Posted on September 21st, 2005 by Gavin M.
[Updated]
Wowsers.
The questions raised by unlovely Rita are as painful as they are obvious. Will gays stay behind in disproportionate numbers in this disproportionately gay city? If so, Why? If gay marriage were legalized, could some of this disaster be avoided? Would George W. Bush have responded more quickly if the victims were just a tad less stylish? And, of course: Will the federal government help keep Key West festive?
Do you know the part in The Producers where the stage production of ‘Springtime for Hitler’ is in full blare, with dancing and singing and Busby Berkeley choreography, like this:
And then the camera cuts to the audience, who’s like this:
That’s one bonk-headed wingnut there, smiling, while the rest of America thinks that Jonah ought to be taken in chains to a hospital for the criminally insane.
Now, we’ve known Jonah for awhile, and it’s only fair to say that he’s not genuinely crazy and malignant like certain other people we could name. The thing with Jonah is that he’s been trained, literally from childhood, to think that he’s a public intellectual in the mid-century New York mode — comprising Commentary, Partisan Review, the NYRB, and the very ship whose poop deck he now haunts, the National Review. Except instead of being a Hofstadter, a Schlesinger, or a Buckley, he’s merely a medium-smart guy with a cushy, crony-advanced career, who uses three or four standard, stolen riffs for every occasion. Jonah doesn’t have ideas; he has opinions and a schtick, like so many other Beltway-conservative yappers and scribblers. It’s to his credit that he seems to realize this on some level — whereas, for instance, John Podhoretz’s cushy, nepotism-driven career seems to have left him with no self-insight at all. But things have changed in America in recent weeks, such that the old whoop-de-do that Jonah purveys, which used to be so easy and replicable in portion-controlled, column-sized doses, is no longer in the mainstream. It’s genuinely beginning to seem crazy, to growing majorities of non-bonk-headed Americans. Apropos hurricanes, and whether it’s the government’s job to rescue people from them, the ratio in the pic above isn’t far from accurate. If it were a referendum on the success of the Bush Presidency, you’d have to add a few more helmet-heads in the gloamy background, but not too damn many.
But I think the larger revelation of Katrina has less to do with identity politics and more to do with showing what various people think the government is for. We’ve heard constantly that it is a scandal of one sort or another that the (overwhelmingly black) inner city residents of New Orleans are so poor 40 years after the War on Poverty was launched.
Yes, if we’re not mistaken, that’s the lead-in to the late-1960s Buckley riff. It used to slay them in the Rotary halls.
“If I could just… Here, watch: If I could only stretch that final six inches or so and get my lips on it…”
Watch as Jonah bravely tilts against the windmills of Liberal Big Government of the wide-tie, Dick Cavett Show variety — as seen on that black-and-white Klassic Krusty the Clown segment where Ravi Shankar plays long ragas and Krusty interviews AFL-CIO head George Meany.
Indeed, the underlying assumption of the War on Poverty (and the New Deal) that government should make sure no one is poor is now widely accepted on both the left and the right. The chief arguments between policymakers on the right and left are over means, not ends. One side, speaking very broadly, believes the rising tide of the market should lift all boats. The other believes the government needs to tug the smaller dinghies.
It makes you almost want to vote for Nixon in ’08, doesn’t it? And not to put too fine a point on it, but perhaps, considering recent events, the Kennedy-era metaphor of the “rising tide of the market” is a bit tone-deaf? Like, maybe if the Cat-5 hurricane swirling off the coast of Texas were instead threatening the DC-area Cheetos supply, someone would snap awake from his happy-tummy, GOP-fanboy reveries?
In brief: We have a pal who you definitely ought to meet, Goldberg. Name’s Shutty McUppington. He’s a tight pal, in the zipper trade. Good business connection — win-win.
