{"id":198,"date":"2005-09-05T20:06:02","date_gmt":"2005-09-06T00:06:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/2005\/09\/05\/you-didnt-know-what-when\/"},"modified":"2005-09-05T20:06:02","modified_gmt":"2005-09-06T00:06:02","slug":"you-didnt-know-what-when","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/2005\/09\/05\/you-didnt-know-what-when\/","title":{"rendered":"You didn&#8217;t know what when ?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a name='a1043'><\/a><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Michael Chertoff<\/span> &#8216;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.wonkette.com\/politics\/michael-chertoff\/index.php#chertoffs-reading-habits-123841\">thought the crisis had passed<\/a>&#8216;.&nbsp; <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Mike Brown<\/span> &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.brendanloy.com\/2005\/09\/you-have-got-to-be-kidding-me.html\">thought it was a typical hurricane situation<\/a>&#8220;. &nbsp; &nbsp; The President&#8230; well, his mind was elsewhere, and the First Mother thought it was an excuse for a vacation. <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">The United States<\/span>,<br \/>\nin pretending to prepare for trouble while forgetting how, and<br \/>\nelevating leaders who never learned to accept blame and have no role<br \/>\nmodels to show them how, is<br \/>\ngearing up for a complete <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikibooks.org\/wiki\/Cookbook:Fleischbutter\">meltdown<\/a> during the first truly unexpected<br \/>\ncalamity.<\/p>\n<p>Just as the leaders of New Orleans fled with their networks of friends<br \/>\nwhen disaster struck (when just those networks could have responded<br \/>\nsmartly to an ornery Fate), I can see the leaders of an entire state or<br \/>\ncoastline fleeing in the face of still greater trouble.&nbsp; As<br \/>\nDouglas Adams predicted, the &#8220;Someone Else&#8217;s Problem&#8221; field will be one<br \/>\nof the strongest in the universe some day.&nbsp; Let&#8217;s hope we are<br \/>\nstill around to appreciate the irony.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Michael Chertoff &#8216;thought the crisis had passed&#8216;.&nbsp; Mike Brown &#8220;thought it was a typical hurricane situation&#8220;. &nbsp; &nbsp; The President&#8230; well, his mind was elsewhere, and the First Mother thought it was an excuse for a vacation. The United States, in pretending to prepare for trouble while forgetting how, and elevating leaders who never learned [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":135,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[206],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-198","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a-la-mod"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/135"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=198"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}