Both the disaster in Houston and the cataclysm in Washington were a long time coming. Look in the mirror, America VIDEO
“Well we know where we’ re going, but we don’ t know where we’ ve been, ” in 1985, in one of the Talking Heads frontman’s numerous tributes to the collective bewilderment of the United States of America. That song, which is called “Road to Nowhere, ” continues like this: I suppose Byrne was thinking about the manufactured nostalgia of the Reagan era or the spread of consumer culture or something like that — but honestly, he had no idea. Over the last week we have seen America’s road to nowhere outlined in especially alarming fashion, with the convergence of Donald Trump’s presidency and a massive storm that inflicted some of the worst flooding in history on our nation’s fourth-largest city and its surroundings. Yet many of us — indeed most of us — continue to behave as though these events had no history, required no explanation and came as a complete surprise. We’ re not little children and we know what we want. But we have no idea how to get there from here. Salon contributor sent me several emails from Houston during the storm. He was among the lucky ones, he reported: There was two feet of water in his garage, which had ruined thousands of books, but the water never came into the house. American conservatives, who claim to be hostile to big government (except when their constituents urgently need it) and also claim to be skeptical about manmade climate change and its effects (except when they go to work for big corporations, which must confront the bottom line) , find themselves in an especially awkward position after a disaster of this magnitude. It’s difficult to feel any sympathy for such bottomless, shameless cynicism, needless to say. Last week right-wing Republicans like and the members of the House Freedom Caucus were eager to strip hundreds of millions of dollars from the FEMA budget to make a down payment on Trump’s border wall, quite possibly the biggest and most wasteful government boondoggle of all time. A week of rain, and their opposition to large-scale federal intervention in state or local affairs has melted away. Of course none of those people will acknowledge the scientific consensus that climate change is making extreme weather events more frequent (and perhaps more severe) , but at least they are likely to shut up about that issue for a while. American liberals are not one-tenth as cynical, and pretty much all agree that climate change is a global emergency that requires immediate action — even if they don’ t know what that would look like, and keep hoping somebody else will figure it out. But they also fall prey to their own version of “Road to Nowhere” magical thinking, in which the complex history of an event like Hurricane Harvey is massaged or elided, and we stride confidently into the future with only the foggiest sense of how we got here. It’s a lot easier to say that Harvey was caused or amplified by global warming — which is no doubt partly true — and was therefore the Republicans’ fault, than to talk about the multiple overlapping ways in which the entire American economic system, and the policies of both political parties, brought us to this point. As Shivani mentions, Houston is a vast landscape of unregulated free-market sprawl, made possible by unrestricted development, widespread gentrification and a “pro-business” climate in which zoning and environmental regulations are lax or nonexistent. To employ a buzzword of the moment, it is perhaps the ultimate neoliberal city, and to pretend that Democrats in Houston or Austin or Washington did anything significant to resist that — did not, in fact, encourage it and embrace it — is laughable. Clearly the problem here is much larger than one city in Texas and one big storm, although if we shift focus too readily we are in danger of deliberately ignoring the lessons they have taught us (or at least should have) . There’s an obvious corollary, at least to me, in the continuing anger, shock and bewilderment among the many American liberals who had already popped the corks on the First Female President™ Champagne, long before last November, and now find themselves in this joke of an alternate universe from a second-rate Syfy Channel series. Such responses are understandable: I come to work every day as an editor at Salon and am amazed all over again at our wildly improbable national predicament. But the thing is, even if the outcome of the 2016 election was in some ways an evil fluke — and yeah, even if Russian spycraft played a role, to some perhaps-never-definable extent — President Donald Trump didn’ t come out of nowhere. He has a history, and represents the culmination of trends in American political and cultural life that go back at least half a century. (In a true historical analysis, it’s a lot longer than that.) If Trump’s simultaneously sinister and incompetent presidency has, in practice, become a hair-raising daily game of “Can You Top This?”, the fact that somebody like him — a massively unqualified celebrity demagogue who appeals to America’s worst instincts — was elected president is not all that surprising.
