Some Good News

Lately, it seems like there is little reason to feel positive about the world. War, flood, famine, and death, all around.

But take heart. Australia's birth rate is on the rise. More Australians in the world is a good thing.

We Must Pretend

Even when a big hurricane blows through, it’s hard to leave your house. We hadn’t really thought about that until today, but of course it’s true: if there were a big hurricane headed for our house, we would be reluctant to leave, too. We’re just like all those people on the news who are going to stay in Port Arthur or Galveston and ride the thing out despite the warnings and cajolings of frustrated governments and neighbors. (Governor Blanco of Louisiana today said, tersely, of people who refuse to evacuate: “Perhaps they should write their social security numbers on their arms with indelible ink.”)

Some people don’t evacuate because they simply can’t; they’ve got no way to get out, and nowhere to go, and no way to pay for a hotel or a rental car or a bus ticket.

But it is apparent to us from listening to people on the news that lots of people are just not that keen on vacating their houses, under any circumstances. We have just listened to an exasperated liquor store employee tell a newscaster that of course she can’t evacuate right now; she’s got work. And when she gets off work, she doesn’t want to sit in a car for hours on end in bumper-to-bumper traffic, thank you very much. She wants to go home, to her place, and kick back.

This woman is not rational.

We understand where she’s coming from completely.

Your house is supposed to be your refuge. You are supposed to be safe there like you are safe nowhere else. Usually, you can count on that safety.

But when a natural disaster comes along, the limit of that safety is exposed.

That’s too much for most of us to bear. It would take a lot of cajoling and news reporting and peer pressure to get us out of the house at the end of a work day, we can tell you that right now. It wouldn’t even be that easy on a weekend.

Why? Well, if you can’t count on your house and your job and your stuff in your house and your stuff at your job, what can you count on? That’s your life, man. That and your friends and family. That can get blown away by a hurricane? Man, don’t tell me that. Don’t remind me how weak and helpless and insignificant I am before the universe.

We’re all saying: “Just let me be, man. Let me huddle together with those I love and pretend that I’m safe. I know I’m not. But let me pretend a little.”

There’s no wisdom or truth in this pretense. But it’s part of who we are.

A Milestone

This is our 100th post here at the Blasphemy Blog. Looking back on our output, we are astonished that we actually had that much to say. Who knew? Not us.

Is there an overall theme to our discourse here, or are we simply saying whatever comes to mind? You be the judge. Here is a brief sample of the points we have made in our first 100 posts:

Tyring to pie your way to peace, love, and understanding is just a waste of delicious pie.

A little revolution may be a good thing, but it's hard to have only a little revolution.

It's sort of human nature not to like poor people, but it's also really wrong, and we should resist the temptation.

There is a God, but we don't get Him.

We love America, but we don't get it.

Most ninjas are Japanese, but some ninjas are Chinese.

Molly Ivins is awesome.

Australia is awesome.

Nanotechnology is awesome, but also scary.

Torture? Not so awesome.

It was worth it to try not to say mean things about the President, but then he made us angry and now we do it all the time.

War is an uncontrollable engine of death, the ultimate rejection of our own humanity and the humanity of those we fight. It is to be avoided at all costs, denounced at every turn, and conscientiously abstained from by all people of principle. We're not saying you're evil if you clock the guy who beats up your sister; we're not saying you should let someone get up in your face. We're saying: if you find yourself in a position to shoot someone because a sergeant, commander-in-chief, government, or country music singer told you to do it, you should not do it. It's wrong.

Basketball? Very awesome.

There. Imagine what we'll have to say in the next 100.

Wait...Can They Do That?

Yesterday, like many Americans, we at the Blasphemy Blog were listening to the unexciting Roberts confirmation hearings. Judge Roberts is a skilled lawyer, which means he is good at sounding reasonable, but not interesting.

Anyway, at one point, Judge Roberts stated categorically, in response to a question from Senator Schumer of New York, that Brown v. Board of Education is settled law, that segregated schools are inherently unequal, and therefore unconstitutional. Good. Something we can all agree on, even in these troubled times.

Or so we thought.

It turns out that local governments in places like Utah and Texas are segregating children evacuated from New Orleans into separate classrooms, often at military bases or shelters. The President, who has apparently not consulted his nominee to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, is supporting this.

The local officials in Utah and Texas are saying that they want to avoid "disrupting" the schoolgoing experience of both the evacuees and the local students.

We at the Blasphemy Blog will give ten dollars to the first person who emails us with an example of some politician from the 1950s saying that allowing black students into white schools would be "disruptive."

Well, we're sure that, at the very least, these separate teaching facilities have resources equal to those of the local schools. Yes, they may be separate, but they're still equal. Separate, but equal...hmmm...

