Short Stories, Long Odds

Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.
- W. H. Auden

It is difficult, at times, to continue to save the world in small and contemporary ways. My Democrat job, the ending of which is its own story, was a source of stress because I put upon myself the usual growth of scope that accompanies all of my activities. I demand that I be the best, and if I am not the best, I agonize over it. I don’t know where that came from. Everything I do, I see myself as doing it on as large a scale as possible, and I am constantly working as if I am on some sort of world wide stage.

It is a pattern in my life, wherein I throw myself fully into some endeavor until it goes wrong, or I get disenchanted with it, or I find out the truth of a thing, and then I immediately become disaffected. Its okay for me to admit this - I’m a grown-ass man, and I can be honest with myself about my penchant for self-aggrandizement.

So it was no surprise to me that I took my Democrat job very seriously, and felt as if everytime I went into work, I was saving Democracy in some small way. My friends in Deutsch class had an unrelated joke - they would ask me how Democracy was doing everytime I came into class. The usual answer was “terrible”.

For a long time, through this medium and through my conversations, scholarly work, and arguments, I have been preaching that the direction our country has been steered in since the terrorist attacks on 9/11 is not only wrong-headed but potentially disastrous. I have commented on foreign policy, geopolitical analysis, the state of rights and our need to protect the Constitution, and the inherent dangerr represented by the Bush administration, single-party rule portrayed as unified governnment, and the rise of the faux-martyrs in American Christianity. I have stated that the Iraq war had nothing to do with the War on Terror, that it would be disastrous, that it would cost way more than we were told, that WMD’s would never be found because they didn’t exist, and that it would in effect destablize the Middle East. I have said we were definitely going to attack Syria, and that we may end up running offensives against Iraq.

I have said, on several occasions, that despite all the money we’ve dumped into Homeland Security, we are in no way prepared for a terrorist attack or its aftermath. I did NOT, however, say or anticipate in any way that we would be so roundly unprepared to deal with a situation like Hurricane Katrina. I never anticipated that we would be preparing to spray pesticides over a city already drenched in toxicity, that Americans would be pointing guns at Americans needing help, that a rescue and logistics matter would be botched so badly that so many people would die horrible, drawn-out deaths for no better reason than a lack of listening skills or caring on the part of our leaders.

4 years to the day after 9/11 and what has happened? Where are we now? What have we achieved with all of our hard work? Our media has finally started to ask the important questions, the hard questions - Ted Koppel and Anderson Cooper are some current heroes who apparently lost their tolerance for bullshit some months ago - but no one seems to be asking what should be the 2 most important questions:

1) Saying that most of the people that died in Katrina’s aftermath were killed by governmental impotency is not correct - a lack of ability or resources is forgivable; what happened in New Orleans is an example of gross negligence and mismanagement, on about as many fronts as you can imagine. Who is going to be held accountable, ultimately? Where does the buck stop? Certainly we have played the blame game some what, but no one is asking who will end up at the end of the chain when the time comes, if it ever does. I believe it has to, because we have witnessed what amounts to murder. Anyone who says anything different is an apologist.

2) What if this had been a nuke? Or a bio-weapon attack? If this doesn’t show the American public that we are in no way safer than we were four years and one day ago, what will?