BagnewsNotes on Bush’s Guitar
BAGnewsNotes does the usual awesome job of squeezing every last drop of meaning out of an iconic news photograph: in this case, the one of Bush strumming while New Orleans drowned last Tuesday: The Week America Lost New Orleans: A Presidential Retrospective (#2).
September 4th, 2005 at 11:56 am
Or is that squeezing every last drop of politically-poisoned mental scrapings of obscurity that one could possibly dream up out of a photo-op. What a load of psychobabble garbage!
I don’t know the exact timing of this photo to the point in which the growing magnitude of the floodings’ effects became well-known, but it seems to me that Tuesday morning/afternoon was when things just began to sink in regarding the level of the unfolding tragedy. And the well-established communication/information/leadership break-downs from the local/state level on up, only aggravated the problem. Those of a rational mindset would assume that the scheduled photo-op happened before the true impact of the levee breaking reached outside of the Gulf Coast area. Even the news agencies at the scene couldn’t paint an accurate picture of the number of people being drowned or threatened until midday, to my recollection. Maybe someone with a sense of intellectual honesty can actually present the time the picture was taken that day, and enlighten the rest of us.
It’s already evident that this is less the specific bungling by a Presidential Administration, than it is the more common screw-up during such disasters, which is the multi-level governmental ineptness of budgeting, resources, communication, bureaucracy and the lack of political will, which happened at the time of the crisis as well as across decades of missed opportunities. Let there be no mistake, the Bush Administration has its own share of blame in how its various agencies and leadership appointees have collected information and reacted to the growing disaster during a critical 24-48 hour time window.
But those who seem to gleefully be using props such as this to breathlessly present “My Pet Goat II”, are callously standing on the backs of dead bodies in order to try to make smug and shallow political theatre.
September 4th, 2005 at 1:03 pm
No more excuses please. I find it hard to believe Bush didn’t know by Tuesday. There were reports Monday of how bad things were getting. Bush apparently wasn’t paying attention:
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001054586
It was clear to us by late morning Monday that many people inside the Superdome would not be returning home. It should have been clear to our government, Mr. President. So why weren’t they evacuated out of the city immediately? We learned seven years ago, when Hurricane Georges threatened, that the Dome isn’t suitable as a long-term shelter. So what did state and national officials think would happen to tens of thousands of people trapped inside with no air conditioning, overflowing toilets and dwindling amounts of food, water and other essentials?
September 4th, 2005 at 6:16 pm
Craig,
It may come off like psychobabble to you, but at least it’s professionally qualified psychobabble. The guy who writes BAGnewsNotes has a PhD in clinical psychology, and according to his bio, “His research has dealt primarily with symbolic expression, the process of visual narrative, and the psychological function of metaphor.”
The photo was taken at Bush’s event in San Diego on Tuesday morning. That would be about two days after Bush, at the request of Louisiana authorities, declared a state of emergency for the state. The major levee breaches occurred in the early morning hours (around 1:30 a.m. local time?) on Tuesday, more than 8 hours before Bush’s photo op with the guitar. Regardless of what you or I were aware of at the time, it would be nice to think that the president would have had access to better information, and would have had a better idea of the seriousness of the situation.
Feel free to continue talking about people “callously standing on the backs of dead bodies in order to try to make smug and shallow political theatre,” and to question my intellectual honesty. There are plenty of things to be sad about in connection with this, and plenty of things to be angry about. I realized some time ago that I’d already made up my mind about what kind of person, and what kind of leader, Bush is, and in light of that, it’s understandable that you might choose to interpret my reactions in this case as being only the result of my anti-Bush bias. Understandable, but wrong.
September 4th, 2005 at 11:26 pm
Fine, but a professional researcher should maintain the ethics to do more than pay lip service to being careful to make too much out of a photo capturing one moment in time, with no real context, and then unleash a torrent of off-hand remarks on a person’s character based upon the position of a finger on a guitar or the polite laughter of a bystander. A person can obviously try to hide their personal biases behind a veneer of learned professionalism, but such awkward and over-simplistic observations ought to be an embarrassment to the standards of true clinical analysis. You can choose to ignore such thinly veiled rantings since the author is preaching an acceptable message. But let’s not give it the automatic credence of authenticity based solely on a degree on the wall. Such people are not immune to personal opinion of ANY direction that they can then let control the way they view issues.
