‘Take two running jumps …’

Well into the blame game and finger-pointing stage of the unmitigated disaster that is New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Katrina’s catastrophic blitzkrieg through the Southland, we are reminded yet again that in such cases often the easiest thing to find is fault.

“There is nothing more powerful than the urge to blame,” declared crisis-management consultant Eric Dezenhall in an Associated Press story in Thursday’s newspaper. It routinely happens after such events, he said. “It is a deeply embedded archetype in the human mind…”

Easily the most visible scapegoat in the aftermath of the Gulf Coast tragedy is Michael Brown, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which reportedly was woefully unprepared to react to the storm.

Partisan congressional screamers such as House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi succumbed to the powerful urge to blame by running to the television cameras to pin the calamity on President Bush, who already is responsible for global warming, mad cow disease, potholes, the heartbreak of psoriasis, and pestilence in Outer Mongolia. They vilified Brown as an incompetent and indecisive boob who should be the first guy fired in the debacle.

“I never would have appointed such a person,” sniffed New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. “Let’s bring in someone who is a professional,” urged Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md. The stressed-out president of Louisiana’s Jefferson Parish went on national television to plead with the federal government to please send him “a better idiot” to help get his parish back on its feet.

Watching the performances of the congressional finger-pointers on television, I wondered what America’s favorite country philosopher, Will Rogers, might have made of the deal. If there was anything that Rogers – twirling a rope, a wad of gum in his jaw and a grin on his face – enjoyed, it was sticking it to politicians, be they lowly ward heeler or president of the United States.

“The U.S. Senate may not be the most refined and deliberative body in existence, but they got the most unique rules. Any member can call anybody in the world anything he can think of and they can’t answer him, sue him, or fight him,” Rogers wrote in a 1935 newspaper column. “Our constitution protects aliens, drunks and U.S. Senators. There ought to be one day a year (just one) when there is an open season on Senators…”

An inspiring thought, to be sure. At the moment, however, the open season in the wake of Hurricane Katrina is on any bureaucrat – local, state or federal – who failed to deliver the goods to help the hurricane victims in crunch time.

Brown’s career as federal disaster chief is most likely toast, and perhaps should be, although I can’t say for sure, because all I know is what I read in the newspapers and magazines and see on television. Based on those sources, I’d say the man probably won’t lack for company in the line of unemployed bureaucrats before this story quiets down and another five-alarm extravaganza takes its place in the daily news cycle.

Rogers, who died in a plane crash in Alaska 70 years ago, had a word of caution about forming opinions based on what we read (or, today, see on television), as compared to first-hand knowledge of the situation.

“Here is something I have learned that is absolutely true,” he wrote. “If you are going to write, talk, comment or argue over any public question, don’t do it by reading one newspaper. I try to get all kinds, breeds, creeds, and every single different political one.

“Gosh, you would be surprised how one bit of political news is so differently construed in different papers. Some public man is a horse thief in one newspaper, and pick up the other and he is just about to be canonized and made a saint. Then the next paper will say he is a horse thief in the day, but repents at night…”

Still, with all our kidding or cussing our public officials, they are as good or better than we who elect them, Rogers felt. He told of a California congressman who had received an insulting letter from a constituent, wanting to know why he hadn’t put trees on the Sierra Madre Mountains.

The congressman’s terse reply cut to the chase: “One of the drawbacks of being a congressman is that I have to receive impertinent letters from a jackass like you. Please take two running jumps and go to hell.”

If President Bush should make the same suggestion to his many detractors, his slumping popularity rating would likely jump 10 points, minimum.

NEWS columnist Kent Ward lives in Winterport. His e-mail address is olddawg@bangordailynews.net.