What is the half-life of a regional disaster these days — eight days, ten? I ask because the Guadalupe River is still giving up the missing, and I cannot find the story anywhere above the fold. I had to scroll past a wedding rumor, a software update, and a recap of a music video shot in a stadium tunnel before I found the body count, which is the order of priority a serious country uses when it has decided in advance not to be one.
The numbers, in case you, like the rest of us, have stopped checking: more than a hundred dead, dozens still unaccounted for, a children’s camp washed off the map, and a search effort being conducted in part by volunteers with airboats and a Facebook page. The state has asked for federal help with the kind of sheepish indirection a man uses when he has run out of his neighbor’s gasoline. The federal answer has been, broadly, that the matter is being looked into, which in Washington is a phrase that means the matter is being looked away from.
I went to a dinner in Kalorama on Saturday — Eliza’s, the second one this month, the lamb again — and I will tell you that Kerr County did not come up until I raised it, and when I raised it the table treated me as though I had asked everyone to take their shoes off. There were eleven of us. One had a niece at sleepaway camp in the Adirondacks; she said the words “so awful” and reached, with admirable economy, for her wineglass. Another, a lobbyist I will describe only as bipartisan, examined a cufflink as though it had been recently insulted.
The conversation that did flourish, at length and with real animation, concerned a pop star, a tight end, and a rumored engagement ring whose carat weight my sister-in-law Judy — who works at the National Archives and has not, to my knowledge, ever held a diamond — described with the confidence of a woman who has read three Substacks on the subject. Judy is not the problem. Judy is doing what the country has asked her to do, which is to take an interest in something manageable.
I would like to be clear that I do not begrudge anyone their distractions. I begrudge the institutions that have built a national life out of providing them. We have a press corps that has decided a missing-persons list in the Hill Country is, at best, a Tuesday item, and a political class that has located, with the precision of a metal detector, the exact moment at which a tragedy stops generating donor calls. That moment, in my notes, was a week ago Thursday.
The bipartisan lobbyist, pressed, allowed that “the response had been complicated,” a sentence I have now heard him deploy about three different catastrophes and one merger. He explained that the disaster-relief supplemental was “in a difficult posture,” which is what people in this town say when they mean nothing is going to happen and they would prefer you didn’t ask whose fault that is. Eliza said, “Margaret, please,” in the tone she uses when she would like the salad course to proceed without incident.
I want to know, and I am only asking, what we believe a country owes the people who lost children at a summer camp. I want to know whether the answer is a press release, a presidential flyover scheduled around a fundraiser, and a polite collective agreement to stop mentioning it after the second weekend. I want to know whether “thoughts and prayers” has been formally upgraded to “thoughts, prayers, and a content pivot,” because if so I would like that noted in the Federal Register, where we keep track of our other surrenders.
There is a particular kind of civic cowardice that does not look like cowardice at all. It looks like a feed. It looks like a producer deciding, reasonably, that the audience has moved on, and an audience deciding, reasonably, that the producers have moved on, and the two of them shaking hands over the grave of a story neither one will admit to burying. Kerr County did not stop being news. We stopped being readers.
I drove home from Eliza’s thinking about the airboats, and the volunteers, and the parents who are still, as I write this, waiting on a phone call from a county morgue. By the time I reached Dupont, the radio had moved on to the engagement, and a man I have never met was breaking down, with real feeling, the symbolism of the ring’s setting.
The lamb, I should say, was excellent. We called it the lamb course, and we asked for the recipe.