FEMA and the Cultural Illnesses of the Age

adult children in government

If you’ve ever listened to fire department radio traffic during a really ugly fire, you’ve heard fire captains and battalion chiefs sounding more and more bored as the situation on the ground spun out of control. They’ve spent twenty-plus years practicing that “I’m struggling not to yawn” voice, so that the firefighters they lead don’t hear them panicking and losing control. Yes, there’s more fire. Let’s go ahead and pull another heavy line to the second floor, and fill out a third alarm.

There are jobs that put people in daily contact with misery and despair and spiraling disorder, and all of the people who work in those jobs favor an affect of something that looks like boredom. If you’re an emergency room nurse or a homicide detective, you’re going to talk to people who sob and scream. They’re scared and in pain, so they’re in a state of emotional dysregulation. The worst day of their lives is your Tuesday shift. You know this, so you don’t descend into emotional dysregulation with them. You’re the person whose role is to enter disorder and make some degree of order.

So the disgusting performances of FEMA director Deanne Criswell and her boss, the relentlessly gormless Alejandro Mayorkas, are pathological in a way that I hadn’t imagined seeing.

A hurricane hits your town, and a wall of mud and water comes with it. People die in horrifying ways. Babies drown in front of their helpless parents. Homes are crushed and swept away. As the hurricane passes, survivors struggle out into the open, counting their dead and rushing to save who they can. The storm surge has shoved bodies into trees, or buried them in mud. People run for ladders and shovels. And then the government shows up and complains that they aren’t speaking with calmness and clarity. OH GOD EVERYONE IS DEAD. Stop spreading disinformation, you!

This is sickness, full stop. Of course there’s chaos in the wake of a disaster. Of course people spread bad information — they’re buried in mud, hurt and hungry, surrounded by the dead, looking at their ruined homes. People outside the disaster zone are desperately trying to reach their parents and children inside the cut-off zone of ruin, wondering if their families are dead. If your first instinct is to lecture them about speaking correctly, you are a fucking idiot, and have no business leading disaster response, ever. What is a “disaster?” What does that word mean?

The needed language in a moment of horror and despair, the appropriate language, is the language of reassurance. Into the cry of disorder, the voice of order. I know you’re in trouble, hang in there, there’s a lot to do, we’re coming. As a first instinct in the wake of disaster, stop being mean to the government is a sign of sociopathic disconnection. Speaking of which:

In the opening moments of the disaster in North Carolina, the Secretary of Homeland Security took his security detail and went clothes shopping. This is….

Yeah, I give up. Their instinctive response to a wave of dead Americans was to tone-police about rhetoric. Literal sociopathy, total failure of basic human understanding.

The constantly recited disinformation theme is itself a sign of pathological institutions, coding the completely ordinary process of discussion as a problem that needs to be repressed. What I’m seeing — tell me if it’s what you’re seeing, because maybe I’m wrong — is a widespread collapse of basic behavioral norms, starting with the foundational concept in emergency work that it’s not about you. Yes, people are upset, and the discourse around a disaster tends to be disordered. Shut up and work on organizing the trucks and helicopters.

Roles imply behaviors. The judge is supposed to be disinterested; the trauma surgeon or the pilot is supposed to calm under all circumstances. LADIES AND GENTLEMEN THIS IS THE CAPTAIN OH GOD WE’RE HAVING A MECHANICAL FAILURE OH I FEEL SO UPSET RIGHT NOW WE MAY NOT MAKE IT BACK TO THE AIRPORT I’M GOING TO TAKE A MOMENT TO WEEP.

Deanne Criswell and Alejandro Mayorkas don’t understand the most basic meaning of their roles. They are failures, and the best evidence of their failure is precisely their attempt to get people to stop calling them failures. Ignore the talk, speak calmly, work the problem.

At Lydwine, a Substack page named for the patron saint of pain and chronic illness, Brian Kennedy writes about people who have “emptied themselves of all expectation, of anything but appetite”:

“Leaning together / Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!”

But for you others with ears to hear — do you understand what I mean? I think I mean the end of that awful sense of waiting hanging over us, that’s hung over us now for decades… a nation of distraction and idleness… of sexual bulimia, endless war… celebrating monsters… and all of us haunted bodies wandering a haunted land, wondering if there really is any more ‘we’, or if it’s only you and me alone, us and them, a sense that things have spun out of control and are headed toward some inevitable confrontation, some necessary reckoning… as though America in our time has to offer not wealth or progress or sweet dreams of a better life but rather apocalypse, the veil grown thin, the gaze transfigured, the truth itself beheld with awful clarity, awful intensity, “like shining from shook foil.”

It’s not just decline I’m talking about, or end of empire. It’s not the price of groceries or the strength of the GDP. It’s something fundamental, something dire.

One of the dire things, the cause of the awful sense of waiting, is that foundations are no longer under our feet. People who are supposed to be there aren’t there, because they don’t know they’re supposed to be there. You call the disaster relief people in an emergency, and they show up to lecture you about your tone. They don’t see your suffering; they see your failure to treat them the way they wish to be treated. Their response is a response of appetite and sociopathy.

“Help, help, I’m drowning!”

“You watch the way you’re speaking to me! As a lifeguard, I demand respect!”

Complete failure, with deep social and cultural roots. The loss of endurance, forbearance, other-focus. The diminishment of roles and their rules. The foregrounding of excessive and obsessive self-regard. Appetitive dehumanization, the self as a thing that wants and consumes and only notices its want.

We’re on our own. Maybe we can make that work.