On the Socipathy of Our Government's Disaster Leaders - Updated Sunday Evening

I read an on-the-money Substack this morning pertaining to the anti-social behavior of Deanne Criswell and Alejandro Mayorkas and their FEMA/DHS hangers-on in the wake of Helene and Milton. It is Tell Me How This Ends by Chris Bray. Some excerpts:

There are jobs that put people in daily contact with misery and despair and spiraling disorder, and all of the people who work in those jobs favor an affect of something that looks like boredom. If you’re an emergency room nurse or a homicide detective, you’re going to talk to people who sob and scream. They’re scared and in pain, so they’re in a state of emotional dysregulation. The worst day of their lives is your Tuesday shift. You know this, so you don’t descend into emotional dysregulation with them. You’re the person whose role is to enter disorder and make some degree of order.

So the disgusting performances of FEMA director Deanne Criswell and her boss, the relentlessly gormless* Alejandro Mayorkas, are pathological in a way that I hadn’t imagined seeing. 

A hurricane hits your town, and a wall of mud and water comes with it. People die in horrifying ways. Babies drown in front of their helpless parents. Homes are crushed and swept away. As the hurricane passes, survivors struggle out into the open, counting their dead and rushing to save who they can. The storm surge has shoved bodies into trees, or buried them in mud. People run for ladders and shovels. And then the government shows up and complains that they aren’t speaking with calmness and clarity. 

OH GOD EVERYONE IS DEAD. Stop spreading disinformation, you! ..

This is sickness, full stop. Of course there’s chaos in the wake of a disaster. Of course people spread bad information — they’re buried in mud, hurt and hungry, surrounded by the dead, looking at their ruined homes. People outside the disaster zone are desperately trying to reach their parents and children inside the cut-off zone of ruin, wondering if their families are dead. If your first instinct is to lecture them about speaking correctly, you are a fucking idiot, and have no business leading disaster response, ever. What is a “disaster?” What does that word mean?

The needed language in a moment of horror and despair, the appropriate language, is the language of reassurance. Into the cry of disorder, the voice of order. I know you’re in trouble, hang in there, there’s a lot to do, we’re coming. As a first instinct in the wake of disaster, "stop being mean to the government" is a sign of sociopathic disconnection...

Roles imply behaviors. The judge is supposed to be disinterested; the trauma surgeon or the pilot is supposed to calm under all circumstances. LADIES AND GENTLEMEN THIS IS THE CAPTAIN OH GOD WE’RE HAVING A MECHANICAL FAILURE OH I FEEL SO UPSET RIGHT NOW WE MAY NOT MAKE IT BACK TO THE AIRPORT I’M GOING TO TAKE A MOMENT TO WEEP.

To me, it is incredible that it has taken three weeks for FEMA to open a center in 

McDowell County, one of the hardest hit areas. That would seem to confirm that FEMA has been far too slow in its Helene response, which the Biden-Harris administration has persistently told us is "misinformation."

Bill Clinton is a terrible person and was a corrupt president -- but he had excellent judgment in his choice of FEMA director: James Lee Witt was an emergency management professional who had compassion for disaster victims and ran the agency with professionalism. The last thing Witt would have done was 

use valuable resources to put together a "messaging toolkit" in the wake of two horrible disasters so people would say nice things about the agency. While there is some valuable information in the "toolkit," the people who need the information don't have power or the internet! As of this morning, ~100,000 people are still without power in North Carolina and nearly 5 million in Florida.

Regardless of whether Trump or Harris wins the election, the smartest thing they could do would be to appoint Ron DeSantis as head of FEMA, if he would take the job. The second smartest thing would be to stop blaming victims and others when someone in an area that suffered a catastrophic disaster says something they don't like. Instead, put 100% of resources on assistance.

*Gormless: "Lacking intelligence, [common] sense or discernment, often implying lack of capacity of will to remedy the situation." 

Sunday, 10/13 Update:

Yet again, it is all about the "federal family" rather than sympathy for the victims or their loved ones. None of the four photos show her or her staff spending quality times with victims.