Even though local officials had said publicly as early as Sept. 20, the day of the storm, that the island was “destroyed,” the sense of urgency didn’t begin to penetrate the White House until Monday, when images of the utter destruction and desperation — and criticism of the administration’s response — began to appear on television, one senior administration official said.
Christ almighty.
This, let me point out, is one of the things that happened in 2005 after hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans: there was a complete lack of concern, at the White House level, about the actual suffering of the people affected. Team Bush showed no sense of urgency about the natural and humanitarian disaster until it became a PR disaster for them. As with, evidently, Buttercup’s administration, they waited until the media had started filling everyone’s screens with human suffering and asking where the federal response was to start addressing the situation, and many of the early efforts at addressing the situation were focused on improving the coverage rather than the actual situation.
From the response to Harvey it appeared that Buttercup’s team had learned at least a few lessons from Katrina, including: 1) Don’t install an incompetent crony as the head of FEMA and 2) when you know a catastrophic hurricane is in the works, fucking prepare for it in advance and 3) respond as fast as you can, and make sure someone is there to take pictures.
Apparently, though, none of these lessons applied to Puerto Rico. Team Buttercup has been, on the evidence of this article, more effective practically than Team Heckuva Job Brownie would have been in this situation; but that’s an extremely low bar. As most of the people actually involved in the effort say in this article, the military and FEMA underestimated the severity of the disaster and the difficulty of the support mission and are now playing catch-up. Again, compared to Katrina, it is somewhat cheering that at least the people involved in responding know what they have to do in order to play catch-up. Still, part of the reason they’re playing catch-up now is that there was initially no Presidential attention focused on Puerto Rico, in part because there was so little mainstream media attention focused on it. And that it is why it is dangerous to have people in charge who care more about their own PR than they do about anything or anyone else.
There is, however, more going on here. As various commentators have pointed out, from what Buttercup has said about the disaster, it’s not clear that before this happened he was aware that Puerto Ricans were American citizens, despite the fact that he had done business there. Everything he’s said about it since, as other commentators have pointed out, indicates that he conceived of Puerto Rico as a remote and alien land populated by foreigners. He talks as if he has no idea where Puerto Rico is actually located relative to the mainland US. And I would ask why…but let’s face it, we all know the answer to that question.
And that was also the answer to the question of why it took Bush’s team so long to take Katrina seriously. Most of the people most affected by Katrina were poor people of color. Kanye West, years before interrupting Taylor Swift at the Grammys, had an era-defining moment during a televised appeal for Katrina aid when he summed up what everyone was pretty much thinking about Bush’s Katrina response:
I know Kanye has been all over the place since then, but this one time, he used his interrupting powers for good. Because he was absolutely right, and it needed to be said, and I’m still grateful to him for saying it on national TV…while Mike Myers, his cohost, looked on aghast and tried to stick to the script.
So that’s one reason that Buttercup has not been quicker out of the gate to help Puerto Rico–because if there is one thing that we know about Buttercup, it’s that his feelings about Spanish-speaking brown people go way beyond ‘not caring.’
Perhaps the most infuriating thing about all this, though, is the nonsensical statements he keeps making about Puerto Rico’s bad debts and lousy infrastructure. Initially, this was kind of baffling to me. But it makes more sense in light of something covered in this article:
“The level of devastation and the impact on the first responders we closely work with was so great that those people were having to take care of their families and homes to an extent we don’t normally see,” said an administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he did not want his statement to be interpreted as criticism of authorities in Puerto Rico. “The Department of Defense, FEMA and the federal government are having to step in to fulfill state and municipal functions that we normally just support.”
Whether or not this is accurate, this is evidently the explanation being offered about why the relief effort has thus far been inadequate and ineffective: because Maria has made an effective local response impossible, we have to go in and create the conditions for effective distribution of aid as well as providing the aid itself. With his unerring narcissism, however, what Buttercup obviously took away from this is: This is all Puerto Rico’s fault and it’s not fair that everyone’s blaming me for it. Observe:
I read this tweet and I was like, WTF? Why bring up the broken infrastructure and massive debt in a tweet about the hurricane response? It’s like he’s trying to blame Puerto Rico for the fucking hurricane. And now I realize: He is. Some part of his brain got a hold of the idea that Puerto Rico’s destroyed infrastructure was part of the reason that the response was being slowed down, and then another part of his brain went, “NOT MY FAULT!”, and that part of his brain then pushed out a Tweet about how if Puerto Rico only hadn’t been such a dump before the hurricane hit, it too would be ‘doing great’ and people wouldn’t be all on his BACK about it.
Oh, and by the way, Buttercup wants everyone to know he’s not on the hook for rebuilding this broken infrastructure, either:
And this is another ingredient of the Katrina disaster: the failure to provide long-term federal assistance during the rebuilding phase. It wasn’t just the initial horror of federal incompetence and neglect. It was the way the Bush administration left it up to private charity and a battered local government to rebuild a major American city. For years, charity groups were going down there and rehabbing people’s homes one at a time because the federal government was doing nothing and people felt SOMETHING ought to be done. But no charitable response, however committed or well-funded, could hope to address the scale of that disaster, and the same will be true for Puerto Rico.
No wonder the major of San Juan called him out. It must be fucking infuriating to watch Team Buttercup out there managing what they see as the REAL disaster–his public image–and calling this a “good news story.” Like West’s intervention, it was a much-needed reality check for this administration. And Buttercup has responded to this reality check exactly the way you would expect him to: by attacking her on Twitter:
There, again, you see what has happened to the official explanation after it entered Buttercup’s brain. “We’ve been slow because the severity of the hurricane has made it impossible for the local authorities to help us” has become “these lazy, ungrateful, poor brown people just want a government handout.”
I think I’m just going to leave this here and go out and scream into the night. I mean it’s actually morning here, but I feel like basically until Buttercup leaves office it’s always going to be a dark and stormy night.
Hearseeno 