Some Liberal Paranoid Narratives
The term “conspiratorial narrative” has been used lately by several writers and is pretty much self explanatory. Although the Right tends to have more of them, and more ridiculous ones, they are widespread on the Left as well. Leftist conspiratorial narratives are mostly not acknowledged as such because most of the people who point to Rightist conspiratorial narratives are in outright denial about the Leftist ones. But here are four prime examples.
The Federal Failure of Katrina
It’s interesting to compare three recent disasters: Katrina in 2005, and Haiti and the Deepwater Horizon in 2010. They’re different kinds of disasters each offering distinct challenges, but comparisons can be illuminating. Effective control of the oil leak at Deepwater Horizon took weeks to achieve. In Haiti, significant aid personnel begin arriving about 5-6 days after the disaster and the government suspended rescue operations on Day 11, although a few rescues happened later. After Katrina, on the other hand, the Convention Center and Superdome were completely evacuated by Day 6, most levee breaches were plugged the following day, and most of the flooding was pumped out by two weeks after the storm.
Despite the scorn heaped on President Bush the Younger, remarkably enough, the response to Katrina was the most rapid of the three disasters. By Day 6, the refugees at the Superdome and Convention Center had all been evacuated. In Haiti, aid deliveries continued to be erratic well after Day 6. This, of course, is not a criticism of the aid agencies, who had to contend with blocked streets and crowd control. It wasn’t until Day 6 of the Deepwater Horizon spill that the extent of the discharge was fully known, and Day 9 before oil booms began to be mobilized in earnest. On the other hand, it was only around Day 4 or 5 that stories began appearing in the press critical of the response times for all three disasters, all written by people with no experience in actually responding to a disaster.
Disasters are gigantic sticky globs of entropy. By definition they make it impossible to move freely, get accurate information, or deliver aid. Workers can’t simply drop what they’re doing to assist some individual problem that may be acute for the individual, or newsworthy, but miniscule in comparison to the whole disaster. A driver of a food truck taking food for hundreds of people cannot - must not - stop to take someone to the hospital. The absolute bottom of the barrel for news coverage of Hurricane Katrina came when a BBC correspondent harassed aid workers - interfered with emergency operations - about an unburied body. The State Department should, very bluntly, have revoked his visa and deported him. Critical news coverage is one thing, interfering with emergency workers is another thing altogether. That shameful episode stands in stark contrast to the two heroic news teams in Haiti who pooled resources to dig out a buried quake victim and still report the story.
It wasn’t like the danger was unknown. In 2001, four years before Katrina, Mark Fischetti wrote “Drowning New Orleans” (Scientific American, October 1, 2001) that detailed the risk in every detail. In fact, New Orleans dodged three bullets:
1. The storm dropped dramatically in intensity before landfall.
2. The eye passed east of the city, so the most powerful right rear quadrant of the storm hit Mississippi.
3. The levees failed as the storm was waning, not at the peak.
Given that the disaster scenarios had been extensively modeled, Louisiana should have had a well crafted disaster plan. Evacuation centers should have been identified well inland (not downtown) and provisioned. The principal responsibility for disaster response lies with state and local government, and their failures were legion. New Orleans’ hundreds of buses were not used. In fact, an Amtrak train specifically intended for evacuation left empty because state and local officials made no effort to use it. One way traffic on Interstates was not initiated until too late. Governor Blanco delayed asking the Federal government to assume command of National Guard forces. Her reason was she didn’t want to admit to being unable to cope with the disaster when it turned out she wasn’t able to cope. A month after Katrina, there were National Guard troops from all 50 states in Louisiana. It wasn’t even until August 30, two days after the levees failed, that she asked for National Guard units from other states. It’s almost as if Blanco and Nagin thought merely declaring an emergency would take care of everything. “Unable to cope?” Ya think?
To me, three principal lessons come out of Katrina:
1. Americans have wholly unrealistic ideas of how fast aid can come after a disaster. Americans have the idea the disaster happens on Monday, FEMA arrives on Tuesday, they write checks on Wednesday, the builders come on Thursday, and everything is back to normal by the weekend. It just isn’t so.
2. Americans need to prepare far better for disasters. People need to be prepared to cope for a week or more before aid begins arriving in quantity. The three days recommended by FEMA is just insufficient.
3. After a disaster, FEMA doesn’t need to be part of Homeland Security. It needs to be Homeland Security, at least in the disaster area. It needs to be able to command other agencies and back the orders up with firing authority. It needs to be able to order the FBI to investigate problems, order Customs to allow foreign aid personnel and supplies to enter, and order other agencies to stop pushing paper and supply personnel as needed for critical tasks.
