Brownie Plodder and the Deadly Indifferences

A crowd of maybe 10 reporters on assignment, four or five bookstore employees, and a few random stragglers slumped into two rows of folding chairs outside of the Garden District Book Shop last night to see former FEMA director and Arabian Horse enthusiast Michael Brown talk about his new book, Deadly Indifference: The Perfect (Political) Storm: Hurricane Katrina, The Bush White House, and Beyond The title itself is intriguing. "Deadly Indifference" sounds like someone's attempt to mock a cop buddy movie that tanks at the box office. It also happens to be the title a second rate mystery novel just in case people aren't confused enough. And if they aren't annoyed enough, there's also the grating use of "Perfect Storm" as well as that enigmatic "And Beyond" thrown in to help with that. I haven't read the book yet. I'm waiting on a library copy and I wasn't about to drop $24.95 on it last night. Gambit's Kevin Allman points us to a review by Paul Bedard that appeared in U.S. News and World Report if you're looking for Cliff's Notes.



The main thing that Brownie got across at this talk was that the "Deadly Indifference" referenced in the title of his book doesn't characterize the Federal Emergency Management Agency under his charge at the time of the flood so much as it applies to, well, possibly everybody. But more specifically, he means to tell us that individuals affected by disasters are themselves so unprepared, so deadly indifferent to the hazards that stalk their lives, that they make things difficult for the FEMAs of the world. Only Brown preferred to use "firefighters and rescue workers" as his avatar for emergency management in his examples repeatedly citing 9/11 as his case reference of choice.

“I don’t care how angry you are. I just want you to read it and think about, are you ready?” Brown said. Not being prepared for the dangers you know your environment poses risks not only your life, but also the lives of others. “We owe it to all these firefighters and rescue workers to be as prepared as we can. As powerful as we think we are, Mother Nature is more powerful than anything we can imagine.”

Depending on your point of view this is either Brown's version of "ask not what your country can do for you" or "people shouldn't live there." Either way it's a cop out for someone hawking a book about the "lessons learned" from a disaster his agency largely failed to cope with.

Despite opening his talk proclaiming his readiness to "have open discourse" about his failures, most of the "lessons" Brown wanted us to learn were about the people who failed him. He took a few obligatory shots at former Governor Meemaw, at Ray Nagin, and also, with the eager prompting of T-P reporter John Pope, at George Bush who he paints as an aloof "frat boy"

On Friday, he described Bush as “a jocular, fun-loving frat guy” who didn’t seem to understand the magnitude of the threat that Katrina posed or the breakdown that ensued after the storm passed and the floodwaters drowned New Orleans.

Brown illustrated this by telling us about a time that Bush annoyed him by picking on the suit he was wearing which was pretty funny considering Brown's own reputation as something of a "jocular" fashion maven himself.

Others on Brown's list of deadly indifferences included Anderson Cooper for being too unhappy on TV about search and rescue operations, rogue truck drivers for failing to move supplies into the city, and the Stafford Act for placing bizarre limitations on the process of rebuilding. That last one most of us would probably agree with although it was interesting that Brown chose to bring up the exceedingly complicated controversy over the new hospital complex in order to talk about it. Throwing in a line about how the old Charity Hospital, "probably needed to be torn down anyway" didn't help to clarify matters.

But mostly, Brown emphasized to us that we, as individuals, should learn how to make FEMA's planning go more smoothly. For example, Brown shared with us his experience evacuating from his Colorado home during a recent wild fire emergency. While Brown had managed to round up his three dogs and drive down to a pre-determined rendezvous point, he was disappointed to see his neighbors arrive there less promptly and with varying loads of (I guess trivial) personal possessions in hand. I tried to turn this on its head by asking Brown what lessons emergency managers can themselves learn to better prepare for the fact that people are going to behave with less than optimal efficiency in these situations but he didn't really answer that choosing instead to talk about putting GPS on supply trucks.

There was some attempt made by his hosts at the Book Shop and by Brown himself to characterize his appearance in front of the small and not at all deadly or indifferent crowd as courageous in some way. But actually Brown exhibited a kind of fake magnanimity toward the audience that mostly came across as trying too hard. One man showed up in a "FEMA Sucks" T-shirt. Brown made a bee line for him attempting to win him over, "Hey I gotta get a picture of that shirt!" A woman delivered a sequence of marginally coherent attacks at him, the Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Patent office, various other offenders all while Brown smiled a bit too broadly and pretended to understand what she was talking about. Finally he awkwardly slapped the table inviting her to sit next to him. I think he was just trying to have his picture made sitting with a black person. Anyway the whole thing came off as desperate and more than a little sad.

At the end I presented him with a copy of River Road Recipes to sign for me. He gladly took it and said a few nice things about the Junior League. When I reminded him of his reputation for being perhaps a bit overly familiar with the Baton Rouge dining scene, his face snapped back to that fake smile again. He might as well have been shouting, "See? Look how great a sport I am!" Again, just sad. At least I have something to remember him by.