I was, by the way, calling on ANYONE who could muster the intellectual honesty to give a proper timeline of the time of the photo-op and the realization, beyond local authorities, of the extent of the flood’s effects on the city and its residents. This more specifically was meant to convict the original creator of the posting who is trying to make the connection between Bush’s photo and the growing deaths in New Orleans, without any real timeline context.
It’s my own observation that it amazes me that, with so many obvious governmental levels of ineptness and confusion, from the local to the national sector, that so many people choose to give short shrift to anything that doesn’t involve Bush and his Administrations’ missteps, both real and imagined. You’d think that those who truly want to see how a critical time lapse in response can occur would feel obligated to understand the full scope of responsibility. Unless I’m remembering wrong, I thought you decided a while back, after some soul-searching, that you wanted to discover and reveal the “truth” of a given issue, regardless of what direction that truth lead, or by what source that truth came from. If that is the proper framing of that belief, then a tragic issue like this is certainly much more multi-layered than a simple “Bush Bad” slant.
September 5th, 2005 at 12:19 am
BAGnewsNotes isn’t purporting to offer detailed psychological analysis of the people in the images the site discusses. It’s more that it’s talking about the inherent psychological symbolism of the photos. I often find the analysis interesting, in that it points out things I didn’t notice consciously, but which, after reading the analysis, I look at and say, huh, yeah, I think you’re right. That is going on in that image. (Other times, though, I just chuckle and say eh, whatever. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.)
I think there’s a lot more going on with this Katrina aftermath than just “Bush bad.” Yeah, I think Bush is pretty bad, and that the Katrina aftermath reveals his badness in significant ways. But there’s certainly more to the story. There’s plenty of ineptitude and dishonesty in both flavors of government in this country, and from the little I’ve seen of it, the Democratic machine in Louisiana has just as many snake-oil salesmen as the Republicans next door in Mississippi. (Though I confess to having a bit of a crush on Mary Landrieu. Did you know she’s 50? Damn.)
For example, I just rewatched the Aaron Broussard piece from Meet the Press today (the one where the president of Jefferson Parish dissolves in tears telling Tim Russert the story about the dying momma of the guy who works in his building), and I had this moment of strong suspicion that I was watching the scene of Steve Martin’s Vinnie in My Blue Heaven, when he arrives at the airport in New York and convinces Rick Moranis to remove his handcuffs by getting all weepy (“Don’t make me look like a criminal in front of my mama!”)
The first time I watched Broussard’s comments I was blinking back tears. So I don’t know; maybe his story is true. Or maybe it’s not, and he’s just another politician working a crowd. The juxtaposition of his performance with Mississippi Governor Barbour’s “aw shucks; the federal gubment’s been doing just fawn by us” routine was making me feel like I was in the middle of a Dukes of Hazard episode.
For the record, I believe the city authorities in New Orleans could have, and should have, done a better job of getting people out of the city, and that Secretary of Homeland Security Chertoff was making a good point today when he pointed out to Russert that there are people who need rescuing now, and it’s not a good time for second-guessing and fingerpointing. The Bush team, of course, has been saying that since day one of this disaster.
The problem is, I’ve seen them do this before, and I know for a fact that they will never get to a place where they stop and say, “Okay. Now it’s an appropriate time for fingerpointing.” The fact is, they’ve screwed up bigtime here, and they should be responsible for that, and they will predictably do whatever they can to deflect that responsibility. And they’re really, really good at that.
The executive branch’s upper echelons are filled with fuckups at the moment. It’s filled with people who owe there position of power to the fact that they are, in essence, frat buddies with the Frat-Brother-in-Chief. They’re not particularly competent, and in a huge disaster like this (or like the war in Iraq) that incompetence shows.
It pisses me off that people are dying because of their ineptitude. So I feel like talking about it, and taking issue with those (like yourself) who appear to be defending them.
It’s nothing personal against you. I’m sorry for sounding strident lately. But this stuff really bugs me.