I don't remember the movie, and it's been in more than one, and I don't want to cite
The Simpsons as a primary source here, if only because citing Homer J. Simpson as a touchstone of moral authority is a bit ironic, considering that I've occasionally compared George W. Bush's management style to Homer's delusional beliefs and actions, but there is a scene, and a line, that has run constantly through my mind since the moment I read that George W. Bush explained the lack of preparation for the consequences of a storm like Katrina at numerous levels of government with the blithe and disturbingly familiar assessment,
"I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees."
In that scene, there is a family, and as often occurs in families, there is a dispute. It is not the first dispute - as if there is ever a first dispute - but something happens differently this time, and it is, for one character (in the Simpsons example here, Homer), the straw that breaks the camel's back, from another member of the family (Bart, of course), and the prospect of a life-threatening risk if the family does not band together and take back, accept, or forgive the member whose straw broke the camel's back, which inspires another member of the family (Lisa, equally predictably) to sympathy, to plead for family-wide acceptance and forgiveness of the black sheep, the prodigal son, the fuck-up who has finally fucked up as badly as anyone can fuck up. And when Lisa pleads on Bart's behalf, that he must be forgiven, that he is family, that surely Homer cannot turn his back on his own flesh and blood, his own and only son, Homer looks at her coldly and says, "I have no son."
This does not mean that Bart ceases to exist, or change biology to make him not Homer's son, but it does mean that after years of trying the patience of the family, Bart's antics are finally so disastrous for the family that a previously unthinkable option, of disowning their own flesh and blood, has become more palatable, and less painful, than continuing the relationship. And as I read about the reaction of George W. Bush to Hurricane Katrina and its toll in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, I get a familiar sinking sensation as I think about the things that George W. Bush and members of his administration have said about disasters as diverse as 9/11 ("Nobody could have imagined a plane being used as a weapon...") and the Iraq War ("my belief is, we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators."), whether from sins of omission or commission, I think about how much harm has befallen our country, how little we have to show for it, and how little the Bush Administration has done to prevent or alleviate it, and I think one thing:
I have no president.
Sure, there is a White House at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., and sure, there is a cheerful fellow named George W. Bush who often resides there, when he's not clearing brush in Crawford, Texas, or trying to stay atop wheeled vehicles like bicycles or Segways at various vacation spots across the country, cutting cake with an old friend like Senator John McCain or playing a guitar with the presidential seal like his dad (both, say people who know them, good guys, though being a "good guy" to individuals when you don't seem to care much for groups of people who comprise your country is of indeterminate value).
And sure, there was a president before Bush named Bill Clinton, and some people were offended that he got a blowjob or three from an eager young woman at his office and then didn't want to talk about it very much, and [obligatory note of moral equivalence required by Washington establishment media guidelines, at penalty of scheduling another conference on blogger ethics] he must've done some just-as-bad things too, or so say some people, who spent so much time poking around his administration that they were too tired to keep up their concerns about executive branch abuses of power after 2000. And there has always, in the history of American nationhood, been a president (ah, Mr. Haig, if only), and as long as the country keeps having elections and treating them as marginally more important than reality TV (unless they've merged in the public consciousness by now), then we will continue to have presidents, and other politicians, and we will continue to have a nation of laws and not men, and, well, you get the idea.
But when the city of New Orleans is substantially submerged by water, when the government does less than enough - far and conspicuously less than enough - to rescue as many people as possible from disease, death, and despair, when bodies of unsaved citizens float peacefully out to sea disturbed only by the nibbling of swimming rats, when the physical battles at the SuperDome are not preseason football but sexual assaults among concentric rivers of human excrement as the dead and abandoned watch from seats they could never afford in regular life, when residents of New Orleans have known for hundreds of years what hurricanes have done, and could do, to their city, when there have been extensive public works projects and contingency plans, spanning decades and requiring attention and maintenance that until recently was generally given, understood, and provided, by popular and bipartisan demand and response, when this metropolitan area of millions of people, some rich and some poor, some able to evacuate and some not, is deluged with unimaginable levels of water and destruction, and the relevant authorities shrug their shoulders and say things like "We told them to evacuate" or "There are still people out there?" and "What was I supposed to do about this?" and "What do you mean, it didn't have to be that bad? What would that have taken?" it boggles the mind.
Whether it was irrational optimism ("the big one won't come soon, it just can't") or greed ("why should we pay for that?") or ruthless indifference ("why should I care if those people live or die") or ideology untethered to economic reality ("what do you mean, the war in Iraq has an opportunity cost?") or anything else that might be borderline offensive but not automatically harmful for a citizen to believe, it's a dereliction of duty for the government, which has a slightly higher responsibility than Joe Sixpack to handle natural disasters (despite the radical libertarian protests of a few personal-empowerment purists), and if members of the government, be they state or federal officials, want to continue to not do their jobs, then they should continue to not do their jobs, but at a minimum, stop taking money under the pretense that they are, and stop preventing someone else from doing them.
It's not just that the government could have done more - it's that the government had no idea, or actively rejected the ideas, that it might want to, or have to, do more, that it would have any responsibility to millions of citizens, and to the rest of the country, to protect Americans and America, despite having spent the last four years proclaiming a boundless commitment to homeland security.
Unless, of course, by having an "accountability moment" so soon after a lawful election, the flood-waters will have won.
After all that, I am left with one thought, built by a thousand bricks of casual indifference and antagonism to the existence of ordinary people and their problems, to the existence of a robust national tradition of political ideals and action, to the idea that the federal government has a role more complex than standing back and enabling a Darwinian deathmatch (how they believe in survival of the fittest and not evolution, I don't know) amid disaster, of an Administration that gives me hope only that their lack of attention to the rest of the country and the world will provide them fewer targets to be assaulted, despoiled, and pillaged as if for sport by their privileged friends, at a small cost to anyone not directly involved, but at a great cost to the country, its ideals, and its future.
I have no president.