"Out of my
grief and my impatience, answered neglectingly"
An
old woman drowned in a nursing home in New Orleans on August 29, along
with 31 other old people. She drowned because the company into whose
care she was entrusted chose not to evacuate any of them. The old woman
was the mother of Thomas Rodrigue, the Jefferson Parish emergency
services director. On September 4th, Aaron Broussard, President of
Jefferson Parish, broke
down while telling NBC's Tim Russert the story of that death.
I'm telling you most importantly
I want to thank my public employees that have worked 24/7.
They're burned out, the doctors, the nurses. And I want to
give you one last story and I'll shut up and let you tell me whatever
you want to tell me. The guy who runs this building I'm in,
emergency management, he's responsible for everything. His
mother was trapped in St. Bernard nursing home and every day she called
him and said, "Are you coming, son? Is somebody
coming?" And he said, "Yeah, Mama, somebody's coming to get
you. Somebody's coming to get you on Tuesday.
Somebody's coming to get you on Wednesday.
Somebody's coming to get you on Thursday.
Somebody's coming to get you on Friday."
And she drowned Friday night. She drowned Friday night.
Few who saw his impassioned breakdown will forget it. Those
who have seen the effects of combat fatigue also saw combat fatigue on
Broussard's face. The only problem with the quote is that Mr.
Rodrigue's mother had died on Tuesday night, not Friday, which was the
2nd. So on Sunday,
Tim Russert sought to set the record straight, because he was more
concerned with the record than with its meaning. Proof again that small
minds are perpetually enamored of the details and blissfully ignorant
of what matters.
Doc described
it as Aaron
Broussard's transcendant humanity.
Little Russ
My new friend Brian
Oberkirch let loose with a
powerful fusillade Sunday, after Tim Russert
demonstrated once again that he's a pale shade of Big Russ, the
hard-working Buffalo father who raised Timmy and about whom Pundit Tim
wrote so touchingly in his best-selling book, Big Russ and Me.
That widely praised book (though not
by all) is – Surprise! – all about the
celebrity whom little Russ became and not really about Big Russ. In it,
Tim uses the politicians' ploy of embracing middle-American values even
as his punditocracy rejects those values in favor of the cynical
attention-getting of modern politics & journalism: word games
and keen gotchas that target the slip of the lip, or of the noise-cancelling
mike, rather than embracing the core values that hard-working
Americans actually share.
Here's Jeff
Jarvis on
what happened on Meet the Press Sunday:
Russert gets up on a factual
high-horse but Broussard puts him right back in his place, explaining
that he learned what he said from his staff and that he certainly did
not cross-examine his colleague about the mother he could not rescue,
who had just died. That does not make the story of neglect of the
entire city of New Orleans by government at all — all
— levels any less vital. And Broussard says so:
Listen, sir, somebody wants to
nitpick a man’s tragic loss of a mother because she was
abandoned in a nursing home? Are you kidding? What kind of sick mind,
what kind of black-hearted people want to nitpick a man’s
mother’s death? They just buried Eva last week… It
will be the saddest tale you ever heard, a man who was responsible for
safekeeping of a half a million people, mother’s died in the
next parish because she was abandoned there and he can’t get
to her and he tried to get to her through EOC. He tried to get through
the sheriff’s office. He tries every way he can to get there.
Somebody wants to debate those things? My God, what sick-minded person
wants to do that?
What kind of agenda is
going on here? . . .
Russert keeps riding his horse.
He wants Broussard to somehow say that by getting facts of this story
wrong, his criticism of the feds was thus invalidated, was not
“fair” (and what a schoolyard word that is in this
context). Broussard won’t bite.
Were we abandoned by the federal
government? Absolutely we were. Were there more people that abandoned
us? Make the list. The list can go on for miles. That’s for
history to document. That’s what Congress does best, burn
witches. Let Congress do their hearings. Let them find the witches. Let
them burn them. The media burns witches better than anybody. Let the
media go find the witches and burn them. But as I stood on the ground,
sir, for day after day after day after day, nobody came here, sir.
Nobody came. The federal government didn’t come. The Red
Cross didn’t come. I’ll give you a list of people
that didn’t come here, sir, and I was here….
