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Peggy’s Wisdom on Katrina — and our Shifting Attitudes Toward Government

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In her column today, Peggy Noonan once again shows the stuff that has made her my Athena. In a particularly wise piece, Peggy not only faults big media for its coverage of Katrina, but she also expresses concern about something which Katrina revealed “a change in the relation of the individual and those who would govern him.”

While Peggy finds American nature “in the story of Jeremiah Johnson,” the mountain man who “didn’t like authority [and] wanted to be left alone,” today it seems we “hunger for someone to take responsibility.” Emblematic of this shift in attitude is a story out of Galveston the day before Rita hit land. Peggy saw two cops arrest a “fat Texas guy” for swimming in the crashing waves. While acknowledging that this guy was probably crazy, Peggy laments that “in the America where I grew up, you were allowed to be crazy.”

Instead of government just maintaining the peace in times of disaster, it is taking more and more authority onto itself, often with little dissent from the people. Peggy fears that if we “lose the right to be crazy, we’ll lose the right to be sane.” Thus, we need to make clear that, even in disasters, government’s role should be limited:

It is the government’s job to warn and inform. That’s what we have the National Weather Service for. It is not government’s job to command and control and make microdecisions about the lives of people who want to do it their own way.

I have only begun to explore the ideas in this wise piece. Peggy also does a great job of evaluating “the media’s part in this.” While she finds that “[r]eporters on the ground in New Orleans deserve great credit,” she also noted that “media have trouble distinguishing between the helpful reporting of facts and the whipping up of fear.” Since I can’t do justice to this wise piece in my poor post, just read the whole thing!

-Dan (AKA GayPatriotWest): GayPatriotWest@aol.com

UPDATE: Just got an e-mail update from Barnes & Noble that Peggy’s next book, John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father, will be released on George Eliot’s birthday. I delight in that serendipity. Not only is Peggy like Athena, but she also has much in common with Eliot (whose real name was Mary Ann Evans).

Comments

  5. I find it quite amusing that you have “deified” this woman who put words in the mouth of NIxon. She is the nastiest piece of work in the entire conservative spectrum. I will write no more as I have to go lay down.

  6. Chandler, you’re mistaken once again. Peggy never wrote for Nixon.

    And to call her “the nastiest piece of work in the entire conservative spectrum” suggests you’re confusing her with Ann Coulter whom this blogger has criticized.

  8. I don’t have to know anything about Peggy Noonan to have an opinion about the column she wrote. If she was evil incarnate yesterday and will be evil incarnate tomorrow, in this article she makes some good points. I don’t know that it’s *brilliant* but it is certainly right.

    One thing that she either misses or didn’t really have time for, is that part of why people aren’t allowed to be crazy is that it puts rescue people and police in danger. A few years ago the governor of MInnesota declared an emergency during a blizzard and gave orders that anyone that went out of their homes would be arrested, and that was why. Because it was deathly dangerous out there and if you had the right to a Darwin award, you didn’t have the right to risk the life of the police or firefighters who would be called out to save you.

    The closest Ms. Noonan got to this was her remark about doing a crazy thing and maybe you survived it, but if you didn’t people would just shake their heads and say that you’d been crazy.

    What she said about leadership and responsibility was right on and would actually take care of the “let crazy people kill themselves if they insist” issue. The *leader* has to be up there taking responsibility right now, explaining to all that police and firefighters are not going to be asked to risk their lives for crazy people who refuse to evacuate… stay if you want, it’s your choice but you don’t get to kill rescue workers.

    We’ve had a long time of building up the expectation for government to save us from ourselves. As a parent, I have that role in my children’s lives. At some point though, the goal is for them to be adults.

  13. But why should the government be expected to do that?

    Seriously?

    When it comes right down to it, I’m a *bad* libertarian. I can see a purpose or even necessity in social programs and other things that good libertarians want to abolish all together. I figure it’s one of those “in a perfect world, sure” sorts of things. The world isn’t perfect.