Throw It

Lots of people want to talk about fixing poverty these days, because the hurricane caused a lot of poor people serious harm. We'd all like to stop that sort of thing from happening again; we'd like to live in a country where everyone can get out of the way of a natural disaster.

But mature voices caution us: don't throw money at the problem. We tried that with the Great Society in the 60s and 70s, and it failed, didn't it?

Nope.

It turns out that Great Society programs were terrific when it came to alleviating poverty. The poverty rate fell from 22 percent to 13 percent between 1963 and 1970. It's still around 13 percent today, though there is some evidence lately that it's thinking about ticking up again.

So we say, let's throw money at the problem. It worked then and it could work again. Imagine what we could do if we started taxing the outrageous severance packages mediocre CEOs get when they're fired and stopped gouging working class people with the alternative minimum tax. The mature voices won't like it, but who cares what they think?

Oops

We’ve just realized that we failed to say something nasty about the President in our last post. So, via The Carpetbagger Report, here goes: the President mismanaged money intended to help small businesses recover from the September 11 terrorist attacks.

The Small Business Administration, which, we cannot stress enough, is part of the executive branch and therefore accountable to the President, was supposed to grant loans to small businesses that lost money because of the attacks. This was called the Supplemental Terrorist Activity Relief Act (or STAR Act). We at the Blasphemy Blog have read Steven Brill's After: How America Confronted the September 12 Era, and you can take it from us: there were lots of mom-and-pop operations that needed some help after 9/11. If the government were actually going to help them, that would be cool with us.

Instead, the Small Business Administration gave the money to places like a radio station in South Dakota, or, incredibly, a company in Wyoming that did not even exist on September 11, 2001.

The small businesses in question aren't at fault; they applied for regular, non-9/11 small business loans. The Small Business Administration just gave out those particular funds because...well, they're corrupt. Less than eleven percent of the STAR loans went to small businesses in Washington, D.C., or New York City.

Congress will be investigating.

Now, the executive branch is huge, and the President, even if he weren’t always on vacation, could not be expected to know every time one of his hirees messes up. But come on. This is no small thing. This is helping out people who were adversely affected by a national tragedy.

The President has not been shy about calling himself “decisive” with regard to how he handled 9/11. But as near as we can tell, all he’s been decisive about is giving speeches and having his picture taken with firefighters. He’s not so much into that thing called “governance.”

There. Something nasty. We feel we've done our duty.

Meanwhile, in Iraq...

Professor Juan Cole of the University of Michigan has his own blog. His area of expertise is the Arab world. We at the Blasphemy Blog have heard him on the news before, and we read his blog regularly; he is a dour individual and listening to him or reading him is always pretty depressing. He never has much good to say about the way things are going with U.S. foreign policy in the Arab world. This morning, though, he's being pretty pessimistic even for him.

For one thing, it appears that the creation of a new Iraqi Constitution is not going particularly well. The two dominant ethnic groups in the provisional Iraqi government are circulating two different versions of the Constitution. The U.S. ambassador has his own version, too. There will be a referendum on this thing in five weeks, but no one even knows what it says.

Also, there was a big offensive on the city of Tal Afar in the Nineva province of Iraq. This was a joint U.S./Iraqi operation, designed to root out insurgents. The town is now empty of insurgents, but it has also been emptied of pretty much everyone else. 400,000 regular Iraqi people are therefore now refugees, and relief agencies are feeling the strain. Refugee camps meant to hold 500 people now must accommodate 5,000. And the insurgents? They escaped through underground tunnels.

Oh, what a bad idea this was. War is always a bad idea, but this war appears to have been a particularly bad idea even for a war.

Rappers Don't Like the President

Many people, including We at the Blasphemy Blog, are angry with the President right now, but the person expressing the most public anger so far has been the rapper Kanye West. West went "off-script" during what was supposed to be a simple NBC appeal for relief money, and lit into the government response to the hurricane, saying, "America is set up to help the poor, the black people, the less well-off, as slow as possible...George Bush doesn't care about black people!"

Via Jesse Taylor at Pandagon, we see that some enterprising individuals have spliced West's rant with his song "Golddigger," creating a track called, simply, "George Bush Don't Like Black People."

Thus we continue saying nasty things about the President, even though we prefer not to say nasty things about people, just because he has made us so angry.

The latest reason? According to the Washington Post, the Federal Emergency Management Agency experienced a "brain drain" after 2003 because all the true disaster management professionals were being replaced by the President's political cronies. Yup, it makes us angry. Take it away, Kanye.

All Talk

As the inimitable (and very rude) Rude Pundit, our blogfriend, points out, the President's cronyfied head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Michael Brown, talked a pretty good game before the big one hit.

