Making Hay After Katrina

Usually trying to turn an unpleasant situation to one's advantage is to be recommended. One learns this if, for instance, he is born as an automatic victim of such an evil system as Jim Crow in the U.S. in the previous century. But in the hands of forces like those headed by GWBush, this effort becomes a monstrous art instead, because in their hands the unpleasantness is compounded.

Before this week, the 11 September 2001 attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon were the biggest calamity to befall the U.S. since -- can I say it? -- the Presidential elections of the previous year. Yet it was the best thing that ever happened to the Bush Administration, for it greatly increased their ill-gained authority, and today under their directives the U.S. is a more constricted and severe place than it was earlier.

Having seen that, we wait with dismay and yet with interest to see how the Bush forces will try to do the same with what's happening in New Orleans. And try they must, because the fates have arranged things so that several of the other big problems facing them these days have convergence points in and near New Orleans. In addition to the recovery from the storm, there is the gas situation, what with the storm damage done to the oil supply, and also there will be the occupation of Iraq, of which the sight of the National Guard in the Mardi gras streets is a big and unpleasant reminder.

For these and other reasons this time things might not be so simple for the Bush forces.

For starters they can't call upon those surefire keywords "freedom" and "terror," which had been used so profusely in everything that Bush said. But what will the replacements be? That won't be easy because there won't be parties on whom to place the blame.

--Well, not easily anyway, since the likeliest candidates, the dark-hued poor people of New Orleans, can't be counted among the perpetrators. The hurricane instead was clearly the work of that very Sky Chief that the Bush forces so readily profess to call upon. The rumors and stories and pictures of looting and filth will help but cannot be counted on to do the whole job.

Here I have to bring my speculations to an early halt, though it's interesting to realize how people like the Roves and Rices are rewarded with huge amounts of power, prestige, and money for thinking up stuff that amounts to no more than a highly unpleasant intellectual exercise for a mere webloggist like me. You have to wonder how the Roves do it. This kind of scheming has to be corrosive to the brain.

Maybe those forces are planning as they go along, because another disadvantage they have is that the high risk of bad publicity forces them to move much faster than they might like, in the effort to give the appearance of being on top of things and thus converting this huge tragedy into only another gift to GWBush and his party. So Bush finds himself pushed into already starting a tour of the shattered areas on the Gulf Coast, where in some places the beautiful beaches have started to reappear. He is slated to spend almost all his time on or not far from those beautiful beaches, in areas where he has gotten lots of votes in the past and where the biggest problem figures to be where to put the replacement casinos. But he will spend just a few minutes in by far the hardest-hit area, New Orleans, where the problems are much larger and more complex.

If he is welcomed there, it will only be with a good deal of tongue in cheek on the part of the officials and the citizens. It's hard to see how he will be able to make hay from that, because everybody will know that, no matter what he will say, his heart will not be with them. In the 2004 Presidential election, "Orleans" gave him only 22 percent of its votes.