The Broken Contract
MICHAEL IGNATIEFF

A more apt title would be, “The Canceled Subscription”. Not content to maintain the liberal idiocy that the federal government should somehow ban hurricanes, Ignatieff, a Canadian, reveals his utter, staggering ignorance of American government.

A contract of citizenship defines the duties of care that public officials owe to the people of a democratic society.

You see, we Americans know that we don’t actually sign a “contract of citizenship” (maybe it’s a Canadian thing), nor does the phrase “duty of care” enter our lexicon. However, this blather does leave me dying to know which founding father penned the term, “a duty of care“, because Ignatieff uses it throughout this pile of vapid bleating. The complete non-existence of such a contract is why the editorial doesn’t quote anything from it, not even a little bitty blurb.

The Constitution defines some parts of this contract, and statutes define other parts, but much of it is a tacit understanding that citizens have about what to expect from their government.

Okay, how about a Constitutional citation, or is that too much to ask? And WTF is this “tacit understanding”? This just shows why we invented the written contract, because dumbasses show up on our shores with ludicrous expectations and bizarro theories of government.

Its basic term is protection: helping citizens to protect their families and possessions from forces beyond their control.

Oh, so the government is supposed to protect you from a falling piano dropped from a window on the fortieth floor? To the morons at the Times, I supposed the loud crash, twang, and grease spot would represent a “failure of government”. How about an asteroid? Should we spend twenty trillion making sure one of those doesn’t hit New Orleans, too? Somehow, Ignatieff has confused the US Constitution with Superman issue 57.

Contrary to what this article pretends, the courts have upheld that nobody has a right to police protection, nor does the government guarantee that your house won’t burn down. If the government actually guaranteed bad things wouldn’t happen, nobody would bother buying private insurance, now would they.

Let’s not suppose this contract is uncontroversial.

What is uncontroversial is the fictitiousness of the contract this article blathers on about, an inchoate notion of how a liberal thinks, or rather wishes, government works.

American politics is a furious argument about what should be in the contract and what shouldn’t be.

Actually, American politics is a furious argument about who has the infinite money it will take to pay for an infinite number of real and imagined needs. This article is giving me a new idea, though, which I call “bill Canada first.”

But there is enough agreement, most of the time, about what the contract contains for America to hold together as a political community. When disasters strike, they test whether the contract is respected in a citizen’s hour of need. When the levees broke, the contract of American citizenship failed.

Not true. The American contract on levee breaches was best penned by the noted judicial philosopher Led Zeppelin, based on the 1929 work of Minnie McCoy.

If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to break,
When The Levee Breaks I’ll have no place to stay.

Mean old levee taught me to weep and moan,
Got what it takes to make a mountain man leave his home,
Oh, well, oh, well, oh, well.

Don’t it make you feel bad
When you’re tryin’ to find your way home,
You don’t know which way to go?
If you’re goin’ down South
They go no work to do,
If you don’t know about Chicago.

Cryin’ won’t help you, prayin’ won’t do you no good,
Now, cryin’ won’t help you, prayin’ won’t do you no good,
When the levee breaks, mama, you got to move.

All last night sat on the levee and moaned,
Thinkin’ about me baby and my happy home.
Going, going to Chicago… Going to Chicago… Sorry but I can’t take you…
Going down… going down now… going down….

If you read the contract, a southern levee failure is guaranteed to create a condition of homelessness, accompanied by weeping, moaning (i.e. this article), and a good excuse to move to Chicago. Further, if anyone has an obligation to care, it would be almighty G-d, but as we see in this text, “prayin’ won’t do you no good”, establishing that any obligations of G-d and government are rendered null and void by a levee failure.

The most striking feature of the catastrophe is not that the contract didn’t hold. That is now too obvious to argue about. Many municipal, state and federal officials, elected and appointed, forgot the duty of care they owed to their fellow citizens.

There’s that vapid phrase again: “The Duty of Care.” It’s just as much “doody” as the average editorial in the New York Times, which serves up running diarrhea in heaping handfuls. Does anyone think an oath of office says:

“I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of __________, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, and will fulfill my duties to evince my care for the poor in the event of levee failure.”

