Archives for September 2005

These days I live in something of a cocoon here, doing my writing and dispatching my parenting duties, almost entirely disconnected from the currents of a pop culture that, once upon a time, it was my job to cover. So, for instance, Kanye West is someone I know little about; I’ve heard a bit of his music, but I’d hardly claim to be knowledgeable. I cannot offer critical insight into his actions tonight. But I can applaud his guts.

A few hours ago West got on live national TV during an NBC charity fundraiser for Katrina’s victims and “went off-script” — way off. In a heartfelt, disjointed ramble that went on for close to two minutes, he complained that aid for the poor was coming awfully slowly. He pointed out that a lot of the people who might have helped were busy fighting a war overseas. He said “They’ve given them permission to go down and shoot us.” Finally, he blurted out, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” (The clip can be found here.)

Mike Myers stood there next to him, stonefaced, after one futile effort to return to the teleprompter’s dialogue. Curiously, the show’s producers allowed West to keep up his off-script ranting until the very moment he mentioned the president’s name. Then it was CUT CUT CUT.

It wasn’t the most carefully composed or easy-to-parse tirade. Maybe some of the words were intemperate. (With what’s been happening in New Orleans, intemperance is surely a natural reaction.) But it was clearly from the heart.

John Darnielle, the Mountain Goats’ singer/songwriter who moonlights as the author of Last Plane to Jakarta, has posted about this and encouraged the dissemination of the image below. I am happy to join the movement.

As the week’s awful events rolled on and the media grew increasingly willing to ask angry questions and confront business-as-usual politicans (Tim Grieve and the War Room gang have kept up with it all), I started wondering, could it happen? Could the Bush administration’s five-year-long winning streak at the reality-subversion game finally be breaking?

If so, it’s fitting that the event that has cracked the spell is not a complex and difficult international crisis, the kind of issue that the president and his men have long used to “create their own reality” around. Nor is it a numbers game like Social Security reform or the inheritance tax, where the administration has gotten away for years with making stuff up. It is a straightforward domestic natural disaster, whose contours are clear to anyone with eyes.

There’s something about corpses in the gutters and starving refugees thronging the streets that brings us all back to the “reality-based community,” real quick.

The delays in the government response this week and the uncomfortable juxtaposition of Bush-on-holiday with the unfolding disaster carried loud echoes of 9/11. But in 2001 it took Bush only three days to respond to the trauma with a moment that appealed to Americans. There was a critical difference then, of course: a human enemy to unite against. “I can hear you!,” Bush shouted into the bullhorn at Ground Zero. “The rest of the world hears you! And the people — and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!”

But who will Bush rally us against this time around? There is no “evil one” to “smoke out.” Nature is not a terrorist. You can’t start a Global War on tropical storms.

You just have to dig in and try to help people, first — then remember to ask what went wrong, figure out who was responsible and plan to do a lot better next time around. The Bush administration seems to lack all interest in that second phase. “Learn from your mistakes” is simply not in their playbook. Still, it seems just possible, in Katrina’s wake, that enough Americans are angry enough to force the president to some kind of accounting.

As I’ve tried to process the cruel “The city is safe!” “No it isn’t!” procession of news streaming out of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, one of my initial reactions was, “Well, build a city under sea level, what do you expect?” Not charitable or humane, of course, but you can’t censor your own thoughts. It didn’t take more than a few seconds, though, to realize that the reaction wasn’t just mean-spirited but foolish: at the moment I had it, I was sitting in my house in the middle of a major earthquake zone. Floods and storms, quakes and fires — we do our best to cocoon ourselves from danger and feel safe, but one way or another, we’re all nature’s pawns.

Americans have always rebuilt in the wake of disaster: The city I live near and work in, San Francisco, has done so more than once. But plainly this is neither an easy nor a quick prospect in the case of Katrina. I’ve never been to New Orleans, though I’ve enjoyed its music enough — and spent enough time in the kitchen attempting to duplicate its recipes — that I always intended to go one day. I hope I’ll still have the chance. More importantly, for the people caught up in this tragedy, I hope for food and shelter, safety and strength. (You probably don’t need them again, but here are a couple of links with information about how you can help.)

And I hope (against hope) that our nation gets its priorities clearer and begins to reverse this decade’s trend of underinvesting in public services and infrastructure to support improvident tax cuts and a misguided, mismanaged war. We’ll come to our senses eventually, right?