The Post-Katrina Era

From AlterNet, UC Berkeley linguistics professor George Lakoff on the language of post-Katrina politics:

The moral of Katrina is mostly being missed. It is not just a failure of execution (William Kristol), or that bad things just happen (Laura Bush). It was not just indifference by the President, or a lack of accountability, or a failure of federal-state communication, or corrupt appointments in FEMA, or the cutting of budgets for fixing levees, or the inexcusable absence of the National Guard off in Iraq. It was all of these and more, but they are the effects, not the cause.

The cause was political through and through -- a matter of values and principles. The progressive-liberal values are America's values, and we need to go back to them. The heart of progressive-liberal values is simple: empathy (caring about and for people) and responsibility (acting responsibly on that empathy). These values translate into a simple principle: Use the common wealth for the common good to better all our lives. In short, promoting the common good is the central role of government.

The right-wing conservatives now in power have the opposite values and principles. Their main value is Rely on individual discipline and initiative. The central principle: Government has no useful role. The only common good is the sum of individual goods. It's the difference between We're all in this together and You're on your own, buddy. It's the difference between Every citizen is entitled to protection and You're only entitled to what you can afford. It's the difference between connection and separation. It is this difference in moral and political philosophy that lies behind the tragedy of Katrina.

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In other words, the man-made disaster in New Orleans this past week has been years in the making. Noam Chomsky has observed on multiple occasions that the net effect of the last quarter century of conservative "reform" has been to destroy the civil society. It doesn't matter if the guy in the apartment upstairs has a heart attack because it's his problem, not yours. It doesn't matter if 200,000 people got stuck in New Orleans because they couldn't afford to leave: they should have gotten themselves into a better financial position like all of us responsible people.

To this day, despite my middle age sense of leftism, I still believe that there is a kernel of truth within a lot of conservative maxims--free money for the poor, for instance, does indeed strike me as a disincentive to work and self-improvement; "personal responsibility," when it means getting up and going to work everyday and doing a good job, or making sure that your loved ones have enough to eat and a roof over their heads, is quite a good thing. But Bill O'Reilly's "Who's Looking Out for You?" style of mindset (answer: no one) is sadism, pure and simple. "Personal responsibility" is one thing; "fuck you, too bad" is another. Conservatives, sadly, have abandoned the former and embraced the latter. Really, New Orleans is but the most spectacular example of many.

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