Recently, former Federal Emergency Management Agency director Michael Brown’s e-mails have been made public. I have a certain amount of sympathy for the guy, because you never want your e-mails to be made public. People then get to make fun of you for your poor misspellings, terrible grammar and royally screwing up the relief effort of a hurricane.

While many of the e-mails that were directed to him described the horrible situation in New Orleans — the levees breaking, the Superdome breaking, etc. — Michael Brown remained calm and declared himself a “fashion god.”

It seems our former FEMA director was hired because of his keen fashion sense. Many of his e-mails, surprisingly, did not deal with the topic of the hurricanes per se, but were about his wardrobe and his insecurities in front of the camera.

I don’t think he was being insensitive or ignorant of the disaster, I just think that while he was looking at the images of the hurricane victims on TV, he was wearing pumps, bell bottoms, aviator sunglasses, was taking a long drag on a cigarette and saying “Hurricane victims make me look FAAAAAT.”

I’m willing to give this man the benefit of the doubt here. Maybe his e-mails are a different side of him than the public side. Maybe this man was calm and composed on his cell phone, explaining “The levee broke, we’ve got problems at the Superdome and my handbag doesn’t match my belt.”

I think people might be overreacting when they say that he was being, well, an idiot. He just cares about fashion, OK? That’s perfectly fine. It’s not like you’ve suddenly hired Christian Dior or Paul Frank to run a war. “Camo was sooo Vietnam. I see all of you in black, something that goes with red easily.”

His aides weren’t exactly helping. In his many e-mails on the subject, one of his aides suggested to him, “ROLL UP YOUR SLEEVES” to make him look more hardworking. He’s working hard, alright — coordinating an outfit and looking “fabulous” takes time when you are a high-profile celebrity like the FEMA director. He must know what Paris Hilton feels like — I smell a new Fox show.

While his aides were discussing with him the possibility of police looting, he probably retorted that there was nothing in those people’s closets worth salvaging, what with the “awful pants-suit combination” he kept seeing.

I mean, he’s not a complete moron. In his e-mails, he was presented with the problem of FEMA’s policy on rescuing pets. He realized that something had to be done because people were either too loyal or too stupid to leave their animals. He wrote in an e-mail, “Please get some sort of plan together to start handling the pets.” See, he only had to be informed of the problem 10 times and then decided to have someone else come up with the plan. That’s the sign of a good lawyer.

In his e-mails, he also asked whether or not he could “quit now” and “go home.” This may have been taken out of context, but it at least shows that the director of FEMA probably didn’t have his head in the game. And dude, I feel ya. I mean, I’m a senior, I’ve totally checked out on some things. Like, I’m barely writing this column anymore; I usually just have my cadre of ghostwriters do it. So I got your back, it’s not like, you know, thousands of people died because you “checked out” and didn’t do your damn job. And when I don’t do mine, I sometimes let my sarcasm slip and actually say what I mean.1

Now let’s just keep in mind what FEMA actually stands for. It is not the FASHION EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT AGENCY. Brown is not part of the Fab Five, and although he probably has plenty of home decorating options in the wake of the hurricane, that’s not why he was hired. He was the man who would have been in charge of the emergency response if, God forbid, a terrorist attack occurred. This is the man who would have been frantically trying to figure out tie combinations and e-mailing his people about that rather than, I dunno, doing his job.

But people have not been asking the right questions. For instance: “What kind of experience does this man have?” Brown served as the undersecretary of the National Incident Management System and the Nuclear Response Team.

So this is the man that was, at one time, partly responsible for a nuclear incident response. There weren’t any nuclear incidents, so he was either really good at his job or didn’t have any experience handling it. But he did have experience with FEMA and hurricanes prior to Katrina. In 2004, FEMA sent Miami-Dade County an estimated $30 million in disaster relief funds for Hurricane Frances.

Unfortunately, Miami-Dade was relatively unaffected by Frances. He claimed that there were no serious mistakes, but the South Florida Sun-Sentinel investigated, found him responsible and called for his removal. Let’s think about this here. If LA got attacked, this guy might send relief funds to Dayton, Ohio. That is, of course, if he was able to decide whether to wear the sleeves rolled up or not.

1 Cronyism has been called an inevitable product of the system but a thousand deaths is not an “inevitable product.” It will be years till we truly understand the scope of this disaster and how ineffective this administration was.

Chris’s team of ghostwriters would like to point out he has no fashion sense. Send complaints to cholt@stanford.edu.