The Visible Fist, Continued
Read the report Patri Friedman found from a detention center relocation camphurricane evacuee shelter run by FEMA. TRY NOT TO THINK ABOUT KICKING THE BUREAUCRATS INVOLVED IN THE CROTCH! Hah! You blew it!
Look, you can blame the Bush Administration for not exerting better leadership over the bureaucracy in this case and others, and you should. But this particular callousness is not Bush callousness or Republican callousness or even conservative callousness per se. It is instinct in the institution and the type of person drawn to serve it, whose first priority - and frequently its last - is control over its subjects. The irony - that every petty and large indignity is made with the conscious aim of preventing riots, and each guarantees incrementally that there will be one - appalls.
Comment by Robby K. —
September 10, 2005 @ 10:58 pm
You know, FEMAs handling of Katrina just keeps reminding me of George Romero’s THE CRAZIES.
Government’s carelessness sets in motion a major disaster, and the government’s attempts to conceal their carelessness AND stop the disaster just make the disaster worsen.
Heck, the Superdome thing keeps reminding me of how the army tries to put all the townspeople in the local high school (which only spreads the chemical agent).
Comment by Brian Hawkins —
September 11, 2005 @ 12:33 am
It has occured to me through all of this that there is no disaster so great that government cannot find a way to make it worse.
Comment by Dave —
September 11, 2005 @ 7:08 am
I don’t know, Brian, that seems a little glib. I think it’s correct in that government *can* make things worse, but I’d need to be an historian of the US (which I’m not), and have looked into government responses to disasters in the past, such as the San Francisco earthquake, the Chicago Fire, even 9/11/01, before I’d come to the libertartian conclusion that government *has to* make things worse.
Comment by Gary Farber —
September 11, 2005 @ 9:00 am
I’m having trouble determining if your reality and mine are starting to depart here, or what. I was talking about. Oklahoma almost a week ago. I’m not at all clear what is news to you, or what you’re updating, or what.
It appears that you’re reporting on something I tried to demand people’s attention towards a week ago. I don’t get it.
I tried to get people to scream about stuff a week ago. I don’t get it. It’s been there, every day, for a week.
I don’t get it. What am I missing?
Comment by Jim Henley —
September 11, 2005 @ 10:06 am
If it’s a genuine question, my theory is you blog too much. (And probably quote too extensively.) The things you consider truly important are then at risk of getting lost in the shuffle.
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Note: You asked.
Comment by Jon H —
September 11, 2005 @ 11:27 am
It’s like the Bush administration’s contempt for the poor, made flesh and put in charge, with guns.
Comment by Doctor Slack —
September 12, 2005 @ 2:22 pm
“It is instinct in the institution and the type of person drawn to serve it, whose first priority - and frequently its last - is control over its subjects.”
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I think you have it wrong here, actually. This particular callousness is very particularly Bush Administration callousness (and by extension largely Republican callousness… or at least the movementarian variant), since the institutional culture and current leadership, governance and priorities of FEMA — indeed its very standing as a subagency of a monstrosity called the DHS — can be attributed to no-one else.
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However, callousness is often more generally latent in bureaucracies of all kinds (not just State bureaucracies), because of their nature as institutions and the people drawn to serve in them. Whether, to what extent and what ways it manifests itself is a question largely of how those institutions are governed (and also of the situations they find themselves in).
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To cite a somewhat parallel example, there’s a reason the kinds of atrocities represented by Abu Ghraib were and are a shock coming from the American military, despite the fact that anyone who studied military history knew perfectly well that there was a latent potential for those atrocities in the institution. Soldiers in an alien battlefield will always find themselves tempted to commit such atrocities, but are much likelier to do so when encouraged (indeed, ordered) from the top of the chain of command.
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Similarly, disaster response bureaucracies will always be tempted to favour their preset process over the human necessity to actually respond to events. But this doesn’t remotely explain what we see from FEMA, which has been specifically structured, ordered and encouraged toward its current display of incompetence and callousness by the GOP machine that mashed it into the DHS framework and apportioned its top jobs to inexperienced political hacks. The “instinct in the institution” just doesn’t cut it as an explanatory tool here.