The man who beat Al Gore (well, actually that was Ralph Nader if you want to get picky) could do nothing right. Bush didn’t leap up in panic when first informed about 9-11? Bad President. Then he spent the day under tight security? Bad President. He didn’t fly back to Washington immediately after hearing about Katrina, despite having communications capabilities that allowed him to function from anywhere? Bad President. Then he flew over New Orleans rather than landing and interfering with rescue efforts? Bad President. Then he actually did visit New Orleans and interfered with rescue efforts? Bad, bad President. But the historical record is clear that gross negligence by Governor Blanco and Mayor Nagin was the real cause of the hardships.
For historical perspective, it is most illustrative to compare the responses to Katrina with the behaviors noted by William James in 1906 in “On Some Mental Effects of the Earthquake.”
The Stolen Election of 2000
The most important thing about the 2000 election is what the Constitution itself specifies:
Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector. (Art. II Sec.I)
The key provision that reveals the intent behind the Electoral College is that, if the election goes to the House ” Votes shall be taken by States, the Representation from each State having one Vote.” Clearly the intent was for the states to select the President. All states have delegated the choice to the voters, but that’s a choice, not a mandate. So a voter in Oregon selects only Oregon’s electors and has nothing to say about how Vermont chooses its Electors.
The most recent wave of outrage over the Electoral College came in 2000, when George Bush narrowly won Florida, and the election, from Al Gore, even though Gore received half a million more popular votes nationally. The Florida recount process was finally terminated on December 11 by the Supreme Court, partly on 14th Amendment grounds (uneven treatment of recounts) and partly on Electoral College issues. Federal Law states that electors selected more than six days before the scheduled counting of electoral votes are to be regarded as conclusively chosen. Since the electoral votes were to be counted on December 18, electors could be selected without challenge up to December 12, the day after the ruling. The court ruled that there was insufficient time to perform the desired recounts and select electors in a way that would preserve Florida’s right to choose them without Congressional interference.
Critics of the ruling ignore the Constitutional fact that the Constitution gives state legislators, and nobody else, the right to decide on electors (“in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct”). So, had the Court not cut off the process, one of three things could have happened:
1. Florida would have sent in last-minute, disputed electoral votes. Congress would have had to resolve the issue, and both houses of Congress were controlled by Republicans, so Bush would probably have won. 1876 deja vu all over again.
2. Florida would have cast no electoral votes, giving the election to Gore. Very unlikely given that the Florida legislature was controlled by Republicans.
3. Florida could have convened an emergency legislative session and appointed a slate of electors in time to meet the deadline, or they could simply have confirmed the Republican electors. Either way the Florida electors would have been Republican.
Actually, when Congress convened, a number of Congressmen did challenge the Florida electoral votes. However, challenges to electoral votes have to be co-sponsored by a Congressman and a Senator (a rule drafted in the aftermath of 1876), and no Senators came forward.
Although the Supreme Court’s ruling has been called blatantly political and corrupt by Gore supporters, it is interesting to speculate what might have happened had the Court ruled that the recounts should continue. Faced with the prospect of missing the deadline for choosing electors, might the Florida Legislature have convened in emergency session and passed special legislation to appoint electors, and then defended its actions on the Constitutional grounds that the State chooses the electors “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct”? Who would have decided the case, given that the Supreme Court would have had a conflict of interest? What if the Democrats in the Florida Legislature stalled the selection until too late? If the electors had been challenged, the Republicans controlled Congress and could have rejected the challenge. Had the election gone to the House, the Republicans were in control, so Bush would have won, 28 states to 17, with 4 split and one independent.
Oh, this cheerful note. If the House had, through some arcane fluke, deadlocked, then the Senate would have named the Vice President as acting President. Say it with me: President Cheney.
There’s just not a plausible scenario that would have allowed Gore to win.
The narrative is that the Reagan Administration deliberately dragged its heels in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, resulting in the needless deaths of many AIDS sufferers.
Someone once defined a government crash program as trying to complete a pregnancy in a month by putting nine women to work on it. Crash programs work on some things and not on others. They work if the project is scalable, that is, if increasing the input increases the result. The Manhattan Project, once it got rolling, was eminently scalable. Once it was clear that we needed Uranium-235 to make an atomic bomb, and ways had been devised to do it, it was just a matter of building as many of the separation units as necessary. In a perfect illustration of scalability, the scientists at Oak Ridge once told General Leslie Groves, military head of the project, that it would take twice as long as anticipated to isolate enough U-235. He simply ordered that the separation building, already the largest roofed space in the world, be doubled in size.
On the other hand, figuring out how to get a nuclear explosion was not scalable. There were only a limited number of people in the world capable of participating meaningfully. Some were unacceptable security risks. Others were needed in other capacities. Too many workers would have tripped each other up and slowed progress. The project could be speeded up by providing logistical support and assistants, and in some cases farming out subtasks to different groups, but fundamentally the work could only be done by a select team working at its own pace. Groves’ genius was recognizing this fact and letting it happen.
