After the Storm, Government Intervention Doesn’t Look so Bad

Depending how flinty your heart, this is either a clumsy or most opportune moment--hot in the backwash of a hurricane--to worry ourselves about the awful tax burden, government overspending and America going to hell.

“I’ll tell ya what’s wrong with America. Everybody wants somethin’ handed to ‘em by government. Everybody got his hand out. . . . And politicians, that’s all they know, spend, spend, spend. It’s ruinin’ the country, yessir.”

Wasn’t it just two weeks ago when such yokel sentiment was heard more frequently than the national anthem?

Just turn on any talk radio show in the country and the invective would come spraying out. Light up the TV and watch the veins throb in the necks of people sick and tired of having to be sick and tired of government. You could read it on the editorial pages in the well-bred hand of the syndicated columnist writing with his $300 imported fountain pen.

Well, times and fashion change. Hemlines rise. Whitewalls come and go. Beta dies, VHS survives.

And when we’re kicked hard and down, government is a pretty sight riding out to save our angry hides.

“We don’t need any more complaining. Those taxes are paying for all this help you see here.” Darlene Authement, a housewife from nearby Motegut, is wiping chicken grease and baked beans from her young mouth. Her daughter, one of three children, fidgets at her feet. They are eating at a mobile emergency kitchen, bringing their paperwork to the government emergency assistance office.

She is looking for a hand.

Two weeks ago, it would have been called a handout. But as we said, things change. And this is an election about change, isn’t it?

Andrew opened up Authement’s house trailer like a tin of anchovies, peeling off the top and sending the family’s possessions scudding off into the swamps to the north. The Authements now crowd seven people into the surviving one-bedroom house of Darlene’s mother, and there they await their future.

Our location is 75 miles to the south and west of New Orleans, where we are alternately pelted by cloudbursts of drenching rain and flying hailstorms of black, crunchy airborne ants. Neither one seems to bother the locals, who have much worse on their minds. You’ve seen the pictures of the countryside: uprooted trees, flattened grasses, downed power lines, crushed homes, torn clothes, ruined toys--thrown by the wind, thrown to the wind, and already turning to compost in the wet green rotting richness of the Cajun bayou country.

By now, the disaster has dropped from the top of Page 1 in New Orleans papers. The TV crews are mostly gone.

But on the shrimp boat called the Jim Tillman, the Tillman clan is jammed aboard, 17 of them and what remains of their lives. The steel-hulled boat and themselves is most of what the Tillman’s have left. Homes ruined. Fishing tender damaged. Nets gone. Local shrimping waters contaminated.

Linda Tillman, mother of four, holds in her hand what remains. The forlorn paperwork--with red form declaring the rubble around them to be an uninhabitable home, white form estimating costs of repairing the small tender. And so on.

They, too, are hoping for a hand.

A little help and they’ll be on their feet. None, and it will be hard to get off their backs.

They walk into the community center, answer a few questions from the federal government emergency team and are out in 10 minutes. Linda and her husband, William Tillman Jr., are uplifted.

“They treated us good,” says Linda, with emphasis on good . And that made the Tillmans feel pretty good. Prior to the hurricane, a bad shrimp season sent them to the food stamp office, which wasn’t so uplifting. “There was a lot of humbug here,” Linda remembers.

Like we said, things change.

We drove all day, bayou to bayou, looking for that one stick-to-my-guns man or woman, standing on the dirty foundation of what was the family home in a pile of glass shards, soggy gypsum wallboard, torn linoleum and wet corn flakes, ready to say to heck with change. “Like I said, just get government off my back, would ya?”

Conspicuous, too, was the absence of the political candidates standing on that rickety platform in Louisiana.

Good for them. Nobody should be denied a hand or our collective sympathy in tough times. Particularly these warm, tough, open Cajun folks, who are too poor even on a flush day.

Sudden change is evident elsewhere in Andrew’s churning wake, too.

The urgent and honored imperatives of the market system are being asked to bend a little for the community cause.

If you own all the plywood in the neighborhood, it’s not considered fair to charge what the market will bear. That would be a free market economy, yes, but it also is price gouging.

Why, even the radio talk shows sound a change in attitude.

One here-and-there drive was partially spent listening to one of the big-deal foghorns of the radio talk show business, you probably know the gentleman’s name, repositioning himself as defender of the nouveau big spenders rather than critic.

In this, we are referring to President Bush’s opening of the national vault not just to the needy of Louisiana and Florida but also to threatened airplane workers in Texas and government-dependent grain farmers in the Midwest, for starters.

*

As I said, we were driving rural roads through flying ants and lightning storms so it was hard to take precise notes, but there was no mistaking the gentleman’s radio voice this day. It cleared its mighty throat and uttered its rage at the journalists who reported that the White House had changed its thinking after 12 years mocking those who would throw money at problems.

“Idiots of the press,” I think that is the description used by the gentleman. And then he said something like this, “What did they want Bush to do, let these people starve, naked in the sun?”

I’m not sure I followed the gentleman’s logic entirely. I think he was trying to say it was tax money well spent, which is certainly the sentiment in these parts.