From an email:
George Bush, the man - David Warren.The Ottawa Citizen Sunday, September
11, 2005
(A bit more objectivity than we get from our own press and politicians.)
There's plenty wrong with America and I'm tempted to say that the only
difference from Canada is that they have a few things right.
That would be unfair, of course -- I am often pleased to discover things
we still get right, but one of them would not be disaster preparation.
If something happened up here, on the scale of Katrina, we wouldn't even
have the resources to arrive late. We would be waiting for the Americans
to come save us, the same way the government in Louisiana just waved and
pointed at Washington, D.C. The theory being that, when you're in real
trouble, that's where the adults live.
And that isn't an exaggeration. Almost everything that has worked in the
recovery operation along the U.S. Gulf Coast has been military and
National Guard. Within a few days, under several commands, finally
consolidated under the remarkable Lt.-Gen. Russell Honore, it was once
again the U.S. military efficiently cobbling together a recovery
operation on a scale beyond the capacity of any other earthly
institution.
We hardly have a military up here. We have elected one feckless
government after another that has cut corners until there is nothing
substantial left. We don't have the ability even to transport and equip
our few soldiers. Should disaster strike at home, on a big scale, we
become a Third World country. At which point, our national smugness is of
no avail.
From Democrats and the American Left -- the U.S. equivalent to the people
who run Canada -- we are still hearing that the disaster in New Orleans
showed that a heartless, white Republican America had abandoned its
underclass.
This is garbage. The great majority of those not evacuated lived in
assisted housing and receive food stamps, prescription medicine and
government support through many other programs. Many have, all their
lives, expected someone to lift them to safety, without input from
themselves. And the demagogic mayor they elected left, quite literally,
hundreds of transit and school buses that could have driven them out of
town parked in rows, to be lost in the flood.
Yes, that was insensitive. But it is also the truth; and sooner or later
we must acknowledge that welfare dependency creates exactly the sort of
haplessness and social degeneration we saw on display, as the floodwaters
rose. Many suffered terribly, and many died, and one's heart goes out.
But already the survivors are being put up in new accommodations, and
their various entitlements have been directed to new locations.
The scale of private charity has also been unprecedented. There are yet
no statistics, but I'll wager the most generous state in the union will
prove to have been arch-Republican Texas and that, nationally,
contributions in cash and kind are coming disproportionately from people
who vote Republican. For the world divides into "the mouths" and "the
wallets."
The Bush-bashing, both down there and up here, has so far lost touch with
reality, as to raise questions about the bashers' state of mind. Consult
any authoritative source on how government works in the United States and
you will learn that the U.S. federal government's legal, constitutional,
and institutional responsibility for first response to Katrina, as to any
natural disaster, was zero.
Notwithstanding, President Bush took the prescient step of declaring a
disaster, in order to begin deploying FEMA and other federal assets, two
full days in advance of the storm fall. In the little time since, he has
managed to co-ordinate an immense recovery operation -- the largest in
human history -- without invoking martial powers. He has been
sufficiently presidential to respond, not even once, to the
extraordinarily mendacious and childish blame-throwing.
If one thinks of Kipling's poem -
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise.
Unlike his critics, Bush is a man, in the full sense presented by these
verses. A fallible man, like all the rest, but a man. |