The Apollo Program was also highly scalable. Once a working design for the rockets and spacecraft had been developed, it was a matter of building more of them. It didn’t take appreciably longer to build all the Saturn V rockets than to build one of them. Teams could work in parallel on subsystems of the spacecraft. Design questions could be sorted out by allowing teams to pursue various scenarios and making the best case they could for each approach. But the design process itself wasn’t scalable. Doubling the funding would not have cut the time in half.
Medical research is not nearly so scalable. Once a treatment strategy has been defined, it’s possible to farm out trials to separate teams working in parallel. And fundamental research can be scaled somewhat by supporting research concurrently among many different lines. Only after a drug has been developed can real scaling take effect, and sometimes not even then. Drugs like interferon are still extremely expensive to manufacture.
As soon as I became aware of AIDS, which means about as soon as it appeared in any scientific media, I watched the debate from the perspective of someone interested in pseudoscience. It had such great potential. There was the inevitable hysteria over the contagiousness of AIDS. There were (and still are) denials that AIDS was caused by a virus at all, coupled with very Velikovskian claims that unorthodox ideas were being suppressed. There were also bland assurances that AIDS could not be caught from casual contact long before there was sufficient data to justify such a claim.
Almost as soon as AIDS was recognized as a serious problem, there were accusations that the government was deliberately dragging its heels on attacking the problem. Yet the number of people capable of mounting an attack on AIDS was limited. Many of the questions about AIDS involved fundamental research on viruses in general, meaning the research most needed up front was perfectly fundable through existing channels. A massive influx of money might have facilitated research, but it would also have attracted less qualified researchers who would require time and effort to bring up to speed. Surely a lot of it would have been wasted on administrivia, and a lot more on projects justified under the rubric of AIDS research but only peripherally related. The most cost effective way to ramp up spending would have been through undergraduate scholarships, graduate fellowships, and medical school support, to create the next generation of researchers. That would take a minimum of ten years to bear fruit. The best evidence that a glut of money in the 1980’s would not have helped the fight against AIDS significantly is that, thirty years later, despite worldwide research efforts, we still do not have a cure or a vaccine for AIDS. Throwing money at AIDS in 1982 wouldn’t have gotten a quick cure any more than throwing money at NASA could have gotten us to the moon by 1964.
It’s all because the government and the drug companies don’t want a cure? Fine. Show me your doctorate in biochemistry or medicine as evidence you have any idea what a cure for AIDS would require.
What actually did needlessly kill a lot of people was obstructing the normal technique of controlling disease outbreaks, which is to trace transmission chains. That approach wiped out smallpox long before we had enough vaccine to eradicate it by brute force. Yet despite statements that AIDS was a disease “like any other,” from the outset it was treated uniquely. The classical method of stopping outbreaks of sexually-transmitted diseases was to trace transmission chains, but that approach was quickly stifled in the name of privacy. For some reason, social stigma never stopped public health officials from investigating and containing outbreaks of syphilis.
The Martyrdom of Saint Allende
It’s ironic that many of the same people who complain that George Bush became President with less than a majority are silent about Salvador Allende becoming President of Chile in 1973 with only 37 per cent of the vote. And Ralph Nader wasn’t even a candidate. Ah, the joys of a multi-party system.
I have a personal attachment to this event because at the time I was closely associated with people who regularly traveled to Chile. They spoke Spanish, were generally sympathetic to Allende, and politically liberal. Nevertheless, months before the coup, they were unanimous that the experiment was failing and that things were going to end very badly.
It must have been so frustrating. According to Marxist theory, once the people take control of the means of production, all the wealth that formerly flowed to the plutocrats now goes to the people. Instead, formerly busy factories morphed mysteriously into empty buildings full of idle machinery. What told me the regime was on its last legs was hearing that the government was nationalizing the trucking industry, a completely pointless gesture since most of the truckers were small independents and there was absolutely no possible benefit the regime could gain. I had the mental image of Chile’s Marxists frantically ripping out sofa cushions looking for loose change. “I don’t understand it - where did all the wealth go?”
Whether the CIA was involved is more or less irrelevant since the beatification of Allende has made any challenge to the idea unthinkable. But what exactly would the CIA have done? They didn’t fly planes or drive tanks. They might have encouraged opposition military officers, provided them with money, information, help in planning, and promises of U.S. approval, but it seems almost insulting to suggest that any army in Latin America, of all places, needs the help of the CIA to stage a coup.
One acquaintance of mine left Chile the day before the coup and learned of it only when he arrived in the U.S. He later told of trying to explain to leftists what he had seen in Chile and being met by a wall of denial. “Fine,” he said, “Don’t believe me. I was only there.”
I don’t think anyone denies that Allende was a decent and sincere man, but Chile was on the verge of becoming Zimbabwe. Saying that the CIA “toppled” Allende is like saying a spilled drink helped sink the Titanic.