Blowback on the Bayou

12:30 AM Sep 03, 2005

Nicked from kos.

One wonders what to say about Katrina from a niche blog like this. The scale of the catastrophe beggars description; the dunderheaded relief effort scourges the conscience.

Yesterday morning, a good friend who happens to be a Republican said to me, quavering with emotion, that she was so furious with the Bush administration's indifferent response that she was considering voting Democratic in 2006.

The dissonance between the fictive shadowplay that makes do as our public discourse on the one hand, and the horrific reality on the other, has yielded burbling puddles of subterranean rage, threatening to shatter the crust utterly and reshape the landscape. This is what they call a "teachable moment." From global warming to racism to the Mesopotamian sinkhole which sapped men and money from the levees ... it's all teachable today.

But does it matter? Will the day's lessons, in fact, be learned?

The last teachable moment has become a ragged bloody warrant to license every depradation of empire. Perhaps the passion of the Gulf Coast can aspire merely to cancel its predecessor. Perhaps that is enough.

E.J. Dionne, a columnist distinguished by his genteel irrelevance, issued his riposte to the bathtub-drowners in today's Washington Post. Well, yes, "individual acts of charity and courage, though laudable and absolutely necessary, cannot be enough." This is grade-school stuff. It's no credit to a country to need these abc's pointed out in the face of some unnumbered thousands of dead and dying.

This is blowback, above all -- Osama bin Laden in the mask of a bow-tied editorialist, a sub-competent crony, a vacuous preacher. The cancerous ideologies cynically cossetted by plunderers and profiteers over a quarter-century have metastastized to menace their host. The hands on the levers aren't just using the Laffer curve to grift some boodle; they've actually started believing their own cover stories. Tens of millions of their subjects are so in the thrall of the prerogatives of capital that they clamor for summary executions of starving people who steal swamp-sodden Twinkies from a Walgreens: Twinkies that the store will write off and discard if it ever re-opens.

Worst of all, as America slides determinedly towards twilight, the carnage in Louisiana has done nothing to disabuse the prevailing hallucinations of perpetual noontide. While the poorest wither to death for want of the simplest necessities before the eyes of the world, repeal of the estate tax, a naked gift to the country's wealthiest, has just been scheduled for Congressional consideration next week. The debt-serfdom provisions of this year's bankruptcy bill -- which go into force Oct. 17 -- dangle like a guillotine over countless ruined residents and foreshadow the hairshirt policies that await the coming shocks to our credit-drunk economy.

What is there to say about Katrina that hasn't been said? What is there to say that will matter? There's so much to teach at this moment, in the face of such an energetic apparatus of ignorance. There's so much to mourn.

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