AKA: Oh FEMA, where are thou?
I sometimes wonder what kind of an effect the recent struggles of the CIA have meant to the paranoid/schiz segment of our society that has for so long been convinced that the CIA is reading their minds with laser beams. Now that we see the CIA is a bunch of stumblebums who can’t even figure out if Saddam has nukes, and who get punked regularly by Dick Cheney and the neocon crew, who will step in and take the place of the Invisible Boogeyman in our collective unconscious?
In the movie "The X-Files: Fight the Future" the evil gummint agency that was gonna power-trip us all was FEMA. Which looked like a real dark-horse candidate for the shadowy bad guys to be feared crown. They hit some real good psychic points: 1) they have a freaky acronym name 2) nobody really knew what they did (of course, that has changed now – we now know that they do sweet F.A.) and 3) there were situations under which they could assume dictatorial power and squish us all into puddles of black oil.
Unfortunately for those amongst us who need the Boogeyman, dumb, doddering FEMA is on the conveyer belt leading to the whirling knives of governmental agency slaughter. Kinda like Head Start … or the enforcement division of the EPA … They’re going to dissolve it, and then try to re-create the thing from the ground up.
What a sea change, eh? From a crack, efficient operation that could possibly, in the right light and if you squinted, look like it could take over the world, to the agency equivalent of Million-Dollar Baby in a couple short years. Grover Norquist must be smiling – he and his ilk have managed to take a governmental program that actually did the people of this country some good and drown it in the fetid bayou water that engulfed New Orleans. Congrats, Grover. Thanks a pantload.
Is it just a matter of time before we get the news trickling out that re-constituting FEMA as a governmental agency is just "hard work" and that in the meantime, and just for a bit, we are going to have to have the duties of FEMA handled by private industry. Just for a bit. And hey, why not? I mean, how much worse can they be? And we all know that everyone in the U.S. worships at the altar of private industry, because they’re the guys that create jobs (outsourcing) and contribute to the national economy (corporate welfare) and are responsive to the needs and wants of the people (cell phone companies, insurance companies) and don’t ever ever actually gouge people (oil industry).
Man, I feel like Michael Corleone at the end of Godfather II: All my enemies have deserted me. Gonna hafta find some new ones. What’s your vote? I vote for Big Agra and Archer-Daniels-Midland.