I Heard The News Today

Has there been a more eventful news week since the autumn of 2001? The atrocity in the Gulf, exacerbated by immense incompetence at every level but particularly by an appalling level of inaction and pass-the-buck dishonesty by the administration, continues to shock and sicken (even while making me proud of most of my fellow Americans). The Chief Justice of the United States died over the weekend, and the President asks the senate to anoint John Roberts not only as the next new justice, but as the Rehnquist’s successor. The War in Iraq continues to dismay. Gilligan died.

“New Orleans” has become shorthand for the havoc Katrina has wreaked, a below-sea-level city that embodies America’s decadent side leveled by nature’s might and practically abandoned except for a few either hardy or foolish souls. Although some of our lesser angels have emerged – according to some, it seems that black people loot while white people use their ingenuity to find stuff that they did not have before – overwhelmingly, the magnanimousness of the American spirit is ringing through loud and clear, even if our national government has reached levels of incompetence I never would have thought possible. Relief efforts are everywhere. Universities across Texas are offering their facilities for college sports teams from the affected areas, and we are opening our doors to students to take classes without facing the regular bureaucratic hurdles. My little university hundreds of miles away from the carnage has opened its doors to a handful of afflicted students and all over campus ad hoc relief efforts have emerged. New Orleans, one of my favorite cities, will never be the same. But all of the pessimism aside, we will find a way to rebuild it, to make it safer and gaudier and more debauched than ever.

My response to Rehnquist’s passing was an audible gasp. I’ll let others argue about Rehnquist’s place in the judicial firmament -- conservatives will overrate him, liberals will underrate him, and the truth will lie somewhere therein. It always struck me that the Chief Justice cared very deeply about the court as an institution, and that in his decades on the court he worked hard to ensure that it maintained a distance to provide it the prestige that the Supreme Court warrants. Sometimes his vision was bizarre – such as when he added the stripes to his robe after he attended a musical that showed a judge in similar finery – but usually it was intended to protect the court’s gravitas. In recent years the court has taken its share of slings and arrows, but I still hold it in higher esteem than any other institution in Washington. Now the succession battle will begin, and the stakes are now far higher than they were just a few days ago. Democrats and liberals in the Senate are certainly fully entitled to any documentation that the administration is, for whatever reason, trying to hide. Judicial politics will be grand spectacle in the next few months.

The Iraq War continues onward, teetering along with no sense of clarity or mission. The insurgents are increasingly brazen, and we seem ineffectual in response. The administration’s incompetence there is masked by its incompetence here these days, which would have seemed impossible only two weeks ago. And in the interim, many of us who have been arguing about the vulnerability of our ports seem to have gotten macabre vindication. If you live in Houston or Boston or New York or San Francisco, ask yourself the following question: How safe do you feel now? Yes, Katrina was a natural disaster and thus different from a terrorist attack, but do you wonder if the bad guys are not watching and rubbing their hands together as a result the events of the last week, and as importantly, after witnessing the response of our leaders? They are.