Norquist + Katrina = Drowning in a bathtub

Some may recall the words of hideous conservative organizer and ideologue, Grover Norquist, president of American's for tax reform:

"My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years," he says, "to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."

What does it look like when he gets his wish?  We've been seeing it on the news for the last 6 days--not just a city drowning, but the disposable people, the people disposed of, unaccounted for, or accounted for as expendable.

To drown government in a bathtub means three things:

1. To drown those produced as capital's remnants and remainders, its necessary excesses, to dispose of them like and with so much garbage; to drown government is really to reduce people to sewage that is simply flushed away; this has been going on for a long time; in New Orleans we are confronted with what happens with the pipes burst, back up, overflow. In short, we get the Real of the US: the poor have been left behind.

2.  To drown government means to drown people's expectations for commonality and social solidarity; to think of government in the reduced terms of force or failure, never as common project; it means that any challenge all too easily swamps government, producing ever more disasters, disasters that cannot be met simply with guns and bombs. Humanitarian efforts try to take up the slack, to absorb and accomodate the discarded people. But, as they do so, the excess of the people becomes all the more striking; how can they be fit in? There is no place for them.

3. As a result, to drown government means to concentrate all energy and expectation in whatever remains of government--in the US case, again, brute military force where the solution to any problem is to demonize and exterminate.

Comments

[ryry39]

The continual onslaught of posts that attack the current state of the U.S. government and more specifically the Republican administration is puzzling. Prof. Dean uses “conservative” Grover Norquist as an example of how the American right wing is misguided if not completely blind to the needs of our nation. While most knee-jerk liberals cringe with the sound Norquist’s ideas they fail to analyze the meat of his argument. Conveniently, today’s Wall Street Journal had three articles that examined the size of government.

The first article (p, A2 “small government…”) negated Dean’s entire idea that this Republican administration is all about shrinking government. The article states that during the Bush administration there has been a “20% increase in all of federal spending…even before the cost of responding to Hurricane Katerina”. The second (p, A18 “Private FEMA”) is about “the remarkable response of the business community” for hurricane relief. Their “straightforward generosity…by last count…had exceeded $200 million”. The third article (p, A19 “When Red Tape Trumped Common Sense”), written, by Sen. Jindal from Louisiana, notes how “there have already been a number of instances in which an overly inhibitive bureaucracy prevented an appropriate response to the disaster”.

What these last two articles are saying (and what Norquist insinuates with his tongue in cheek bathtub remark) is that if we had fewer functions run by a monopolistic state agency the government would be remarkably more efficient. The idea that more competition leads to lower prices and more efficiency is not new, it’s the foundation of free market Capitalism. Maybe if a few knee-jerk liberals would suck it up and decide to crack open an economics text they wouldn’t be so scared about numbers and grab some insight to the ideas of economic conservatives.

[Patrick J. Mullins]

Un-neutralized oil slicks under any other name would smell as fetid--whether or not the Mother Slick is one mindless brain or turning into Skylla. Next thing you know she'll have reached Dick Cheney's number of heart attacks, but only with 5 can you have enough heads to cannibalize in an authentic Skylla fashion. I'm so dizzy I can't even remember what the term 'pushy broad' means anymore, but I think Skylla was one. Incredible when people have nothing better to do than try to steal virtual real estate.

Rejection is hard on all of us, honey, but I think you were given your walking papers a good while back. You're just like that goblin that slipped into the queen's bedroom in 1982 after having cased the joint and stolen a bottle of white wine through a tunnel. Why don't you ask for a cigarette, because the security button is on the other side of the bed and I'm sure the owner doesn't smoke regularly, so she'll have to rouse the guards.

[Jodi]

Oh the fickle, fickle Right. And oh how quickly they forget. 10 years ago the era of big government was over. The Right was the anti-government Party, the Party who would get government off our backs. Now conservatives brag about increases in government--at least in terms of spend, spend, spend. It seems these new conservatives just can't spend enough! As long, that as, as this enough is for the military.

So, there is something honest and commendable about these new conservatives. Like their historical (Edmund Burke and William F. Buckley) forefathers, these conservatives are happy with big government as long as it maintains the great chain of being and 'natural hierarchies,' as long as the rest of us remain in our place. Thanks to these new conservatives, New York City has the same income disparity as Nairobi. That's what conservativism looks like.

