Have we reached the point where a tornado outbreak across two states is treated by official Washington as a scheduling matter? I ask because I spent Friday evening in Georgetown watching a kitchen television run a silent chyron of county names — Smith, Forrest, Lamar, Greene, Tuscaloosa, Bibb — while my friend Eliza, who I love, asked someone to pass the bread.
This was at the soup course. By the salad course, the chyron was still rolling, the counties had multiplied, and the lobbyist across the table — I will describe him only as bipartisan, which is to say he billed both parties last cycle — examined his cufflink and observed that the federal response curve was “tracking pretty well with historical norms.” Historical norms. Eleven counties on the ground, March, and he produced a phrase that could have come out of a slide deck about quarterly yogurt sales.
By the time the dishes were cleared, the President had posted a single sentence containing the words “monitoring” and “tremendous,” and the FEMA administrator was, per his own social feed, not in Birmingham but in Monterey, delivering a keynote whose program lists the title as “Resilience: A Conversation.” The state delegations issued statements ranging from thoughts-and-prayers to thoughts-prayers-and-a-reminder-about-my-reelection-website. One senator’s office sent the same condolence language they had used in February, with the month updated and a comma moved.
My sister-in-law Judy, who works at the National Archives and has a longer memory than any cable producer in this city, mentioned over the cheese that the briefing on the 2011 outbreak was held within ninety minutes of dawn. By a Republican governor. With a Democratic president inbound on a plane. We used to do this. We used to send the principals to the runway in their pajamas if that was what the hour required. Now we workshop the language and we issue, around lunchtime, a paragraph that has been read by seven lawyers and one pollster.
There was, of course, no mention from any podium of the warming Gulf, of March temperatures running six degrees above the historical mean, of the fact that this is the third multi-state outbreak this calendar year and we are not yet through Lent. To raise it would be to introduce a topic upon which both parties have agreed not to introduce a topic. So we say “severe weather event.” The way insurance adjusters say “act of God” when they mean “we are not paying.”
Halfway through dessert I said something — I admit I said something — about whether anyone at the table had family below the Mason-Dixon, and Eliza did her Eliza thing. “Margaret. Please.” The tone was hostess. The subtext was that the lobbyist was going to write a check to the museum and the museum check was, at that specific moment, more solvent than Lauderdale County. The lobbyist examined his cufflink again. We had achieved a cufflink quorum.
I will tell you what unsettled me. It was not the Hill aide who, when pressed, said the delegation was waiting on damage assessments in order to “right-size the announcement.” It was not the cable anchor at eleven who pronounced Tupelo three distinct ways in a single segment. It was that nobody at the table — nobody, including, after Eliza’s Margaret-please, me — said another word about any of it until the cab arrived. Eight people, six of whom draw federal salaries directly or adjacently, and we returned, with what I can only describe as relief, to the seating chart for the museum gala.
The cab came at eleven. We were arguing about whether to seat the deputy secretary next to the donor with the divorce. Nobody had said the word Tupelo in forty minutes. Somewhere a county clerk was still on the phone, and somewhere else a press shop was still on its third draft, and we were settling, with great care, the placement of the centerpieces.