. They instead locked up the truck and drove us to the refugee camp on I-10 and Causeway and dropped us off. Many refused to get out of the van but they were forced. The van drove away as quickly as it could, as the drivers appeared to be terrified, and we were suddenly in the middle of 20,000 people. I would estimate that 98% of them were African Americans and the most impoverished people in the state. It was like something out of a Kafka novel. Nobody knew how to get out. People said they had been there 5 days, and that on that day only 3 buses had shown up. I saw murdered bodies, and elderly people who had died because they had been left in the sun with no water for such a long time. I’ve traveled quite a bit, and I have never seen the despair and tragedy that I saw at this refugee camp. It was the saddest think I have ever seen in my life. I am still so upset that there were not hundreds of buses immediately sent to get these people to shelters.”

Also, see this report from a Green Party member, Malik Rahim, who has remained in Algiers. The whole report is interesting, since it emphasizes one thing that should be made obvious:
1. the state not only abandoned New Orleans, but expended a lot of energy trying to keep a self-organizing population from rescuing each other, even as they allowed gangbangers and vigilantes to run wild.

"My son and his family -- his wife and kids, ages
1, 5 and 8 -- were flooded out of their home when
the levee broke. They had to swim out until they
found an abandoned building with two rooms above
water level.

There were 21 people in those two rooms for a day
and a half. A guy in a boat who just said "I'm
going to help regardless" rescued them and took
them to Highway I-10 and dropped them there.

They sat on the freeway for about three hours,
because someone said they'd be rescued and taken
to the Superdome. Finally they just started
walking, had to walk six and a half miles.

When they got to the Superdome, my son wasn't
allowed in -- I don't know why -- so his wife and
kids wouldn't go in. They kept walking, and they
happened to run across a guy with a tow truck
that they knew, and he gave them his own personal
truck.

When they got here, they had no gas, so I had to
punch a hole in my gas tank to give them some
gas, and now I'm trapped. I'm getting around by
bicycle.

People from Placquemine Parish were rescued on a
ferry and dropped off on a dock near here. All
day they were sitting on the dock in the hot sun
with no food, no water. Many were in a daze;
they've lost everything."

no comment

“I am glad the President has nominated someone already familiar with FEMA's mission to become Deputy Director. Mr. Brown is currently General Counsel and Chief Operating Officer of the agency, a position he has held since February of 2001. Before joining the Bush Administration, I note from his resume, he served as executive director of the Independent Electrical Contractors in Denver. In the early 1980s, Mr. Brown served as staff director of the Oklahoma Senate's Finance Committee, while serving on the Edmund, Oklahoma, City Council.

He ran for Congress in the sixth district, and, in what I think is
particularly useful experience, early in his career, was assistant city manager in Edmond, with responsibility for police, fire and emergency services.”

-- Senator Joe Lieberman (D), HEARING before the COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS UNITED STATES SENATE,ONE HUNDRED SEVENTH CONGRESS ON THE NOMINATION OF MICHAEL D. BROWN TO BE DEPUTY DIRECTOR OF THE FEDERAL EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT AGENCY

Via The Left Coaster.

Population of Edmond, Oklahoma: (year 2000): 68,315.