And, as we will see, conservatives will have to keep fighting, and keep resorting to brutal force as the poor do what they can to survive.

[Patrick J. Mullins]

Yes, and they're now fighting so hard in vacuity delicto since they 've lost the technique of in flagrante delicto, that I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't come up with a National Guard line of clothes. They've already started trying to appropriate our homes since by now New Orleans is the new style-maker. Come back and preach where once you tried and failed. If you fail, try, try again. Never ever learn to quit proselytizing, never ever learn to understand that other people mean 'No' when they say 'No,' not just fucking right wing vapitudes, who say nothing but 'no' and carry it out at the end of a loaded gun.

[Jodi]

Yes, Patrick, they fight and they fight and they have likely forgotten why--something out of Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe? Or maybe Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (although I don't know that one well enough...maybe I'm just thinking Liz and heat.

On style, but off: a branch of national guard or something like that with red berets has been assigned to the French Quarter. If they would have had different hats, they might have been in the garden district.

[Patrick J. Mullins]

Well, Liz fought heat all her life, the marvelous old bat--and ended up proving that being in heat didn't preclude having enormous compassion.

Of course, that one has 'Sister-Woman', one of the great nomenclatures of all time, but she's not cut out for the job.

In any case, we won't see much of what they're wearing, due to the proscription of photos--as well they might proscribe them, because there are all those armed security guards around the rich property after firearms were taken from everyone else except military personnel--and these guards.

Then yesterday there were the $2000 debit cards, and Brownie yelling 'lookit! FEMA never did this before'

And today they still didn't ever do it before, because they were pulled, in favour of wire transfers, etc.

[ryry39]

Well, it only took me about 12 hours to remember why I can't stand the left wing. When someone from the right gives them something to read and possibly learn from they quickly dismiss any possibility to learn in favor to poke fun of their silliness. Fortunately,my four years of attempted left wing brainwashing didn't work and what remains is a stronger will and desire for me to enter an arena where mindless banter isn't work, its play and the bottom line consists of thorough quantitative analysis and exceptional client service, not subjective grading.

[Jodi]

And, for those who can't afford exceptional client service there are all sorts of interesting options: living in the astrodome, struggling like rats in the polluted sludge of what used to be New Orleans, prison, and death. Ah, freedom!

[Patrick J. Mullins]

Miss ryry39--we do not care that you don't like our ingratitude, and we do fully intend to play the blame game, so why don't just realize that your offers of 'exceptional client service' are not even of interest on a volunteer scale--not that any of us hopes you get payment from anyone at all for your 'exceptional client service.'

By the way, we can't stand you either. There's the myth of stupidity of the Bushies that one of our friends around here has been analyzing well (since their shrewdness is actually almost legendarily effective by now), but I don't think she meant you--who don't even have sense enough to know that we're still in a position to tell you that we'd much less rather put our foot into our own mouth than put it in yours--which we've clearly done, since 12 hours is pretty Larghetto from where I come from (look up 'larghetto' if necessary. As Professor Higgins told Eliza 'you'll get nowhere with your slum prudery here.')

[ryry39]

Ohh big words! I'm scared! And nice touch to make it personal (We don't like you either). Do you speak for the whole left wing? If you do you should be in a more important place proclaiming your ingenuity (no offense to Prof. Dean's blog...hell I love this site). Apparently my education is not up to par with yours (blame Hobart & William Smith for that). I on the other hand I think it was superb including the many lessons I learned from the webmaster herself. One of the most important lessons I learned from HWS was to open your mind to others ideas and maybe you'll learn something yourself. While Jodi and I rarely, if ever, agreed on anything other than choice in cocktail, I came away questioning my own beliefs more times than not. All my original blog entry was intended to do was counter an argument that I felt had holes to it.

[Jodi]

Patrick, I agree--Alphonse is completely right on this one. I've argued something similar with my partner: they aren't stupid. There is a plan. There are intentions. Paul says, why choose? Can't they be both abhorent and stupid? I think it is better to take them absolutely at their word, as meaning what they do and as intent on their actions. Failing to acknowledge this is what keeps well meaning liberals and leftists mired in ideology, in trying to be fair and see the other side. The other side is not at all hard to see. Unfortunately, it's as plain as day.

[Patrick J. Mullins]

(minor correction: Skylla had 6 necks, a head for each, and 12 feet.)