Recognition turning point?
Kudos to Maureen Dowd for giving us the background on the “background” of Bush’s speech in New Orleans. It did look like he might have been speaking at Disneyland, in more ways than one.
In a ruined city – still largely without power, stinking with piles of garbage and still 40 percent submerged; where people are foraging in the miasma and muck for food, corpses and the sentimental detritus of their lives; and where unbearably sad stories continue to spill out about hordes of evacuees who lost their homes and patients who died in hospitals without either electricity or rescuers – isn’t it rather tasteless, not to mention a waste of energy, to haul in White House generators just to give the president a burnished skin tone and a prettified background?
I found myself wondering whether they were really going to lug all those generators back out again, leaving the church square in darkness again. What do they do with the military camouflage netting that so nicely framed the church and hid the reality? The metaphorical possibilities there make my teeth ache.
But perhaps there’s room for hope – I sense a change in the air. People want competence. We’re can-do people, us Americans. I really think there is a limit to how much we can be stolen from and exploited. There is much to do that would benefit all of us, all the people.
According to Rasmussan Reports, here’s what happened after the President’s speech.
Thirty-five percent (35%) of Americans now say that President Bush has done a good or excellent job responding to Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. That’s down from 39% before his speech from New Orleans.
The latest Rasmussen Reports survey shows that 41% give the President poor marks for handling the crisis, that’s up from 37% before the speech. (my emphasis)
At this point, is it really wise to put Rove in charge (especially since he might need to focus – at some point – on the Plame investigation…)? Is it really wise to deny an independent investigation of what happened up and down government with Katrina? Is it really wise to give the very first (and again, no-bid) contract to Halliburton or to waive the labor wages laws for federal contracts? All these things are standard, and we’ll also see attempts to spin the Katrina disaster to the administration’s benefit and to implement pet ideological projects. However, the modus operandi is getting too much pattern recognition to continue to work very effectively anymore.
While we have the chance (if it’s not already too late) we need to focus on cleaning up the voting apparatus, and reclaiming it for the American people.
We need to demand access to the programs used in the electronic voting machines. Let a small independent team of security-cleared programmers examine it. The keystrokes needed to tip the count would be visible in the uncompiled source code, according to Clint Curtis, the guy who wrote a program to do it.
Oh, and note to America – people in charge of verifying vote counts and totals cannot be involved in the campaigns of anyone running for office. Get it?
To me, the Dowd paragraph that you quoted doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
At the time of Bush’s speech in New Orleans, the order was for mandatory evacuations; everyone with a bullhorn, a boat, and a tiny bit of authority was trolling the streets, calling for people to get out (and helping them do so). Anyone foraging in the muck for food must have been doing so by conscious choice, not because the President set up some lights for his speech and they couldn’t do otherwise. It’s not a zero-sum game, where if the President gives a speech in one place, another place goes without electricity.
Again, we run into the problem where Bush is damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t. On one hand, he’s accused of showing poor leadership by not visiting the disaster area soon enough. On the other hand, when he does show up at the disaster area, he’s accused of tastelessness for setting up lights so that the cameras can see him. Using video cameras is part of what I do for a living, and they need plenty of light in order to work properly.
The people who drowned and died in hospitals also had nothing to do with the set-up for the speech. I honestly don’t understand the connection.
“What do they do with the military camouflage netting that so nicely framed the church and hid the reality?”
At what point have we been spared the reality of Katrina’s aftermath? When Anderson Cooper and Shep Smith were wading through the floating detritus, pointing cameras at dead bodies 24/7, didn’t we get enough of the reality? While we all like to actually understand what’s going on (aka getting the Truth), at times it’s not a bad idea to show something less horrific to take the edge off and give the impression that the entirety of the situation isn’t Death, Death, Death. The church provided the kind of context Bush wanted for his message: there’s hope, we can rebuild, we can use that can-do attitude to make things better than they were. I’m not saying that he did a great job of making the speech, but he did better than he might’ve were the background a camouflaged church swathed in darkness under six feet of sewer water. I can’t imagine a politician that would have staged it differently (except perhaps for Dennis Kucinich, who would have set up lights through a granola-powered hamster wheel run by volunteers. Kidding, kidding!)
As for what happened to the generators after the speech, I hope that they were soon put to good use elsewhere.
I’m not informed enough to comment on voting machines, other than saying that if we can’t trust paper ballots (hanging/dimpled chads) and we can’t trust electronic voting machines (possibility of partisan hijacking), then I have no idea how we can get the vote out now, or how we managed to vote for so long.
George W. Bush is a failure as president. He needs to resign and put us out of his misery.
