Do they give some kind of prize at the Times for flamboyantly bad writing? (Actually, I'm pretty sure they do: it's the op-ed space reserved for Tom Friedman's column. Ba-dum-cha.) Because it looks to me like Selena Roberts is angling for it.

Her Sunday piece (sorry, no permalink) is on the re-emergence of Curt Schilling, who mowed down the Yankees yesterday and somewhat dented their playoff hopes. Try to conceive of the combination of mood-altering drugs you'd have to take to produce prose like this:

By Schilling's thespian standards, this was a low-key sequel to his Shakespearean-timed recovery powers. Even so, the vision of Schilling resurfacing as Boston's starry-ace purchase was another momentous dig to the Yankees' vulnerable, and unfamiliar, existence as the pursuant of their rival.

Unimposing on sight, with his rounded upper body disproportionate to his vermicelli legs, Schilling has come to represent what the Yankees used to be and what they long to be again.

Schilling is the symbol of resilience and of insufferable confidence. He is the embodiment of a front-runner and of a Velcro aura. He is the personage of his city's World Series mentality and the envy of his rival's flummoxed fan base.

She really shouldn't have used the word "Shakespearean" (much less the phrase "Shakespearean-timed"): it seems to have made her come over all adjective-y and archaic. What the hell is a "starry-ace purchase"? The Yankees are "pursuant" to their rival? (Because, you know, it sounds more high-falutin and Shakespearean than "pursuer," a pedestrian word which has no advantage other than being correct. "Unimposing on sight," rather than to sight, is another symptom of the disease.) Schilling's "resurfacing" (actually, the vision of it) is a "dig" to the Yankees' "vulnerable existence"? How exactly does a hole get dug (and a "momentous" one, no less) in an existence?

I'd like to play along with Selena, and try to think about who the personage of my city's mentality might be, but I'm stuck trying to understand how someone manages to embody something as immaterial as an aura. Or, for that matter, what sort of an "aura" it is that's made of Velcro. A damn clingy aura, I guess. And prickly.

Did an editor really pass eyes over this? Must have been one with a Shakespearean taste for letting writers hoist themselves on their own petards.

posted by michael  3:03:55 PM  
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Chinatown. Virtually alone among the right-wing punditocracy, David Brooks seemed to have been genuinely shocked and dismayed by the appalling aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, by what it laid bare of the cruel institutional indifference to the suffering of the poor and black in America. It seemed, in spite of what one expected, in spite of years of shilling for the forces that mandated that cruelty and deepened that indifference, that Brooks had retained some sort of moral core after all—how else could he have been capable of shock? His reaction was unexpected enough, in fact, that he got some praise for it from the left—maybe even deserved praise, so long as you were willing to grade on a curve.

Well, that didn't last long, did it?

We're told you can't serve God and Mammon, and the strain of trying may have been too much for poor Brooksie. It's a contest in which Mammon decidedly has the upper hand: nothing matters so much to a right-wing pundit as the paycheck, except maybe the airtime, and both depend on reliable performance. So in today's column, Brooks takes up the Magic Airbrush of Paradox, and with it photoshops a nice, soft, comforting libertarian-ideological glow over the whole sickening mess. Turns out that the disaster-within-a-disaster, the massive failure of anticipation and response that doomed New Orleans to its toxic flood, was really a flaw—wait for it—in the nature of planning itself.

Among the many achievements of the human race - Chartres Cathedral, the Mona Lisa - surely the New Orleans emergency preparedness plan must rank among the greatest, and the fact that this plan turned out to be irrelevant to reality should not detract from its stature as a masterpiece of bureaucratic thinking. ...

One can imagine the PowerPoint presentations! The millions of cascading bullet points! The infinity of hours spent planning a hurricane response that would make a Prussian officer gasp with reverence! ...

The New Orleans emergency preparedness plan offers a precise communications strategy, so all city residents will know exactly where to go in times of crisis. It recommends that two traffic control officers be placed at each key intersection. It recommends busing the thousands of residents unable to evacuate themselves to staging areas prestocked with food.

In short, the plan was so beautiful, it's too bad reality destroyed it. The plan's authors were not stupid or venal. They are doubtless good public servants who worked in agencies set up to prepare for this storm. And yet their elaborate plan crumbled under the weight of the actual disaster.

A sense of tragic irony may be a fine thing in a novelist or playwright; it's a little beside the point, however, in a public affairs columnist. (Never mind that Brooks' GOP heroes have been selling themselves for four years now on the pitch that they've got plans to deal with all the big bad scaries out there, and the other guys don't.) What better use of their time might have been made by the people charged with planning for a disaster than, er, planning for a disaster, Brooks can't be bothered to say: then again, he only has so much space in his column, and there's a lot of easy and irrelevant mockery of PowerPoint slides and bureaucratese to be larded in.

