Katrina: On The Question Of Patriotism

The second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina is coming. We'll be writing about it all week here at The Big Con. It's the signal conservative failure, the sine qua non of all we warn about here at the blog. In fact, we could write about nothing else, and teach our lesson just as well: that conservatives can't govern, because of their contempt for government.

It also allowed us to gauge our conservative fellow Americans' moral level.

I remember my first introduction to Katrina. It was the night before landfall, and the blogger Atrios shared a weather report:

MOST OF THE AREA WILL BE UNINHABITABLE FOR WEEKS...PERHAPS LONGER. AT LEAST ONE HALF OF WELL CONSTRUCTED HOMES WILL HAVE ROOF AND WALL FAILURE. ALL GABLED ROOFS WILL FAIL...LEAVING THOSE HOMES SEVERELY DAMAGED OR DESTROYED.

THE MAJORITY OF INDUSTRIAL BUILDINGS WILL BECOME NON FUNCTIONAL. PARTIAL TO COMPLETE WALL AND ROOF FAILURE IS EXPECTED. ALL WOOD FRAMED LOW RISING APARTMENT BUILDINGS WILL BE DESTROYED. CONCRETE BLOCK LOW RISE APARTMENTS WILL SUSTAIN MAJOR DAMAGE...INCLUDING SOME WALL AND ROOF FAILURE.

HIGH RISE OFFICE AND APARTMENT BUILDINGS WILL SWAY DANGEROUSLY...A FEW TO THE POINT OF TOTAL COLLAPSE. ALL WINDOWS WILL BLOW OUT.

AIRBORNE DEBRIS WILL BE WIDESPREAD...AND MAY INCLUDE HEAVY ITEMS SUCH AS HOUSEHOLD APPLIANCES AND EVEN LIGHT VEHICLES. SPORT UTILITY VEHICLES AND LIGHT TRUCKS WILL BE MOVED. THE BLOWN DEBRIS WILL CREATE ADDITIONAL DESTRUCTION. PERSONS...PETS...AND LIVESTOCK EXPOSED TO THE WINDS WILL FACE CERTAIN DEATH IF STRUCK.

POWER OUTAGES WILL LAST FOR WEEKS...AS MOST POWER POLES WILL BE DOWN AND TRANSFORMERS DESTROYED. WATER SHORTAGES WILL MAKE HUMAN SUFFERING INCREDIBLE BY MODERN STANDARDS.

THE VAST MAJORITY OF NATIVE TREES WILL BE SNAPPED OR UPROOTED. ONLY THE HEARTIEST WILL REMAIN STANDING...BUT BE TOTALLY DEFOLIATED. FEW CROPS WILL REMAIN. LIVESTOCK LEFT EXPOSED TO THE WINDS WILL BE KILLED.

Here was a spur to the President of the United States...to stay on vacation. And, three days later, to utter one of the most astonishing lies [1] of his administration—"I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levies"—though it had been anticipated to his face, and on video [2].

I learned a lot in the next weeks about my fellow Americans. I remember especially my furious anger with the small circle of conservatives with which I've been debating politics for many years by email. I remember how Katrina become their spur to...stay on vacation.

A moral vacation, I mean. What I mean is: every time I would come to them with yet more evidence of one of those manifest calamities brought on by the conservatives in charge of our federal government they would come back–with more anger than I had been able to muster—about some smaller sin of the overwhelmed government of New Orleans: it was all, of course, the Democrats' fault. One of my friends is a citizen of FreeRepublic.com. I'll never forget how he believed he had clinched the argument. He pulled out an aerial photograph (above) of school buses in a flooded parking lot. That proved it: New Orleans had means, motive, and opportunity to evacuate the stranded and miserable hurricane victims from the Superdome. They just didn't care!

Well, the Freepers would have been right; if the Freepers had been magic wizards. If they could have, as Snopes [3] pointed out, wished into those buses fuel, food, water, and qualified drivers; fluttered a workable logistics plan down from on high; and, to top it off, sufficient funds from a cash-strapped municipality to make this miracle happen—and a guarantee, in any event, that these thousands of people in buses wouldn't have been stranded, unprotected, in the path of another oncoming hurricane or flash flood. And a guarantee that those buses actually worked. And that they weren't (as it appears they were) already stranded in a yard of brackish water.

This same friend of mine, the Freeper, happens to be from Alabama. He had another argument for why conservative government hadn't failed: that Alabama had done just fine, because the competent and public spirited folks running his state had outstanding emergency management plans. As if Alabama municipalities had been hit by anything more than a fraction of the force of New Orleans. It was nuts.

It didn't matter. The arguments served the only transcendent moral purpose conservatives know: abjuring the idea of that there exists an American national community, to which we all owe mutual obligation.

It was then that I was reconfirmed in a vague notion I'd been carrying in my mind for years. It concerns patriotism and its paradoxes. Conservatives, of course, claim to be patriotic. They claim to be the most patriotic souls of all. Sometimes—say it ain't so!—they've been known to say other kinds of Americans are not patriotic, because they don't believe the right things about preventive war, theology, and uncritical worship of the President (if the President is a Republican).

But patriotism has a simple definition: love of country and willingness to sacrifice for it.

This is, of course, something progressives have no problem doing. Because it means, simply, that all Americans are every other American's concern. It means always acknowledging a national community, one to which we owe a constant obligation, parallel to our more local networks. It means that there is a certain level below which no American should be allowed to fall: in rights, in services, in solicitude from Washington. That no one who lives under that flag can ever be left behind. Even if they have the misfortune to live in a city that was hurt more by a hurricane than your city; and even if one city proves tragically less prepared to cope with a hurricane than another. That being an American means: step up. Our nation will sacrifice for you. That is what patriotism means.

Conservatives, on the other hand, were glad to let a certain group of Americans flounder and rot—to gloat that certain supposed local failings trumped national obligation, and use "clever" graphics and just-so stories to shirk that obligation.

It proves they aren't patriots at all.

[UPDATE: Recall [4] that it wasn't just my wingnut friends saying it. Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff: ""The critical thing was to get people out of there before the disaster. "Some people chose not to obey that order. That was a mistake on their part." Recall—though the memories are painful—that "some people" had neither cars, cash, nor credit cards. Classic blaming the victim.]