The voting machine problems are severe. At the very least, we should get a paper receipt that we can examine and then put into a box for later recounting if necessary – there’s no problem for ATMs to do that, right? Almost all of the voting problems and statistical anomalies were in districts that were using the machines – and then there was no way to check the results. Personally, I feel that if we can’t examine the receipt on paper, I don’t trust the results – and I also feel that in places that use paper, they should also have to examine carefully that each chad is actually punched out.
The thing that got me in Dowd’s article – and you’d have to read the whole thing to get the context – is that there was an element of the magical castle there. I personally don’t have a big problem with lighting, although that time he lit up the whole Statue of Liberty was a touch overboard in that context. What bothers me more is that I’m pretty certain they’d drag the generators back out again, like the dismantling of the photo op before. And the use of military netting – well, I’m sorry, but that was way over the top.
As for the message of hope, my personal hopeful associations with New Orleans don’t center around the church square. Perhaps a jazz theme might have done it better in this case. He would have been better, if he were going to go with the religion theme, to show a “house of God” shining bright as a marker of the landscape – better to put it in context rather than shrouding the surroundings in (military???) denial.
He recited his solutions as though he were learning them for the first time. Again – he’s just not a leader. I agree with the court jester Lewis Black in that I feel it’s their job to manipulate me better. I’m insulted that it takes so little for us to throw away the things that make us who we are. If we’re going to have puppets, can’t they at least get someone who can realistically act like a President? Martin Sheen, someone like that?
Unfortunately, the whole thing just seemed as fake as his “can-do” attitude. He and his cronies are not competent to represent American citizens and foundational values.
competent
1. Properly or sufficiently qualified; capable.
2. Capable of performing an allotted or required function.
3. Legally qualified or fit to perform an act.
4. Able to distinguish right from wrong and to manage one’s affairs.
incompetent
1. Not qualified in legal terms: a defendant who was incompetent to stand trial.
2. Inadequate for or unsuited to a particular purpose or application.
3. Incapable of proper functioning.
4. Devoid of those qualities requisite for effective conduct or action.
New Orleans, for me, shows exactly what happens in a welfare state for the benefit of the few – those aims are all that matter and anything else is simple manipulation to achieve those priorites. When a real American government is needed, well – it’s just not really there. Bush is responding only to the political fallout and nothing else. I’m beginning to feel that he may actually me more than simply a dry drunk – he may be a sociopath (a personality disorder characterised by a continuous and persistent pattern of aggressive behaviour in which the rights of others are violated).
But you’re right that his using electricity there didn’t take it away from anyone else. It may take me a while to find the people that died for lack of transportation while air traffic was grounded for his last photo op, but I won’t stop looking. It’s very possible that people are hestitant to make that connection right now. Even if I can’t show that for sure, I believe the principle still holds. Frankly, that level of personal security was just simply less important than the welfare of those Americans.
Court jesters and poets (those two groups of people who best tell the grain of truth with the right exaggerations) always get respect and recognition from me. Granola-powered hamster wheel – heh heh. Very condensed caricature – many points on that (grin).
Every politician is going to use the images and context he thinks are going to best convey his message, whether it’s a church for President Bush or a “reporting for duty” salute by Senator Kerry. I’m not going to fault an individual for using a system that’s been in place for decades, if not since the beginning of politics. Not for nothing, but if you wanted a jazz band, you weren’t going to get it from any President, I don’t think. And, to be perfectly honest, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that I didn’t even know that the building was a church until it was pointed out. I just thought, “Hey, look, that one’s still standing. That’s nice.” Go figure. Call me stupid.
We’ve talked before about differing ideas of leadership, and what a President should look like. We’re all going to have at least slightly different ideas of how a leader should act and convey himself. I’m kidding around a little, but would President Martin Sheen/Bartlet be up there in New Orleans, shouting Latin imprecations at the church while a jazz bland plays Louis Armstrong in the background? I hope not. That’s not what I want in a leader.
For my part, I have yet to find a single politician that competently represents MY core values, and I was born and raised in the U.S. This includes Bush, Kerry and Bartlet (so to speak). I would like to think, however, that the millions of people who did vote for the man that they thought came closest to representing foundational American values don’t share Bush’s apparent sociopathic tendencies. Otherwise, that’s a lot of whackos out there.
Unless the entirety of investigative journalism has been completely subverted toward supporting the President (and I mean ALL of the journalists, from the Village Voice to the New York Times), I don’t think you’re going to run into a media blackout regarding Bush’s security detail inadvertently causing more deaths in LA. If you don’t find the news, it probably just means that it’s just not there. Doesn’t mean that you should stop looking, though. I’m also willing to bet that Bush’s Secret Service detail isn’t significantly larger, on average, than other Presidents’ details.