He also casts blame on "80 years of welfare-state thinking" and on modern urban life in general. Noticeably spared any criticism is the (Bush-administered) federal government, despite the fact that its mandate under the Constitution is, among other things, "to establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, [and] promote the general Welfare."
Mero's commentary, based as it is on a social Darwinist vision of society whereby we're all basically on our own in a dog-eat-dog world, understandably generated an outpouring of responses in the Opinion pages of this newspaper. These letters and essays pointed out the bigotry and coded racism in Mero's discourse and the flaws in his argument about "blue-state welfare dependency."
Mero was then granted the unusual privilege of an immediate response. In a 675-word rejoinder titled, "People who disagree should rise above acrimony" (Tribune Opinion section, Sept. 18), he panders to our local religious majority by citing Mormon "self-reliance" in the 1976 Teton Dam collapse. Here, too, his reasoning is badly flawed.
First, the loss of life and property in the Teton Dam flooding was minuscule compared to that of Katrina. Second, individual self-reliance, even in the face of a relatively small flood, proved to be useless; as Mero himself acknowledges, it took "tens of thousands of Mormons and their neighbors" to carry out rescue and rebuild operations.
What if a much larger disaster (say, a major earthquake or a nuclear accident or attack) were to hit the Salt Lake Valley? Would Mero and his Sutherland Institute confreres want disaster relief to be carried out solely by our local community, with no federal assistance? I doubt it, yet that's what his argument implies.
Mero claims that Katrina has "ripped the facade off of 40 years of the War on Poverty." But the War on Poverty was derailed by the Vietnam War and ended definitively 25 years ago when the inauguration of Ronald Reagan ushered in an era of small-government conservatism in which "government is the problem, not the solution."
Today there are more than 35 million Americans living in poverty and the Bush administration has done little to help. Indeed, what Katrina ripped the facade off of is George W. Bush's pretense of "compassionate conservatism."
Mero and his Sutherland Institute claim to be "compassionate" toward others, but the only evidence he cites for this - their advocacy of a charity-based "universal" health-care system for Utah's indigent and needy uninsured - flies in the face of empirical research showing that charity alone can provide but a fraction of what's needed and that government must do the necessary heavy lifting.
The governing theme of Mero's latest diatribe, however, is that those who disagree with his bigoted, elitist views are guilty of undermining civil discourse and fomenting "acrimony." This is coming, note, from a man who in his first article slandered the New Orleans victims as "doing nothing to help themselves, except to complain that the rest of us are not doing enough fast enough to save them" (I worked recently as a volunteer at Camp Williams and found exactly the opposite to be true) and who derided the defenders of these traumatized evacuees as "ridiculous" and "ludicrous."
Now, having provoked his opponents into using strong language themselves in their responses, Mero in his second commentary calls these respondents "ignorant" and "narrow-minded ideologues" who "are still caught in the 1960s and still fighting Vietnam, seem not to want any part of a lasting solution to the health-care needs of poor people in Utah, . . . only scream for more tax dollars," and engage in "orchestrated letter-writing campaigns filled with hateful personal accusations."
Mero would have us believe that in using such inflammatory language he is "rising above acrimony." I think most readers of this newspaper will not be fooled but will see the transparent hypocrisy of his self-serving self-righteousness.
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Tom Huckin is a professor of English at the University of Utah and a resident of Salt Lake City.
