Mark Koerner writes about...

Two Monologues

Don,

Your editorial is a good one. It meshes with my own view fairly closely, which is that 9/11 was a “conservative disaster” while Katrina is a “liberal” one; not in the sense that American ideologues caused either one, but in the sense that each disaster stands as an argument of sorts for a different type of monologue.

For 9/11:

“It is all well and good to say that the government should feed the hungry and wipe out poverty and end discrimination and clean up the environment and send alcoholics through rehab. Maybe it should, in certain cases.

“But what the liberals have forgotten is that some functions of government are more basic than others. And protecting the citizenry from people who mean to harm the citizens is the first function of government.

“Other functions, like restoring wetlands, must be subordinate to the public safety function. And here we have a case of the government failing to realize that. They spent so much money on all of these other activities, that they didn’t have the resources or the focus to stop al-Qaida.”

For Katrina:

“It is all well and good to say that families and charities should take care of the poor, the unemployed, the sick, the injured, the lame and other unfortunates. ‘And if they fail,’ the argument goes, ‘then we should rely on local governments and state governments, not on the federal government’.

“Katrina shows us that this is just not a realistic argument. Only one organization has the necessary personnel and resources to do widespread rescue and relief work over a long period of time, and that is the federal government. Yes, all these other institutions have a role, and the federal government shouldn’t do more than it has to, but in a case like this, it clearly has to do a lot.

“And even if the state of Louisiana could handle this problem on its own over the next few years (which it can’t), it might very well bankrupt that state government, or force it to go deep into a debt it might not get out of for 50 or 75 years. This isn’t a cost most of us want to impose on a poor state like that. It’s much better to spread the costs over all of us, and there is only one organization that can do that: the federal government.”

As a side issue, a certain type of grass-roots, salt-of-the-earth conservative has always said that the United States never gets anything out of foreign aid. “We just keep pouring money down a bottomless pit,” this guy says.

But as we can see from the world’s response to Katrina, foreign aid is not a bottomless pit after all. Our old enemies, Germany and Italy, our most reliable friend, Australia, and even El Salvador and Cuba have offered to provide relief efforts. So what goes around does come around, doesn’t it?

Neither monologue is strictly correct, of course. But the essential point is that the two different disasters lend plausibility to two different arguments.

Mark