Shut up and dribble

If you're familiar with the process by which management always offers and labor always demands, or someone else's terrorist becomes your liberation fighter, you'll recognize the refrain here: You're politicizing, but the bluff little guy from the sports pages is Just Asking Questions. And thus is another pile of Trump-fluffing hooey passed off as reasoned journalistic commentary. 

Couple of points. Disasters are something we can study and learn stuff from, by way of averting future disasters, mitigating their impact, or helping people and governments recover from them. Natural disasters can be distinguished from technological or human-caused disasters -- some of the time. A hundred-year rainfall above a poorly engineered dam can produce both. Disasters can be made worse by deliberate actions (locking the exit doors) or by a lack of action (like, regular fire inspections or the installation of warning systems).

Disasters are like any other kind of news, only more so, meaning the measurable, "objective" elements of an event are put together by distinctly subjective processes. Looting and panic get a lot of coverage, even when they don't happen. "Proximity" can be as much cultural as geophysical (see Adams' chart of TV minutes per 1,000 earthquake deaths). Quick-onset disasters tend to get more attention than slow-onset disasters. (Hurricanes, of course, are an exception, but a heat wave can kill 10 times as many people as a tornado and go largely unnoticed.) That's because news is a process of presenting information through narrative structures. A ballgame, a courtroom confrontation, a campaign debate or a rescue of children from a burning house* is "dramatic" because it takes the form of a story when it's told.

Now, back in the old days, a kindly old editor might have reminded you that a hurricane isn't a "tragedy" unless it murders its stepfather at the behest of its old man's unquiet ghost. "Tragedy" is an inherently political term, and -- as with scandals or crises -- the authority to call "tragedy" is political authority, whether it's exercised in the newsroom or on the presidential Twitter feed.** Mitch Albom is invoking that authority here to make sure you talk the way he wants you to talk -- especially about his friends:

Tragedy is too small a word for this event. It should be a moment of empathy. A moment of prayer. A time to reflect on how small we are in the eyes of nature.

This is, at the nicest, question-begging. And in terms of disaster response and mitigation, there are usually much better things to do than reflect on your relative size in the eyes of nature. But there's a point to be made here about Society:

Instead, it has become about blame.

This should surprise no one. It is a pattern we have developed in our country. There is no such thing as a terrible event just happening. It must be someone’s fault.

Mitch seems to be confusing disasters he's heard about with disasters in general. As noted above, not all disasters reach even the avid news consumer in the same way. But hang on, because the lecture's coming:

A hurricane devastates New Orleans? It was the government agencies. It was FEMA. It was infrastructure. You almost forgot that Katrina was one of the most intense hurricanes to ever make landfall in America. (In terms of sustained wind speed at landfall, no -- but it did strike a uniquely positioned major US city with some distinct infrastructure issues.)

Wildfires sweep through California? The left blamed climate change. The right blamed California lawmakers. You almost forgot there had been a drought there after two wet winters, meaning vegetation had grown and then dried out, which made it easily combustible. Or that the Santa Ana winds often act like the devil blowing on embers. (Hmm. Could one of these things -- climate change and "California lawmakers" -- be more related to weather patterns than the other?)

In Texas, the flood waters hadn’t even receded before liberals were screaming that DOGE cuts were responsible, while Kristi Noem, the head of President Donald Trump’s Homeland Security department, was blaming the Biden administration, even as her agency was taking FEMA apart.

Others claimed budget cuts to the National Weather Service were at fault. Still others blamed cloud seeding.

Cloud seeding?

Worth noting that some of the first voices blaming the forecasts were, um, "local and state officials" in Texas. (For what it's worth, my impression is that the NWS forecasters' performance was above and beyond.) But the idea that seeing a correlation between budget cuts and forecasting capacity is some form of liberal screaming is just belligerently stupid.

I don't want to inflict the whole column on you, but this paragraph from up-page is worth a return visit:

To make matters worse, the children at Camp Mystic are not allowed to have cellphones with them. While this is a healthy policy to keep kids in a “tech-free" environment, in this case it prevented them from getting warning texts or calls.

So rather than prayer or empathy, this situation calls for some outright blaming -- as long as it's directed at the camp managers, rather than the county officials who took a pass on a flood warning system. Interesting choice, given the cost barriers of having a cellphone and wireless service compared with low-tech systems and public goods: AM radio, landlines, the Emergency Alert System, and sirens that you test at noon on the first Saturday of the month, for example. If your interest is in protecting lives and property rather than asking the universe if this suit makes your butt look bigger, that is. It's getting hard to avoid the impression that our columnist is mainly interested in making sure that nobody in the Trump administration gets a case of hurt feelings from all this. But back to his lessons on life:

... Now, the victims of the Texas floods, and their families, deserve explanations. When you lose someone you love, when your property is destroyed, you want to know why. It’s natural.

But searching for a culprit, rather than a circumstance, is not only unsatisfying, it’s wrong. There’s a risk in constructing backward scenarios to tragedy. We tell ourselves if this had been done, or that had been done, then this would never have happened.

... We tell ourselves we are in control, but so much of life is beyond us. Illness. Accidents. Sudden deadly flood waters. The victims’ families deserve to mourn without outside noise. The rest of us might benefit from humility in the shadow of capricious fate, and a soft hug with those we love. That, in the end, is healthier than a pointed finger.

At the risk of further accusations of liberal screaming: Soft hugs are nice, but vaccines, airbags and fully staffed federal agencies (from air traffic control to forecasting to disaster response) save more lives. Those who can't distinguish that response from finger-pointing at better than chance levels can shut up and dribble.

* Always get the dog's name, kids.
** Kin to the "securitizing move" in securitization theory; if you've been wondering why there seems to be more talk about Carl Schmitt lately, think "sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception."