Thomas Rowlandson:
The Double Disaster or New Cure for Love (July 10, 1807)
Published by Thomas Tegg

" … after the previously almost unthinkables start occurring regularly again."

In an apparent contradiction, MAGA governance has ushered in an unprecedented —and indeed, previously unthinkable — number of Disasters. From airplanes suddenly falling out of the sky or inexplicably leaving taxiways on takeoffs or landings, to so-called Natural Disasters, those deemed caused by acts of a somewhat less than benevolent God, the MAGA-verse has seen more and worse than recent administrations. While the incumbent hastily explains that these can be traced to lingering effects of President Biden's administration, no explanation seems entirely necessary. Actual Disasters come from nowhere, are utterly unforeseeable, and provide almost endless potential for sympathetic photo opportunities. Few things demonstrate an administration's authority more than mustering the National Guard to help locate flood victims with their Hueys. This sudden spate of horrible events might have boosted the incumbent's ratings.

His incessant budget cutting and reallocating could be seen as at least a proximal cause of this shocking increase in Disasters. A lack of preparation can certainly worsen certain outcomes. Furthermore, safety nets, which might seem like a waste of resources, often appear worthwhile only after they've prevented a catastrophic outcome, producing a dog-that-doesn’t-bark benefit that is not immediately apparent. Nobody ever opens the nightly news with a story about an averted Disaster, for the absence of Disaster never qualifies as news. After the flood washes away the houses, the governor can dispense great wisdom, and the President can extend his official best wishes. Few better opportunities accompany the office's many more onerous responsibilities.

Dismantling too much of the social safety net, though, seems unlikely to make the cad a hero. It's a fine art to properly deflect blame, especially when the Disasters keep happening over and over and over again. But on the other hand, a decent disaster displaces innumerable more disturbing stories about insider trading and general ineptness. Disasters carry a definite upside. Dismantling FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Administration, in favor of immigration enforcement seems likely to backfire, especially in a year that has already spawned a remarkable number of tornadoes and floods. The shortage of actual criminals for immigration enforcement to arrest has made their burgeoning budget seem like a bust. It can be a hard sell to tell someone who lost their home that you spent their recovery money sending someone's mommy far away from their home.

Enforcement of innumerable injustices, though, can create another kind of Disaster, further increasing the apparent threat level. The canny politician understands that whatever elevates a threat level reduces the scrutiny left over to consider any underlying Disasters present in an administration. This incumbent ensured a high baseline of continuing threat levels by populating cabinet positions with obviously incompetent sycophants. Even self-administered Disasters can successfully distract the White House Press Corps. Eliminating school lunch programs rarely makes the news. We'll know America will have been made Great Again, I suppose, when South Asian schoolchildren start collecting rupees to send to UNICEF to be distributed to starving schoolchildren in Alabama, thereby ensuring that we get our fair share of the world's Disaster relief. Great Again!

To say that MAGA is a Disaster is to give it more credence than it will ever deserve. Its presence has already spawned innumerable Disasters with many, many more looming on an increasingly hazy horizon. The State they hate was always better at preventing Disasters than recovering from them, though the headlines only ever reported on their often chaotic Disaster recovery efforts. No system can ever eliminate the potential for Disaster, but only apparently under-appreciated systems can effectively blunt our overall exposure to them. We often learn better as a result of failing. The Johnstown Flood of 1889 spawned generations of state and Federal regulations, as that flood was caused, in part, by administrative failures. The resulting Disaster could have been preventable had an administrative state like the one the MAGAs are dismantling existed during the Gilded Age. It didn't. The Progressive Age featured an alphabet soup of new government agencies, some of which very likely prevented repeat performances of Disasters like the one that occurred in Jamestown.

Progress occurs in spirals rather than straight lines. We seem to need to place ourselves in peril sometimes to remember why we hinder some behaviors. Freedom was never the simple concatenation of individual latitudes, but a mindful construction of inhibitors and enablers capable of safely constraining our baser instincts. We often have good reasons for forbidding certain behaviors, but we forget those reasons and bring new disasters on ourselves. Even inhibiting some rights makes perfect sense when the free exercise of them produces murdered schoolchildren. Those who dismantle our safety nets are only temporarily our saviors. Ultimately, they become our killers after the previously almost unthinkable starts occurring regularly again, making America GAPE again and again.

©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #FollowingChapters, #PureSchmaltz