Thirty-five years ago, on May 18, 1980, Mount St. Helens erupted catastrophically. The mountain, located in Washington's Cascade Range just 50 miles northeast of Portland, Oregon, essentially tore itself apart in what was by far the largest volcanic event in the lower 48 states since European settlement. Fifty-seven people died, and the area around the mountain was scoured, with hundreds of square miles of trees flattened in national forest land and hundreds of miles of roads wiped out. Ash fell across eastern Washington, accumulating almost half a foot deep in Yakima, blotting out the sky and turning day into night, flattening crops and clogging streams.
The eastern part of the state was economically paralyzed for many days afterward as residents dug out; imagine digging out from a snowstorm on a warm spring day, except the snow never melts, clogs engines, scars lungs, and hardens when it gets wet. The eruption wasn't a complete surprise. Even before any activity began, geologists knew the young (geologically speaking) mountain was the likeliest in the Cascades to erupt again.
In late March, the mountain started to have swarms of earthquakes. A week later, a small crater opened on top which started venting steam. As April progressed, the north side of the mountain started to bulge, at first detectable only by instruments, eventually becoming perceptible to the naked eye. Scientists knew something serious was afoot, the question was just how big it would be.
\Washington's governor at the time, Dixy Lee Ray, was, perhaps fortuitously, also a scientist. She had a Ph.D in biology from Stanford, and her rise to local fame was as the director of the Pacific Science Center, Seattle's interactive science museum, and host of a local public TV program about science. Don't assume, though, that just because she was a scientist, a Democrat, and Washington's first female governor, that she was a hardcore liberal—her stepping stone to becoming governor was serving as the head of the Atomic Energy Commission in the Nixon administration, and her main legacy today is the various partially finished nuclear plants dotting Washington's landscape.
She had a unrestrainedly pro-growth attitude in general, and even proposed allowing supertankers to dock in Puget Sound. She never missed an opportunity to rhetorically poke hippies in the eye. Democratic voters wound up a bit surprised with what they ended up with when they had elected a blank-slate, feisty outsider in 1976, and she lost the 1980 primary when she ran for re-election to none other than (then-state senator, now-U.S. Rep.) Jim McDermott.
Nevertheless, thanks to her professional background, she immediately recognized the scope of the problem when Mt. St. Helens became active. She declared a state of emergency on April 3, and on April 30 created a "red zone" that excluded all persons from a large radius around the volcano. The reaction to the expansive boundaries was quite negative. Not only had the volcano been attracting thousands of tourists who were now kept out, but the boundaries restricted logging operations in the area and also prevented many people from reaching their vacation cabins.
Her overabundance of caution turned out to be well justified, in the end. The May 18 eruption happened on a clear Sunday morning, when weekenders would have been at their cabins, loggers would have been at work, and hundreds, if not more, gawkers would have been at viewpoints checking out the steaming volcano. Instead, only one person was at the main viewpoint overlooking the scene, six miles to its north—geologist David Johnston, who had time to radio the USGS with the chilling message "Vancouver, Vancouver, this is it!" before being overtaken by either the blast wave or pyroclastic flows.
While some of the other deaths were people camping illicitly in the exclusion zone, many of the deaths, in fact, occurred outside the red zone, as lahars (waves of melted glacial ice mixed with rocks) swept down the nearby river valleys, wiping out logging camps. The exclusion zone, however, did its job. Had gawkers, cabin owners, and loggers been within the blast zone, the death toll wouldn't have been 57, it would have been many hundreds or even more than a thousand. Credit goes to the scientists who monitored the growing volcano, and a governor who took them at their word.
Fast forward to February 2009: Another governor with a reputation for being smart, Bobby Jindal, gave the Republican rebuttal to Barack Obama's first address to a joint session of Congress. The speech was supposed to be a coming-out party for a GOP rising star, and the conservatives' own answer to Obama, to the extent that he too was young and non-white. Within a few days after the speech, though, any sense that Jindal was a potential future president had dissipated. The only person still thinking that was his destiny seemed to be Jindal himself, a misconception that he seems to harbor even today.
Part of that was due simply Jindal's delivery. Not only did he describe Obama's stimulus package in the most patronizing terms possible, he delivered much of his critique in a weird sing-song that made it sound like he was lecturing to preschoolers. The most memorable moment of the speech was when he looked at the camera, eyes wide in amazement, and brought his litany of absurd expenditures to a climax with "$140 million for something called volcano monitoring!"
