Marty raised the issue of "do you you feel safer now?" in his provocative post yesterday.

For those of you who'd like to think more deeply on this topic and for those wanting to think more carefully about my recent post about corporate bribery and Saddam, I suggest two provocative readings for you. I think they raise important questions.

W. David Stephenson, among others, reports on Davd Rosenbaum's NY Times article report (now part of the NYT's gated content rather than part of the public discussion - does that make sense?)on survey results showing a level of morale at the Department of Homeland Security that is so low as to be almost impossible to believe. The statistic that many newspapers led with is that only 12 percent of the more than 10,000 DHS employees who returned a government questionnaire said they felt strongly that they are "encouraged to come up with new and better ways of doing things."

DHS rates at or near the bottom in many categories among governmental agencies.

Where does DHS rate highest? It places second with 56% of employees strongly agreeing with the statement "The work I do is important." What?!! 44% do not strongly agree with that statement! That may be more disturbing than some of the really low scores.

Secondly, Peggy Noonan has written a distrubing piece in the Wall Street Journal called "A Separate Peace." The subtitle is "America is in trouble--and our elites are merely resigned."

Think about this quote:

I think there is an unspoken subtext in our national political culture right now. In fact I think it's a subtext to our society. I think that a lot of people are carrying around in their heads, unarticulated and even in some cases unnoticed, a sense that the wheels are coming off the trolley and the trolley off the tracks. That in some deep and fundamental way things have broken down and can't be fixed, or won't be fixed any time soon. That our pollsters are preoccupied with "right track" and "wrong track" but missing the number of people who think the answer to "How are things going in America?" is "Off the tracks and hurtling forward, toward an unknown destination."

So, Marty's post seems not so much a provocation, but a reading of a general sense of unease and a call to start asking important questions as if they matter, whether or not they involve legal issues. I know that some of our readers are uncomfortable with the discussion of these kinds of issues on this blog, but I think that the points Noonan raises in the following quote, which does refer to lawyers, are certainly well worth taking some time to raise and discuss:

I suspect that history, including great historical novelists of the future, will look back and see that many of our elites simply decided to enjoy their lives while they waited for the next chapter of trouble. And that they consciously, or unconsciously, took grim comfort in this thought: I got mine. Which is what the separate peace comes down to, "I got mine, you get yours."

You're a lobbyist or a senator or a cabinet chief, you're an editor at a paper or a green-room schmoozer, you're a doctor or lawyer or Indian chief, and you're making your life a little fortress. That's what I think a lot of the elites are up to.

Not all of course. There are a lot of people--I know them and so do you--trying to do work that helps, that will turn it around, that can make it better, that can save lives. They're trying to keep the boat afloat. Or, I should say, get the trolley back on the tracks.

For further reading, you might move on to Barbara Tuchman's book, March of Folly.