17th St canal levee on Lake Pontchartrain
September 14, 2005
The 17th Street canal levee on Lake Pontchartrain
Just Broke. Bush: “I take responsibility”
READ how The New York Times manages the Metaphysics of Meaninglessness
Page One top right-hand column New York Times quotes:
““Katrina exposed serious problems in our response capability at all levels of government, and to the extent that the federal government didn’t fully do its job right, I take responsibility,” Mr. Bush said in an appearance in the East Room with President Jalail Talabani of Iraq.”
This gesture was so meaningless in real terms that reporters were obliged to note why the departure itself made news. The “No regrets” president he was known as. “Admit nothing. Deny everything. Blame the accusers.” --was the rule printed on Reagan’s Contras T-Shirts. Now seen (as if) eating humble pie? “Throughout his nearly five years in office Mr. Bush has sresisted publicaly acknowledging mistakes or shortcomings, and his willingness I this case …was evidence of how shaken his presidency has been by the political fallout from the government’s handling of the storm.”
The qualification “seen (as if)” accepting blame goes with the meanglessness of the ritual. There is actually a double-seeming going on here. One, that had prevailed as long as the levees kept Lake Pontchartrain from flooding New Orleans, despite dire warnings, seeming as if residents were safe; and the other one going on in the Oval Office as Bush speaks. If acceptance of responsibility carried real import, it would be followed by judgment and punishment. So far, only one head has rolled, metaphorically – FEMA’s Brown’s. And in fact, Bush’s public show of taking responsibility works against any penalty or retribution being exacted; while simultaneously smearing blame on “all levels of government”. But in this case, responsibility falls on particular policies by particular parties within government, not government per se --already perceived as punishing enough. This smearing of all “government” – token of authoritarian control necessary for everyone to recognize – for the ‘mistakes’ made by these parties and policies is one of their favorite rhetorical ploys. “Hide behind the universal, after it has been particularized.” --would be a Rove-revised T-Shirt update. “Transparency” means never having to take responsibility for anything in particular, while claiming credit for everything in general.
These reflexions on what meaninglessness is, under a psycholinguistic regime that stages penitence sanctioned by mock punishment to avoid real culpability, were spinning through my head as Tom Friedman’s article “Singapore and Katrina” snagged my eye like a PacMan’s sprog. Quoting Janadas Devanm, a Straits Times columnist explaining to his Asian readers how the U.S. is changing:
“Today’s conservatives differ in one crucial aspect from yesterday’s conservatives: the latter believed in small government but believed, too, that a country ought to pay for all the government that it needed.
“The former believe in no government, and therefore conclude that there is no need for a country to pay for even the government it does have….”
………..then comes the clincher:
“(But) it is not only government that doesn’t show up when government is starved of resources and leached of all its meaning. Community doesn’t show up either, sacrifice doesn’t show up, pulling together doesn’t show up, “we’re all in this thing together’ doesn’t show up.”
It is to confute the double meaningless of not taking responsibility for the levee that busted, while appearing to do so, that Katrina as an Act of God must be insisted upon. It is judgment of their ways, even as the flood deaths bring judgement against those who didn’t properly fix the levees.
The social energies mentioned above, traceable to psychological sources, don’t show up when: those in government use government ritual for show, to keep in power those whose ways contributed to the devastation for which they are taking responsibility (not:) … as well as for the devastation of Iraq. These are eerily, if indelibly linked by the presence of the puppet president Talibani in the Oval Room. Doubling up the “good-news/bad news situation” to neutralize the bad, one supposes. That’s the way they do.
Meanwhile, doubling up THIS analysis of Managing Meaninglessnes, it can be reported that one’s eye could not fall on the New York Times page 1 article on Bush eating humble pie without being virtually assaulted by a 7” close-up picture of John Roberts rugged face: blue eyed, open mouthed, clam-clamming it up on the abortion issue, the President’s pick. Oh, how the neocons adore Roberts. An entire thread on the OD board is devoted to it. (Not to mention how they ‘love’ Bush’s other Reagan-era appointments.) The blatant symbolic message on the minds of the Times’ editors: “Anxious about the breakdown of authority (17th st. canal levees collapsing)? Here is your next father figure … seque to Roman Catholic Judge Roberts, sitting on the bench up there, judging on the side of the Unborn.
Getting one’s mind around all this involves making that final symbolic loop – the unconscious displacement (seque) of group-cathexis from blame of Bush, to blame of authority in general (accepted), to Rescue From Punishment (for original sin, committed in the womb before they were born) by Roberts. Its, like, “BUSH! BUSH! HE’S OUR MAN! IF HE CAN’T DO IT, ROBERTS CAN.” This is the next big sea-change movement of historical group fantasy, as I see it. Robert’s is America’s Catholic Group-Fantasy Father.
Many other symbolic associations are linked to this, such as the “monotheistic moralizing masochistic trend” (Freud, l923). Massive homosexual anxiety in American males is cathected with, through, “threat of anal rape” as deep underlying terror patch in the psyche. This “threat” is projected onto Arab/Islamic males, represented by Saddam Hussein, and “war on terror” is the massive delusional group-psychological defense against this psychological threat (“terror” in themselves).
The 17th Street canal levee on Lake Pontchartrain
Just Broke. Bush: “I take responsibility”
READ how The New York Times manages the Metaphysics of Meaninglessness
Page One top right-hand column New York Times quotes:
““Katrina exposed serious problems in our response capability at all levels of government, and to the extent that the federal government didn’t fully do its job right, I take responsibility,” Mr. Bush said in an appearance in the East Room with President Jalail Talabani of Iraq.”