    But it’s also true that people have a strong tendency not to take responsibility for what they do and a strong tendency for the rest of us to remove consequences because we’re nice people and it bothers us to see people suffer. We’d rather be compassionate than be callous.

    I have a problem with making children suffer for their parent’s stupidity, for example. And I figure that everyone screws up and makes mistakes and it’s simple Christian charity to give them a hand up when they need it.

    Still, to much protecting stupid people from themselves ends up enabling them to continue to be stupid. It also ends up with an assumption that *anything that is legal is safe*. Going through life with the blithe assumption that anything the government allows you to do is safe is dangerous. But once we’re at that point then the government almost *has* to make sure that anything unsafe is against the law.

    In any case, crazy people, if they really are crazy, probably deserve more protection than the ones that simiply never saw fit to develop their common sense.

  14. It’s an ongoing moan and groan.
    If you ignore people’s stupidity, they moan, groan and sue you for not protectign them. If you protect them, you’re a fascist. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

    I’m reminded of working in the airline industry on 9/11. Afterwards, the traveling public bitched for more security, then when they got it, they bitched about too much security. More recently, look at the Katrina episode. Folks bitched because the feds didn’t take over fast enough, but if they had taken over when people say they should have, they would have bitched about fascism. They bitched about the feds moving in too quickly after Charley paid a visit to us last year and yet after Katrina, there were those who yearned for the days of James Lee Witt who took almost a month to respond to some disasters.
    You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

  15. Bottom line, in some situations, you just have to let stupid people fend for themselves. I think when those folks refused to evacuate N.O. even when they’re ass deep in flood water, there should have been a disclaimer that they were on their own with no support. Same with those folks in the snow storm mentioned above. The government should tell the people that if they venture out after they’re warned not to, too damn bad.
    And no, a lot of people in this day and age, especially liberals, have no freaking clue about what personal responsibility means.

  16. “And I figure that everyone screws up and makes mistakes and it’s simple Christian charity to give them a hand up when they need it.”

    Synova is bang on when she calls this simple Christian charity. It flows right out of the doctirne of Original Sin – people are wickedly and viciously ignorant, that is their nature, left to their/our own devices, we will screw up. That part is not open to argument in my book. It’s just a statement of observable fact. You can point to all the examples where people do manage to rise above that level and I would answer that hope is not a plan.

    This is an example of a situation that brings inot a focus between two contradictory worldviews. One is naturalistic and the other one doesn’t have a name that I now of.

    in the naturalistic worldview we are part of nature, and nature’s laws apply to us and we should act according to those laws. We are temporary anifestations and vehicles of genetic lineages. We have no individual value beyond that, and that isn’t much. So there is no real cost and only gain when the weak ones – stupid, unlucky, slow, sick or whatever – die off. The individuals that die off have no special value because they will be replaced by better ones.

    In this world, you and your group are on your own. This worldview explains altruism in very simple and convincing terms. This happens to be the basis for Confucian ethics. It has a feeling of Stoicism to it.

    Then there is the opposite view. This posits that every individual has value a priori. That means that an individual has a moral claim on others to help him in preserving his life, and if this is in the context of a religious system, that he has the same sort of claim on God. That can lead to a sense that God operates some kind of system of justice valid throughout the universe. Imagine the opportunites for diasppointment in this worldview.

    Anyway, both worldviews have their points. Both work as a basis for highly civilized societies. They both lead to a sense of human dignity, but of fundamentally different kinds, with fundamentally bases. The first worldview seems a lot less whiny to me. No BS yelling at the sky wondering way bad things happens to good people, because there doesn’t need to be a reason and the sky isn’t listening anyway. On the other hand, it has the advantage of giving some rationale for senseless things that make you feel good, like rescuing abandoned infants. Or stupid adults marooned in a doomed city.

  21. #14
    You wonder why Ronnie threw them into the streets? Before him, there wern’t homeless in the droves we see now. Just think, everytime you se a raving maniac screaming at a street post, every time you see someone sleeping in a doorway, thank the lord your tax dollars aren’t going to them. The true Reagan legacy.