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To everyone's surprise, this perfect scapegoat, Michael Brown, declined to skulk off and nurse his kidney stones when the president dismissed him. He turned up on the front page complaining that the White House and his own boss Michael Chertoff, secretary of homeland security, had failed to respond to "a blur" of anguished phone calls when Brown realized that the situation in New Orleans was metastasizing. Brown's outburst was a train wreck for White House spin merchants and underscored the absence of Rove the Enforcer, who would have threatened to kill him.
George W. is up to the top of his Tony Lamas in toxic sludge. For the time being there's no smirk on that insufferable but unsuffering face. Still we're stuck with him until 2009, unless Republicans lose both houses of Congress and Democrats find the guts to impeach him, both highly unlikely. America's best chance to benefit from the catastrophe in New Orleans is to focus all this agony and indignation on a popular philosophy of government called "starve the Beast," one endorsed by President Bush and most of the rightwing zealots who sneaked into power five years ago. "The Beast" is your federal government, of course, the entity that collects your taxes and chooses wars for your children. To starve it means to drain it of revenue -- something Bush with his tax cuts and Arab wars has done in spectacular fashion -- until it can honestly say "No" to "Buddy, can you spare a dime?" For reactionary true believers, no government is the best government and all bureaucracy is pernicious.
Hurricane Katrina showed us what can happen when "starve the Beast" is actually put into practice. When the federal government had a chance to justify itself, the Beast was too hungry to walk upright -- starved not only for money but for talent, experience, leadership and everything that's critical when the levees are crumbling and people are dying.
The US government, like all governments, has failed desperate people before and will fail them again. But this failure occurred against the backdrop of a bloody, frustrating war that was launched by falsehoods and promises nothing besides more falsehoods, more bloodshed, more frustration and staggering expenditures that may starve the poor Beast to death. New Orleans knows that in its hour of need, some third of the state's National Guardsmen and half their vehicles were in Iraq. This fateful collision of natural and unnatural disasters served to clarify what Piers Aubrey, the mercurial Irish journalist in Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows, identified as "the fundamental problem of politics" -- "what the state might ask of the individual, what the individual might ask of the state."
Even apolitical, ideology-shunning Americans have begun to connect the breach in the levees with a breach of the social contract, society's basic agreement binding the governed and their governors. When government is a one-way street -- when it requires your children and your money for its wars but offers you nothing in return, when it's no more than a giant leech bleeding you white -- there's no longer any reason to vote or to pay your taxes. If the federal government's only legitimate function is military, why not save your tax money and form militias? You and your neighbors could do a better job of choosing enemies and defeating them than the clowns now floundering in Washington, DC. That would be my version of starving the Beast.
When enough Americans see that the social contract has been broken, will they turn against Bush and a Republican Congress that was scheming, even while New Orleans drowned, to cut $13 billion from the Medicaid and food stamp programs? Last weekend I watched New Orleans suffer on CNN and took a break for a cocktail party honoring a friend of mine, in an ultra-exclusive gated community the size of Fort Bragg. It was a sprawling golfer's Neverland of lush fairways -- drought prevails in North Carolina -- and not McMansions but McXanadus, McVersailles, plutocrats' palaces that could lodge most of the Gulf Coast refugees without crowding. People who live there can't imagine themselves in trouble or in need, can't conceive that the Beast they're starving might ever have to come to their rescue. All they require of the president they created and control is deeper tax cuts. The distance between these castles and those Americans hip deep in toxic floodwaters, weeping and clutching their bedraggled cats and dogs, is greater than the distance between Earth and Alpha Centauri. Is government of the gated community, by the gated community and for the gated community good enough for the United States of America?