Brown, whose dismal performance, we cannot stress enough, the President is personally responsible for, was very proud of a "hurricane liaison team" FEMA put together for Hurricane Isabel. This liaison team kept state and local authorities in touch with each other, so they could coordinate efforts. It sounds like a great idea, but I guess it wasn't an idea that survived the turnover that comes with a new Presidential term.

When the big test came, Brown and his boss were found wanting. They care more about how things look, and how people talk about the disaster, than fixing the disaster. The President goes on TV and says his foremost concern is saving lives, but his actions tell a different story. For this President and the people who work for him, the people who run our government, looking good and sounding good are more important than being good.

In our opinion, this is a direct result of the President's evangelical religious faith. The President comes out of the holiness tradition, which says that, when you take Jesus into your heart, it changes you. The President used those exact words to describe his faith.

This way of thinking creates people who believe that saying "I accept Jesus Christ as my personal savior" is more important than any action one might take. This means that the President thinks it is more important for him to say he wants to save lives than it is for him to actually save lives. And he hires people who think the same way he does.

That's Enough

We at the Blasphemy Blog are now singing a different tune. We used to avoid criticizing the President of the United States on a personal level, for the simple reason that we don't like to call people names. Since the hurricane blew through, we've been feeling different about that, though, and have been grumbling about this and that with regard to the chief executive's failure to execute. But our blogfriend Billmon has finally pointed to some outrageous behavior that is beyond the pale.

We've been aware for some time that the President used people for photo opportunities. He is a public relations creature in a public relations age, though, and many politicians do this. The President's father famously had his people arrange a crack deal in front of the White House so that he could hold the seized baggie of contraband up to the camera to make a point about the War on Drugs. When we at the Blasphemy Blog were growing up in Indiana, Governor Evan Bayh delayed the arrest of some dangerous fugitives until he could be personally present for the good photo.

All politicians do this kind of thing. It's nasty but it gets the job done, and we don't think it causes much real harm. However, using firefighters as walking props, so that the President can look good as he tours the devastation left behind by the hurricane, is just unconscionable.

It is unconscionable because the President has been on TV for days talking about how he doesn't care about the blame for this or that with regard to the poor government response to the hurricane, he cares about saving lives. Well, no, what he cares about is making himself look good. That much is now clear.

Well, we at the Blasphemy Blog can't forgive the President for that kind of thing, so we're going to add to our repertoire. We're going to say things that make the President look bad, whenever we feel like it.

Many people in this country consider firefighters sacred. The President, through his actions, has profaned them.

Let's Not Wash Them Away

It seems pretty simple to us: the government messed up. A destructive hurricane blew through and the government could not deal with damage left in its wake because said government was in the midst of an ill-advised reorganization of it emergency services. Everyone was on vacation, no one was in charge, and the result was an unthinkable dereliction of duty. So it goes.

Now, to the rebuilding.

New Orleans, as we all know now from watching the news, had a lot of poor people in it. Not surprisingly, the poorest parts of the city were the places where the levies broke. Now, we hear subtle and not-so-subtle rumblings, instructing those poor people: Don’t come back, they say. Let’s create some “special economic zones” on the Gulf Coast and really get the economy moving.

These pro-business, pro-development, libertarian voices want a new New Orleans, a nice place to visit. No more poor people. Fewer black people. Let the private sector create a business-friendly environment, they say. (By “private sector,” they mean “whichever contractors happen to have the ear of whichever Senate staffer is writing the appropriations bill next year.”) And why not? What were the poor people doing for their city, besides living in it?

Better to let them stay in Houston, find work there with the doing-just-fine-thank-you oil industry, and give New Orleans away piece by piece, crony by crony. It’s the spirit of free enterprise.

Or maybe, just maybe, we could repave the streets, invest in some low-rise housing projects, build schools where the plumbing works and the teachers don’t have to buy school supplies themselves, and wire the whole city for free broadband internet access. Then we could invite everyone who left to not be washed away, to stay in their home, and leave the special economic zones where they belong, in China. Our whole country should be a special economic zone.

The Buck Stops Where?

From MSNBC:

"Bush began the day at the White House where he expressed unhappiness with the efforts so far to provide food and water to hurricane victims and to stop looting and lawlessness in New Orleans. 'The results are not acceptable,' said Bush, who rarely admits failure."

We at the Blasphemy Blog have just returned from a long journey and are tired. We are in no mood to see underlings tongue-lashed by their superior. When the Federal Government does not work properly, the cause may be traced to many places. But there is someone in charge of the Federal Government. The President does not say, "I want to do better." He says the "results are not acceptable," using language clearly intended to distance himself from those results. It's not the kind of behavior you expect from someone in charge, if they're good at being in charge.