I thought not. Maybe he’s basing his idea of a contract on the Statue of Liberty. He must think the poem goes

I, a copper statue of unusual size, hereafter referred to as the party of the first part, affirm that I will fulfill my obligations to care for your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, as established by act of Congress. I also affirm that I will stand beside the golden door and lift my lamp for “the wretched refuse of your teeming shore”, also known as “the homeless, tempest-tossed”, and hereafter referred to as the party of the second part, upon pain of fine and imprisonment, or both.

Well, it’ a poem, not a contract; a distinction lost on him.

Some fled when they should have stayed at their posts. Some promised help they could not deliver.

In addition, some like Governess Blanco blocked aid to prevent turning the Superdome into a “refugee magnet”.

Some failed to rise to the terrible occasion.

Yes, by not ordering an evacuation early on, by not asking for federal troops, by passing emergency orders that hinder more than helped, by insisting on nice Greyhound buses instead of school buses.

All of this is now well documented.

Except in the New York Times, which dares not print a word of it.

What has not been noticed is that the people with the most articulate understanding of what the contract of American citizenship entails were the poor, abandoned, hungry people huddled in the stinking darkness of the New Orleans convention center.

The poor have the most articulate understanding of government? If they did, wouldn’t they be arguing cases before the Supreme Court, instead of waiting on a Democrat governor to quit blocking food and round up some buses?

“We are American,” a woman at the convention center proclaimed on television. She spoke with scathing anger, but also with astonishment that she should be required to remind Americans of such a simple fact.

Sadly, at the time she was being beaten on both sides of the head with a cluebat for continually voting for the liberal welfare state. I will remind her of another simple fact.

When the levee breaks, mama, you got to move.

So there.

She - not the governor, not the mayor, not the president - understood that the catastrophe was a test of the bonds of citizenship and that the government had failed the test.

What the mayor understood was that school buses aren’t comfortable enough to bus his citizens to safety. What the governess understood was that if she called for federal troops then some looters might get shot, so she didn’t. What her emergency manager understood was that the Superdome was a “shelter of last resort”, which isn’t supposed to get stocked with food and water, but he kept sending people there anyway. Then either he or the governor prohibited food from being delivered to the shelter, on the theory that if the people weren’t starved out, they’d never leave.

This failure was perhaps most evident when, on Sept. 1, a full three days after the hurricane struck Louisiana, Washington’s top officials were asserting that they had only just learned that in the convention center were thousands of exhausted fellow citizens in the dark, at the ends of their tethers, awaiting an evacuation that had not come.

More evidence of what the Times won’t tell you. People didn’t flock to the Convention Center until Wednesday, two days after the hurricane, when the mayor told people to go there without telling anyone that he was changing the situation.

“We are American”: that single sentence was a lesson in political obligation. Black or white, rich or poor, Americans are not supposed to be strangers to one another.

And they weren’t strangers to each other. Indeed, they were down there basking in liberal utopia, commonly called an equality of suffering.

Having been abandoned, the people in the convention center were reduced to reminding their fellow citizens, through the medium of television, that they were not refugees in a foreign country. Citizenship ties are not humanitarian, abstract or discretionary. They are not ties of charity.

Indeed. Citizenship ties only sometimes allow you to vote, and in all cases are a taxing experience. For most of this country’s long existence, citizenship entitled you to zero dimes of government money, even in the worst circumstances. This country was founded on the principle that people don’t have a right to stick their hand in the public purse, and when American citizens expanded into the West the only reasonable debate on government actions would’ve been whether we should charge them more for stamps.

In America, a citizen has a claim of right on the resources of her government when she cannot - simply cannot - help herself.

Man, Ignatieff is being brazenly stupid, eh? Put me down for an aircraft carrier battle group because I don’t have the resources to put up my own combat air patrol. Please have the admiral call my cell number. I also need to requisition a couple trucks from the US mint because I don’t have enough mulch for the yard.

If you can turn around and successfully demand that the government compensate you for losses in situations it did not cause, then the government would gain the right to forbid you from exercising those freedoms that could bring about such a situation.