This gesture was so meaningless in real terms that reporters were obliged to note why the departure itself made news. The “No regrets” president he was known as. “Admit nothing. Deny everything. Blame the accusers.” --was the rule printed on Reagan’s Contras T-Shirts. Now seen (as if) eating humble pie? “Throughout his nearly five years in office Mr. Bush has sresisted publicaly acknowledging mistakes or shortcomings, and his willingness I this case …was evidence of how shaken his presidency has been by the political fallout from the government’s handling of the storm.”
The qualification “seen (as if)” accepting blame goes with the meanglessness of the ritual. There is actually a double-seeming going on here. One, that had prevailed as long as the levees kept Lake Pontchartrain from flooding New Orleans, despite dire warnings, seeming as if residents were safe; and the other one going on in the Oval Office as Bush speaks. If acceptance of responsibility carried real import, it would be followed by judgment and punishment. So far, only one head has rolled, metaphorically – FEMA’s Brown’s. And in fact, Bush’s public show of taking responsibility works against any penalty or retribution being exacted; while simultaneously smearing blame on “all levels of government”. But in this case, responsibility falls on particular policies by particular parties within government, not government per se --already perceived as punishing enough. This smearing of all “government” – token of authoritarian control necessary for everyone to recognize – for the ‘mistakes’ made by these parties and policies is one of their favorite rhetorical ploys. “Hide behind the universal, after it has been particularized.” --would be a Rove-revised T-Shirt update. “Transparency” means never having to take responsibility for anything in particular, while claiming credit for everything in general.
These reflexions on what meaninglessness is, under a psycholinguistic regime that stages penitence sanctioned by mock punishment to avoid real culpability, were spinning through my head as Tom Friedman’s article “Singapore and Katrina” snagged my eye like a PacMan’s sprog. Quoting Janadas Devanm, a Straits Times columnist explaining to his Asian readers how the U.S. is changing:
“Today’s conservatives differ in one crucial aspect from yesterday’s conservatives: the latter believed in small government but believed, too, that a country ought to pay for all the government that it needed.
“The former believe in no government, and therefore conclude that there is no need for a country to pay for even the government it does have….”
………..then comes the clincher:
“(But) it is not only government that doesn’t show up when government is starved of resources and leached of all its meaning. Community doesn’t show up either, sacrifice doesn’t show up, pulling together doesn’t show up, “we’re all in this thing together’ doesn’t show up.”
It is to confute the double meaningless of not taking responsibility for the levee that busted, while appearing to do so, that Katrina as an Act of God must be insisted upon. It is judgment of their ways, even as the flood deaths bring judgement against those who didn’t properly fix the levees.
The social energies mentioned above, traceable to psychological sources, don’t show up when: those in government use government ritual for show, to keep in power those whose ways contributed to the devastation for which they are taking responsibility (not:) … as well as for the devastation of Iraq. These are eerily, if indelibly linked by the presence of the puppet president Talibani in the Oval Room. Doubling up the “good-news/bad news situation” to neutralize the bad, one supposes. That’s the way they do.
Meanwhile, doubling up THIS analysis of Managing Meaninglessnes, it can be reported that one’s eye could not fall on the New York Times page 1 article on Bush eating humble pie without being virtually assaulted by a 7” close-up picture of John Roberts rugged face: blue eyed, open mouthed, clam-clamming it up on the abortion issue, the President’s pick. Oh, how the neocons adore Roberts. An entire thread on the OD board is devoted to it. (Not to mention how they ‘love’ Bush’s other Reagan-era appointments.) The blatant symbolic message on the minds of the Times’ editors: “Anxious about the breakdown of authority (17th st. canal levees collapsing)? Here is your next father figure … seque to Roman Catholic Judge Roberts, sitting on the bench up there, judging on the side of the Unborn.
Getting one’s mind around all this involves making that final symbolic loop – the unconscious displacement (seque) of group-cathexis from blame of Bush, to blame of authority in general (accepted), to Rescue From Punishment (for original sin, committed in the womb before they were born) by Roberts. Its, like, “BUSH! BUSH! HE’S OUR MAN! IF HE CAN’T DO IT, ROBERTS CAN.” This is the next big sea-change movement of historical group fantasy, as I see it. Robert’s is America’s Catholic Group-Fantasy Father.
Many other symbolic associations are linked to this, such as the “monotheistic moralizing masochistic trend” (Freud, l923). Massive homosexual anxiety in American males is cathected with, through, “threat of anal rape” as deep underlying terror patch in the psyche. This “threat” is projected onto Arab/Islamic males, represented by Saddam Hussein, and “war on terror” is the massive delusional group-psychological defense against this psychological threat (“terror” in themselves).
posted by Sid Thomas | 2:03 PM
1 Comments:
Aren’t you just using Bush as generic target of your anger. Even if he says that he did some things wrong it is not enough for you. He has to be the ultimate cause of all the problems. For fifty years we have known that if a hurricane hit New Orleans the levees would burst, everyone knew it, Governors, majors, residents. Comfort yourself if you need to with imaginary claims of Christian blame on homosexuals (though no religious group has said that) and blame a politician you hated anyway. If you have any respect for the rule of law you will have to admit that Bush is not the only one who screwed up. In fact, he is not the primary one.
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