One bureaucratic acronym conspicuous by its absence in Brooks' column is FEMA, which one would have thought had a thing or two to do with the subject. Despite his willingness to blame government "at every level," somehow the only level Brooks can get any handle on is state and local. That's a shame, because it's really not possible to speak—honestly, at least—about disaster planning in Louisiana and New Orleans without accounting for the systematic effect of the 800-pound federal gorilla. Consider the testimony about the now-famous "Hurricane Pam" exercise from one of those planners Brooks is so happy to mock (via):

There was a certain amount of contention, a few turf wars, some loud talk. None if it consequential, in the end, because of the single greatest emollient: FEMA. The Federal Emergency Management Agency promised the moon and the stars. They promised to have 1,000,000 bottles of water per day coming into affected areas within 48 hours. They promised massive prestaging with water, ice, medical supplies and generators. Anything that was needed, they would have either in place as the storm hit or ready to move in immediately after. All it would take is a phone call from local officials to the state, who would then call FEMA, and it would be done. ...

The organizers of the exercise -- particularly the former commender of LOHSEP [Louisiana Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness], Col. Michael Brown (not that one) -- insisted that the plans contain no "fairy dust": no magical leaps of supply chains or providers: if you said you would need 500 semis for your part of the plan, you had to specify where the 500 semis were coming from. ... The problem is FEMA, and by extension the Department of Homeland Security, which gobbled FEMA up in 2003. FEMA promised more than they could deliver. They cut off deeper, perhaps more meaningful discussion and planning by handing out empty promises. The plans that were made -- which were not given any sort of stamp of authority -- were never distributed or otherwise made available to those who most needed stable guidance; they vanished into the maw of FEMA and LOSHEP.

So maybe, David, the fault isn't in planning as such, or at all levels, so much as in a certain approach to planning (or to avoiding it) at an identifiable level.

Brooks winds it up with that oldest of old right-libertarian chestnuts, the biggummintistheproblem wheeze:

The paradox at the heart of the Katrina disaster ... is that we really need government in times like this, but government is extremely limited in what it can effectively do. ... For the brutal fact is, government tends toward bureaucracy, which means elaborate paper flow but ineffective action. Government depends on planning, but planners can never really anticipate the inevitable complexity of events. And American government is inevitably divided and power is inevitably devolved. ...

So of course we need limited but energetic government. But liberals who think this disaster is going to set off a progressive revival need to explain how a comprehensive governmental failure is going to restore America's faith in big government.

[The final dig at "progressive revival" is Brooksie's way of signaling that he's recovered his equilibrium, and is ready to harness back up and ride into keyboard battle. His patrons must have been giving him the stink-eye after those earlier Katrina columns, after all.]

Has this gag ever been less persuasive? Government didn't fail the citizens of New Orleans and the Gulf coast; bureaucracy didn't fail them. "Government" and "bureaucracy" are abstractions, not real things. Unless we want to push Brooks' logic—and it's not exactly a stretch—to the hopeless conclusion that government as such (American-style government, at least) is a practical impossibility, a structure designed and doomed to fail, we have to recognize that the phrase "failure of government," as he wants to use it, is essentially contentless. There is no such thing as a general "failure of government." Particular governments, particular agencies of government, fail under particular circumstances. To be more precise, the people who run governments and government agencies fail, and they do so for a complex of structural reasons that can and should be assessed and remedied.

No David, "government" (big or small) didn't fail here. But Republican government sure as hell did.

Brooks, though, is content just to throw up his hands. It's Chinatown, Jake. Then again, this may be the only pose left when the administration for which you've so relentlessly and shamelessly propagandized has just revealed its near complete bankruptcy. Too bad for Brooks that his column appears on the same day as Evan Thomas' Newsweek article, "How Bush Blew It": an article that (finally!) discusses forthrightly the way in which Presidential prickliness, defensiveness, inattention and magical thinking have become crippling problems of government. More than usually, the rot in this administration comes from the head—and the stink is now in everybody's nostrils, like it or not. David Brooks may be able, still, to wish it away (along with his own complicity) for the duration of a newspaper column: but reality, as if we needed reminding, is not so kind.

Update: At Corrente, Lambert's also on Brooks and picks up the "failure of Republican government" theme. Beat me to it, in fact.

posted by michael  1:55:03 PM  
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