The Buck Stops There

I didn’t catch much of the Michael Brown hearings today, but I’ve read a few recaps. Once again, America is dishing out its finest export: blame shifting.

Monday morning quarterbacks will always be able to design the best last-minute plays. Commissions and investigations are great, but as such can only be backward-looking and never progressive enough. But, a short look at the obvious will show that things in New Orleans went wrong, something better should have happened, and as such, someone had to take the fall.

I admire Brownie for not rolling over and playing dead. Whether or not his analysis of the local and state officials’ performances is accurate, he at least has enough fight in him to not become a Bush puppet. However, Mr. Brown, please remember that the nation is not supposed to know your name. I, and a host of others, could not name another FEMA director. Yours was a position that is regulated to the annals of anonymity. Essentially, the only way America would ever know your name is if you screwed up. We should have never learned the name Ken Lay, Lewinsky should never have become a noun or verb, and no one should have ever known about the Georgia woman who ran from her wedding. In our media-savvy society, one error can cost you a lifetime.

I am not on the recent New York Times bandwagon that paints George W. Bush as a master ringleader of a band of cronies. Mainly, I don’t think the president smart enough to orchestrate mass corruption – I’ll leave that puppeteering to the smarter people behind him. But, the buck does stop somewhere, and history will tell the story far better than the current American media. Then again, if Mr. Bush turns out to be one of the worst presidents in history, the American people have only two places to shift their blame: 1) On themselves (they elected the man twice), and 2) On the Democrats for running two consecutive hopeless candidates.

Blame shifting will continue as long as we continue to turn regular people into overnight celebrities via reality TV and soft-hitting news. Students will soon major in Saving Your Own Rear End, taking courses called “Shredding Documents 101,” “Talking in a Circle,” and “Not My Fault.” It will take a bigger person, however, to find out where the buck stops, admit it stops at his or her desk, and accept the due course of action. Such a person will not be given the mediocre title of ‘celebrity,’ but rather of ‘hero.’ We make celebrities; heroes make themselves.