A Pilgrim’s Digression

DailyKos and the Talking Points Memo Café both have good commentary on the New Orleans disaster. I’ve been catching up with these sites today, my day off. As usual with Liberal blogs, the commentary is often as insightful and well-written as the blog article itself.

I particularly like this article from DailyKos, The Common Good. The author asserts that “Katrina and its aftermath reminds us that although we Democrats believe our government is supposed to function for the Common Good, it has not—and we have not fought hard enough for this ideal.” He also quotes E. J. Dionne in the Washington Post:

It is a time when government is morally obligated to be competent, prepared, innovative, flexible, well-financed—in short, smart enough and, yes, big enough to undertake an enormous task. Not only personal lives but also public things must be put back together.

Where I would quibble with Dionne is when he asks how we find a way to share the burden of “the sacrifices that war and natural catastrophe have imposed on us.” Pardon me, but “war” cannot force anything on us. It is not an entity or a force of nature. The war of which he speaks had decidedly human architects, all of whom could have called the whole thing off at any time.

At TPMCafe, Ari Kelman writes an article called New Orleans: Not Going Anywhere, in which he asserts that New orleans will rebuild, and the apocalyptic rhetoric coming from the Mayor of New Orleans is bad for morale and way out of line. I think he’s wrong, and most of those commenting on the article think he’s wrong, too. To me, it has been refreshing to hear a few honest, heart-felt words from the mouth of a politician. God knows we haven’t heard anything like that from George Bush or Mary Landrieu or Michael Chertoff. The politician’s guide to “responding” to a catastrophe is to put on a casual, blue shirt, roll up their sleeves, and congratulate each other and the brave National Guard for a “magnificent” (quoting Chertoff) response.

I’ve really liked what I’ve heard from Mayor Ray Nagin. This is a man who is deep in a city that has been wiped out, reduced to anarchy, in which dead bodies lie unattended in the streets. To criticize him for “apocalyptic” and crude rhetoric seems to miss the point. He is in the middle of what anyone in his place would term, if not an apocalypse, an unimaginable disaster.

Finally, I do have a question which will make me sound like a Conservative: where is the response to this tragedy from the world? When the tsunami hit the Far East, the United States and the world at large responded almost instantly. I have not even seen a single world leader express condolences.