The other part of the problem was that less than a month after his speech, the Redoubt volcano in Alaska erupted. It was almost as if nature conspired to make Jindal look as ridiculous as possible. An earlier eruption of Redoubt in 1989 had nearly killed hundreds when a 747 jet flew into its ash cloud and all four engines shut down. This time, scientists were prepared, having monitored earthquake swarms in the months before the March eruption.
Washington's Democratic governor in 2003, Gary Locke, had a similar job. He was chosen to give the response to George W. Bush's State of the Union address. Imagine, for a second, if Locke had topped off his list of complaints about everything that Bush was doing with an astonished-sounding reference to "something called hurricane monitoring!" Makes sense, right? Washington has never been hit by a hurricane, after all. (Well, with one possible exception.) Sounds like kind of a made-up problem, doesn't it? Just something that scientists carp about so they can get more government funding. I mean, maybe people in unimportant parts of the country do get hit by hurricanes occasionally, but that's their fault for building there, isn't it? You can't bail people out for making bad lifestyle choices like living next to the Gulf of Mexico! That's just going to encourage them further.
It's easy to laugh at Jindal's volcano monitoring fail as an isolated confluence of bad speech-giving and karmic comeuppance, but there's something more going on here. It's a window into the broader Republican approach to governance, of not being able to put yourself in someone else's shoes and anticipate that they might have problems that you don't. That problem you're having? It's something that's never happened to me, or anyone else I know, so it must not actually be happening. Or, if all the evidence eventually shows that it really is happening, then it must be because you did something wrong, so you should just take care of it yourself.
"Something called Obamacare?" What? You don't have a full-time job that comes with group health insurance, and you can't buy individual-market insurance because you have a pre-existing condition? I don't know anybody with that kind of problem. Why don't you just get a better job with benefits, then? Wait, you're too sick to get a job because of your chronic condition? Geez, what did you do to get that pre-existing condition in the first place?
"Something called Social Security?" What do you mean you aren't retiring with a fully loaded 401(k)? We already told you that you were supposed to have a million dollars in assets before you retire so you can live comfortably. Wait, your job doesn't _have_ a 401(k)? Well, at least you were making maximum contributions to your Roth IRA every year, weren't you? Wait, you were spending all your wages on rent and food? What the heck is wrong with you?
"Something called community college?" What do you need that for? Just go to the university where your parents went, right? They've been contributing to the alumni fund so you shouldn't have any trouble getting in, haven't they? Your parents didn't _go_ to college? Huh. Well, just work a minimum wage job during the summer and pay for it that way like I did. Wait, you say tuition has gone up since then? Well, get a part-time job while you go to school too. You say child care costs eat up half of what you earn? Well, maybe you should have thought of that before having kids.
"Something called public transit?" What do you mean it takes you two hours to get to work because you have to change buses twice? Just drive to work like everybody else does. It takes me 20 minutes. You can't actually afford car insurance on top of your rent and student loan payments? Well, at least move closer to work then. Your job is in a suburban office park that doesn't pay enough to afford housing that's anywhere near it? Geez, why you gotta be so negative all the time?
You only need to go back a few days to see this thought process still in action. Wednesday saw mark-ups to a transportation package that included big cuts to Amtrak's operating expenses, thanks to the Republican House majority ... shortly after Tuesday's fatal Amtrak derailment in Philadelphia. The _Washington Post_'s Philip Bump researched rates of rail ridership in Democratic districts (which tend to be the major cities and suburbs) and Republican districts (which tend to be rural and exurban), and learned that average ridership in Democratic districts is six times greater than Republican districts. There are 184 congressional districts—nearly half of them—where no one got on or off a train at all in 2014!
For the Republican majority, it's "something called train safety?" They don't know anybody who takes the train! What kind of loser would take a train instead of driving somewhere? Okay, maybe people in cities have to take the train, and those cities (and the national economy) would be paralyzed without trains, but that's really more of a city problem, and the people who chose to live in cities should probably figure that one out themselves. In much the same way that people who, for whatever reason, chose to live near a volcano should take care of their own damn volcano monitoring. Just leave your hands off my hurricane monitoring, okay? That's a problem that affects real Americans.