Unexpected fury.

I've had a pretty decent week, so I looked forward to writing up a first post that wasn't full of angry rantings. My new job is working pretty decently, life is calming down somewhat, and so forth.

But no. A week without in-your-face bullshit from the Bush administration is like a week without food and water, and lo, we have the wonder that is Michael Brown.

I have a particular view of government service, one that is strict enough that I've had more than a few people call me crazy for it. I believe that when you work for the government, it is more than a job. It is more than a responsibility. It is a sacred trust (and believe me, being a godless athiest, I call very little sacred), serving the people-and the people deserve the best they can get. If you hold a position, it should be because you were the best-qualified for it, not because of who you know or who your parents are.

The system we currently have, of course, is corrupt. It's so corrupt that the corruption has become ingrained into the system, almost unrecognizable as the poison that it is. The House of Representatives has no centralized method of publishing job openings and making them competitive. The closest thing is the job openings listing published each week in Congressional Quarterly, which gets an average of two new openings a week. There are over five thousand jobs in the House of Representatives staff alone, and it is renowned for its high turnover, so why only two a week? Because most openings never make it that far. Openings are filled before they can get competed for because someone knows someone and you are expected to use contacts to get jobs. Knowing someone is worth more than any job experience anywhere, and this has become not only all right, but the way people think things are supposed to be.

I had an internship one summer in the House of Representatives. Over the course of the summer, there were about twelve interns. Of all twelve of us, only one got there on merit. All the rest of us (including me, which I now bitterly regret) were there because our parents knew people in the right places. The results? We came in late, did half-assed jobs, and generally made the Congressman look bad. All except for Andrew, who was better than all of us put together. He took his work seriously, and fulfilled his responsibilities amazingly well. I imagine he's working at a McDonald's somewhere now, because we've created a system that disdains that kind of hardworking honesty.

The Bush team has managed to take this disdain and turn it into an art form so disgusting that it disturbs everyone. Even people who think that contacts should matter over merit are disturbed, whether or not they realize why. To me, it is anathema. And so the topic returns to Michael Brown.

He is the man in charge of FEMA, the man in charge of any large-scale disaster relief effort, and the only disaster-relief-related thing on his resume is a fraudulent claim that he was head of Edmond, Oklahoma's emergency services division from 1975 to 1978. The truth? He was an administrative assistant to a city official, the head of exactly nothing. (He also lied about being a Professor of Political Science at Oklahoma's Central State University. He was there, at least-as a student who didn't even make the Dean's List, let alone the faculty.)

The results of Brown being the head of FEMA should be apparent to everyone. New Orleans has been treated to an uncertain, stumbling response, followed by freakish bravado. FEMA has turned away firefighters, barred the Red Cross, refused donations of food and drinking water from Wal-Mart, barred Coast Guard members from delivering diesel fuel, cut one Parish's emergency communications line, and turned away a five-mile-long caravan of 500 boats ready and willing to help locate and evacuate survivors from New Orleans. Why? Because FEMA doesn't need the help, and they claim that their authority supercedes the local government's. (Jefferson Parish restored their own communications line, then posted armed guards to protect it from FEMA.)

(Oh, and the U.S.S. Bataan, an extraordinarily well-equipped hospital ship, has been sitting off the Gulf Coast since the day before the levees broke. Their helicopters have been ordered to go help with the relief efforts, but the six operating rooms and hundreds of beds onboard are quite, quite empty. I'd say this is more Bush's direct fault as Commander-in-Chief, but I thought I'd just throw it in there. The U.S.S. Comfort, meanwhile, the Navy's media-flagship relief vessel, was due to arrive yesterday.)

FEMA's response to this disaster could only conceivably have been worse if they had decided that the New Orleans survivors would soon become zombies and began shooting them. This is what fucking happens when you take a guy who was fired from the International Araban Horse Association and put him in charge of national disaster relief, but it makes perfect sense according to Bush logic, because Brown has the ultimate qualification: he was the previous FEMA head's college roommate.

To those who think that getting a job through contacts is harmless and does no damage, look at this. This whole disaster exemplifies what is wrong with being given a position through contacts; the employer may be able to convince himself that you're the most qualified for the job, that they're not being swayed by personal knowledge of you, but the reality is that this is impossible. We are all biased, all more swayed than we think we are, and no one can be trusted to hire someone that they know for work this important. Those who serve the people must be the best there is, chosen impartially. A centralized system for publishing openings in government must be created, and people applying for those positions should be chose through some sort of double-blind system.

That's the long-term solution, anyway. The short-term solution is that Michael Brown should be fired, then put in prison for the rest of his life on hundreds of charges of Criminally Negligent Homicide. I suppose him being taken off Katrina disaster relief and eventually promoted or given a medal is a distasteful second best.