It may be astonishing that American citizens should have had to remind their fellow Americans of this, but let us not pretend we do not know the reason.

No, what’s astonishing is that a Canadian can live in the US as long as Michael Ignatieff and still think up crap like this.

They were black, and for all that poor blacks have experienced and endured in this country, they had good reason to be surprised that they were treated not as citizens but as garbage.

Hey, this liberal went a couple paragraphs before devolving into the inevitable race baiting! He should get a cookie.

Let us not assume, either, that this moment of contempt is over.

Nor should we assume that Ignatieff has spent his moment of error-filled, empty-headed bleating.

A week after the disaster, bodies were still floating in the fetid waters. I hope they will have been cleared by the time you read this. Duties of care, not to mention decency, cannot be less controversial than care of the dead. Yet often enough, the only people who took the care to cover corpses, to identify their names, to mark out a place of rest, were not law enforcement officials, who always seemed to have some pressing reason that it wasn’t their job, but the storm victims themselves.

Maybe he thinks the cops should’ve arrested the corpses for created a public nuisance, but as I understand it the police were told to help the still living victims first. How would you like to go to a hospital and die in the waiting room because all the doctors are busy pushing a gurney to the morgue?

Let us not be sentimental.

Sentimental let us not be, nor stupid, sanctimonious, or downright silly.

The poor and dispossessed of New Orleans cannot afford to be sentimental. They know they live in an unjust and unfair society.

The chief proof of that unfairness is that Ignatieff was paid cash money for the worthless words he’s flung at a page. In a truly just society, Times readers could sue him for compensation for the minutes of their lives this editorial sucked away, not to mention a big award for pain and suffering.

They know their schools aren’t much good, that their police protection is radically deficient, that their economic opportunities are few and that their neighborhoods have been starved of hope and help.

Well, maybe if they’d quit voting for a liberal welfare state, their lives would improve.

Knowing all this, the people of New Orleans still believed that, as Americans, they were entitled to levees that would hold, an evacuation plan that would actually evacuate them and a resettlement plan that would get them back on their feet.

Amazing, isn’t he! He’s wears his shameless stupidity and historical ignorance like armor against obvious logical flaws in his argument. When New Orleans was first built, did Americans there know they were entitled to a levee system, or did they just decide it would be wise to build one? When a group of Americans move somewhere, do they assume they’re entitled to the protection of multi-billion dollar civil engineering projects just because they are, by G-d, Americans? Aren’t Americans vacationing in Cancun also entitled to the right of levees that will hold, evacuation plans, and resettlement? I mean, you’re no less of an American just because you’re on vacation, now are you?

They were entitled to this because they are Americans and because these simple things, while costly, are well within the means of the richest society on earth.

Wow. So in this lunatic’s worldview, I suppose Neil Armstrong would’ve said, “That’s one small step for a man, and now someone build me a fucking fifty trillion dollar moon base because I’m an American, by G-d, and I have a right to the protection of a big ass moon base with six foot concrete walls, giant glass domes, and a fully stocked trout pond.”

So it is not - as some commentators claimed - that the catastrophe laid bare the deep inequalities of American society. These inequalities may have been news to some, but they were not news to the displaced people in the convention center and elsewhere. What was bitter news to them was that their claims of citizenship mattered so little to the institutions charged with their protection.

Bush was trying to move heaven and earth to help, short of spending two years in jail for violation of the Posse Comitatus act, which he certainly would face given how “caring liberals” keep trying to charge him with war crimes. On the other hand, Blanco didn’t seem to care that she was letting her people starve so long as George Bush was getting blamed for it. On top of all that, if the institutions didn’t actually care to help the victims, where did all that aid come from, France?

There are inequalities that people endure, and there are inequalities that enrage. Neighborhoods in Los Angeles that kept quiet through poverty and discrimination erupted when Rodney King’s attackers were acquitted. Why?

Hey, sounds like he’s been reading too much Al-Jazeera crap claiming that New Orleans was “the moral equivalent of the Rodney King beating multiplied times 30,000” Well, interestingly, Rodney King is now in jail with a $25,000 bail. I’ll skip through some of his race baiting digressions and get back to Katrina.