Here's what Brian wrote
immediately, again as quoted by Jeff:
I was offended by how quickly
the whole discussion went meta. Bodies yet to be retrieved &
buried, folks hanging from their own rafters holding onto life,
literally, by their fingertips — and pundits, bloggers and
media types were already well on their way to converting the storm into
a object lesson for their own rhetorical strategies. Hijacked our
suffering for their own stories….
Here’s a new way to
think about blogging and all forms of consumer generated media: forget
fact checking [your] ass. That’s a parlor game for grad
students and professional cynics. Yes, you caught some high-profile
folks screwing up. Good on you. We’re frying bigger fish now,
and you can’t play with us if you haven’t got the
emotional heft. I’ve seen do-it-yourself media help us
reconnect as human beings. Help one another as individuals in need.
Answer a calling to the better parts of ourselves. That’s
where I’m putting my energy.
Here's Brian's most important contribution:
Get out of my face, says
Broussard. He's dealing with life & death and making decisions
no one should have to make. The gap between words & things
necessarily closes in these instances. Hermeneutics is a luxury. I find
those most strident and sure of what actually happened in Louisiana
weren't anywhere around when it was all coming down. Weren't delivering
ice & medicine and provisions to old ladies. Weren't trying to
manage the gas situation to figure out how to get from here to there.
Weren't watching their neighbors in line for FEMA supplies and food
stamps. Weren't hearing about friends and family losing all they worked
a lifetime to acheive. Weren't having their towns and way of life wiped
out in a few hours.
Brian's best insights are reinforced by David Weinberger, as
he does so well, in Facts
as cudgels:
In this case, it was worse than
a parlor game. It was an ambush. It was an attempt to discredit the
story's teller in order to deny the story's meaning. It was
contemptible. And, Brian points out, it didn't help that Russert
consistently mispronounced the drowned woman's name.
"When I was
dry with rage and extreme toil"
This
is a timeless theme in literature: the jarring disconnect between the
people who have put themselves in charge of things and the warriors on
the scene who must do the real work. Here's how Shakespeare
characterized it in a speech by the great young warrior, Hotspur. As he
stands bloody and exhausted from battle, a mincing nobleman demands
that he immediately turn over his prisoners to be taken to the King.
Hotspur's later response to King Henry IV:
My liege, I did deny no
prisoners.
But I remember, when the
fight was done,
When I was dry with rage
and extreme toil,
Breathless and faint,
leaning upon my sword,
Came there a certain
lord, neat and trimly dressed,
Fresh as a bridegroom,
and his chin new reaped
Showed like a stubble
land at harvest home.
He was
perfumèd like a milliner,
And twixt his finger and
his thumb he held
A pouncet box, which
ever and anon
He gave his nose, and
took't away again;
Who therewith angry,
when it next came there,
Took it in snuff; and
still he smiled and talked;
And as the soldiers bore
dead bodies by,
He called them untaught
knaves, unmannerly,
To bring a slovenly
unhandsome corse
Betwixt the wind and his
nobility.
With many holiday and
lady terms
He questioned me,
amongst the rest demanded
My prisoners in your
majesty's behalf.
I then, all smarting
with my wounds being cold,
To be so pestered with a
popinjay,
Out of my grief and my impatience
Answered neglectingly,
I know not what--
He should, or he should
not; for he made me mad
To see him shine so
brisk, and smell so sweet,
And talk so like a
waiting gentlewoman
Of guns and drums and
wounds -- God save the mark! --
And telling me the
sovereignest thing on earth
Was parmacity for an
inward bruise,
And that it was great
pity, so it was,
This villainous
saltpetre should be digged
Out of the bowels of the
harmless earth,
Which many a good fellow
had destroyed
So cowardly, and but for
these vile guns,
He would himself have
been a soldier.
This bald unjointed chat
of his, my lord,
I answered indirectly,
as I said,
And I beseech you, let
not his report
Come current for an
accusation
Betwixt my love and your
high majesty.
It's every warrior's disdain for those who benefit from battle
but choose not to participate. Here's another example, from personal
experience: Command,
Control & Connive, a war story.
8:55:17 AM 
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