Rock You Like a Hurricane
Come on, gimme a break about my article title. That shit was crying out to be done.
I’ve had a hard time coming up with just one political angle from which to approach my account of the fall of New Orleans to a crazy, homicidal broad named Katrina. The fallout of this hurricane and her younger sister, Rita, with the attendant worst-case scenarios coming to dismal life has had more political ramifications, and a far more disastrous effect on the unity of the country, than 9/11. I know a lot of people are going to have a problem with that assertion, but think about it. 9/11 may be viewed as a "sacred cow" of tragedies among Americans, but as bad as it was it at least it unified us all, although briefly. For a few weeks in the early autumn of 2001 we were of one mind and one heart. We grieved as one. Even after the bitterly divisive presidential election of the previous year, we all managed to rally around our new president. And we all agreed that Rudolph Giuliani was the fucking SHIT.
This disaster called Hurricane Katrina is a whole other animal. Right out of the gate finger-pointing began as soon as the levee holding in New Orleans’ 17th Street Canal ruptured, spilling a large portion of Lake Pontchartrain into the downtown area. "It wouldn’t have happened if so much money hadn’t been diverted from the levee-building project to fund the war in Iraq," lefties grumbled. "Nuh-uh," conservatives countered. "It was those goddamned liberal environmentalists lobbying about the fucking wetlands." As usual, the unsexy, middle-ground truth – that a fundamental design flaw in the levee itself, coupled with hasty construction, was almost certainly to blame for the break – was lost and abandoned. Journalists scrambled to take a position that would turn the story black and white and, they hoped, galvanize viewers as it polarized them.
Not that the media needed help there – black and white was pretty much taking care of itself. The city’s poorest people – who’d been forced to hold out during the storm because they couldn’t afford to leave – quickly began to take advantage of the descending bedlam. Abandoned and damaged stores were broken into and looting began. Well, the black people were looting, anyway. If you believed what the AP news wire told you, the white people may have been in the stores, and they may have left with some items they didn’t pay for – but that was only because the store was abandoned and they just FOUND the stuff. The violent behavior of some of those who remained in the city roused the sleeping giant of white fear and knee-jerk racism among observers, and rhetoric grew ugly. At least one pundit (Rush Limbaugh) even nicknamed the city’s black mayor, Ray Nagin, "Ray Nay-ger".
And while journalists were apparently able to set up cameras pretty much everywhere and to cover the unfolding disaster with an almost tiresome thoroughness for two and a half days after the levee broke, there was NO National Guard presence in New Orleans. The local battalion normally serving New Orleans had been deployed to Iraq and was due to return the second week of September, but where were the backups? The reason for this is yet another bone of contention between left and right. The right asserts that this was because the governor of Louisiana, Kathleen Blanco, didn’t ask for them. Satellite footage of a disastrous CNN interview showing Blanco, unaware that she is still being broadcast on satellite, bemoaning her failure to request troops seems to back this position. But then how do you explain the troops that New Mexico agreed to send? An emergency order for 17,000 New Mexico guardsmen was signed off by the governor of New Mexico and forwarded to the Feds to be signed off on by the President, but somehow this order got lost in the shuffle. Louisiana state Department of Homeland Security officers did show up – but only to prevent anyone, unfortunately including Red Cross volunteers bearing food and water, from entering the city.
The horrors went on and on. By the time the smoke began to clear, and the water began to be siphoned out of the city, the head of FEMA had resigned from his job in disgrace, Kathleen Blanco’s political career was in a shambles, and New Orleans was an uninhabitable cesspool of garbage, dead bodies, and hopelessly damaged buildings. And our public officials looked around and decided that the time for action had already passed them by and it was time to move on to fruitless, senseless bickering.
Patriots and hawks love to point to 9/11 as a cautionary tale. They invoke that date and tell us to "Never Forget" in their stern, unctuous big-daddy voices. Those of us who take a more skeptical approach to our public officials – both large and small, both local and Federal – will be invoking 8/29 as our date to "Never Forget". Remember this tragedy. Mourn New Orleans. And look at everything that happened here, and remember what NOT to do.