What makes the failure over Katrina so unexpected is that while liberals and conservatives agreed about nothing else, they were supposed to have agreed that government should protect Americans from natural disaster.

What a lie. What moderate Democrats and Conservatives agreed about, if nothing else, was that they can’t stop a New Madrid earthquake from devastating the Midwest, can’t stop a giant tidal wave from flattening Florida, can’t stop Mt. St. Helens from erupting, can’t stop the eventual expansion of the sun into a red giant, and can’t stop the ultimate heat death of the universe. Liberals continue to bask in the idea that somehow, if we tax the rich just a little bit more, we can afford to stop all these things.

Since the Mississippi flood of 1927, and the efforts of Herbert Hoover and the Army Corps of Engineers, public authority has been charged with this duty. This was the key element of the contract that seemed to have been ripped up like a roof shingle and cast into the infernal waters of New Orleans.

The Army Corps of Engineers has never by so stupid as to think they can wave a magic wand and prevent floods. All they can do is prevent some floods from causing so much damage, but their presumptions take into account that there will be hundred year floods, thousand year floods, and yes, ten-thousand year floods, floods that just float everything away.

This betrayal cannot be made better by charity and generosity.

Okay, then we can save a hundred billion by telling New Orleans to get fucked.

Americans have turned out to be - not surprisingly - very generous toward what has become the largest population of internally displaced people since the Civil War.

Need we point out the failure of Southern governments to prevent that displacement? Hey, I wonder why those Southerners didn’t sue somebody.

But private benevolence cannot heal the wounds - of humiliation and abandonment - caused by government failure.

Hey, nobody who pens dreck like this article has room to talk about humiliation.

Nor can exemplary performance by some agencies - the Coast Guard, for example - do that much to redeem the abject performance of others

Well what could redeem the abject performance of Nagin and Blanco?

The failures were not just failures of performance or anticipation. They were failures of political imagination.

Houston, this is New Orleans. We’re showing a caution light on panel 3. Can you check our political imagination subsystem?

New Orleans, this is Houston. We’re working the problem, but can you give us your surface altitude reading?

Houston, we’ve got that right here. It says minus ten.

What’s that, New Orleans? We’re not sure we read you.

Houston, I say again, we’re reading ten feet below sea level. I repeat, ten feet below sea level.

(aside, in Houston) Did we miss a step? Is New Orleans built below sea level?”

(reply, in Houston) I think we found our design flaw. Sounds like a political failure.

Officials and engineers in charge of the levees reasoned like actuaries, building to a standard designed to protect only most of the people most of the time.

That’s why they have degrees in engineering and accounting, degrees that let them understand that protecting everybody from everything costs an infinite amount of money and will take an infinite amount of time to complete. To pay for it, all social welfare spending will have to be slashed, all environmental spending will have to be zeroed out, and all other government spending will likewise be transferred to the “infinite flood protection” project.

Had they reasoned with any degree of political imagination, they might have started from the premise that there are some harms that a government must protect its people from, however unlikely they may turn out to be, whatever the cost.

That’s why we hire people with degrees in engineering and accounting, and pay people with journalism degrees to give us our pizza and get the hell off our porch. While Ignatieff continues his hallucination (not imagination) that we can pay for an infinite number of projects, each costing an infinite amount of money individually - infinity squared, taken together; we’ll continue in our happy engineering world where you calculate prices against probabilities and incurred failure costs.

That is how the British reasoned when they built the hugely expensive Thames barrier, how the Dutch reasoned when they built their flood-control system.

He’s really showing his complete and utter ignorance of civil engineering. The Dutch flood control engineers never say, “our system protects against ALL failures, hahahaha.” Their work is based on costs and statistical tables of probabilities, along with calculations of how many thousands of people will die during individual failures, along with how often those failures are expected to occur.

In America, a levee defends a foundational moral intuition: all lives are worth protecting and, since this is America, worth protecting at the highest standard.

“…. and each life will get protected with an infinite amount of money. Hey, look! A Marxist monarch butterfly is hatching out of my ass!”

Again, I cite the truth of Zeppelin.

If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to break,

No amount of wishful thinking can change the mathematical and engineering certainty expressed in those simple words.

This principle was betrayed by the Army Corps of Engineers, by the state and local officials who knew the levees needed repair and did nothing and by Congress, which allowed the president to cut appropriations for levee renewal.

He hurls more mud at the Army Corps of Engineers. Maybe they could use it to fill sandbags. Hell, if he keeps it up maybe they could build a levee out of his bullshit.

For the record, it was some of the newly repaired floodwalls that actually failed. I suppose Ignatieff will now demand that they build “unbreachable” walls, made out of ten-foot thick beta titanium vacuum welded to the sheet of titanium extending under the entire city. Meanwhile, back on the planet with the blue sky, flood walls are concrete, and levees are mostly made of, out of all things, dirt.

The same betrayal occurred in evacuation plans that assumed that citizens could evacuate by car. It turned out that 27 percent of city households did not own a car. Racial ignorance and contempt may explain some of this, but not all.

Ignorance and contempt go a lot farther in explaining the existence of this horrible editorial.

A better explanation is that the people involved in municipal, state and federal government simply did not care enough about their own professional morality to find out the true facts.

But the best explanation is that Ignatieff simply didn’t care enough about his professional reputation to conduct any research, or even engage in logical thought, before slapping us on both cheeks with his oozing spleen and subjecting us to his inchoate hallucinations about government.

Public officials simply didn’t bother to cross the social distances that divided them from the truth of the New Orleans population.

Oh, and would these be the same public officials who were born and raised in New Orleans? Yes, I think they would.

These social distances between rich and poor, between black and white are stubborn and are likely to endure, but the most basic duty of public leadership is always to know how the other half lives - and dies.

And here he had me thinking that the most basic duty of public leadership was convincing the “other half” to pay for an infinite number of infinitely expensive projects.

A duty to truth was failed, but so was a duty to democracy.

Is the “duty to truth” in the same mysterious and top secret document that details the citizenship contract? Do we need a secret decoder ring to read its words?

Why weren’t ordinary New Orleans citizens consulted about the evacuation plan?

Oh, I don’t know, for the same reason we weren’t consulted about the Vogon plans for an interstellar bypass?

The people in poor wards of the city would have picked its holes apart in a second.

The same way they found the security flaws in the FootLocker storefront? No, the poor would’ve screamed, “why are you spending billions pushing dirt when I don’t have a decent job!?”

In the future, one simple test of an evacuation plan’s adequacy should be: Have the people who are likely to be evacuated been fully consulted on its contents?

Now how can consultation affect adequacy? The plan is adequate or it is not, and local opinions can’t change that. Local opinion said the levees would hold even in against a CAT 5, because they were designed to hold against a CAT 3. Local opinion was exactly what decided whether New Orleans really needed to spend a fortune on bigger levees. Local opinion keeps dumping money into professional sports stadiums instead of schools. Local opinion is what votes the current batch of politicians out of office for spending too much on “unnecessary” flood control projects.

The most terrible price of Katrina - everyone can see this - was not the destruction of lives and property, terrible though this was. The worst of it was the damage done to the ties that bind Americans together.

So, the imaginary damage done to a histrionic Canadian writer is worse than the floating bodies? Does everyone really see this? Beyond the amount of weed it takes to see the purple dragons is the weed it takes to publicly insist that everyone sees the purple dragons.

It is very much too late for senior federal officials, from the president on down, to reknit these ties. It is just too late for the public-relations exercises that pass for leadership these days, the fine speeches from the Oval Office or other stage-managed venues.

I’m sure Bush is delighted that he’s no longer expected to give a speech saying, “The responders and humanitarian agencies, General Honore, and many others have done a magnificent job, but now it’s time to start reknitting ties. Ties of all stripes - even paisleys.”

If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to break,
When The Levee Breaks I’ll have no place to stay.

Mean old levee taught me to weep and moan,
…

This entry was posted on Friday, September 30th, 2005 at 5:41 am and is filed under Mother Nature's Wrath. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.