1115.org

Forget the looting. Forget the shooting at rescue personnel. To me the most appalling part of what happened in the aftermath of Katrina was how people just died where they sat at the convention center. What a colossal failure of absolutely everything. People were directed there by the authorities. And there were absolutely no resources there at all, no food or water or medical assistance or anything else, no refuge. And the weakest, sickest, most vulnerable of these refugees just died waiting for help that never came.

This doesn’t seem to be on anyone’s conscience. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff appeared on TV screens throughout the land on Friday, smoothly offering excuses for why no food or medicine and supplies reached the huddled masses in the Superdome and the Convention Center until Friday. It was all about flooded roads, and access. Questions, Mikey:

Another question for whoever wants to take it, Chertoff, FEMA director Michael Brown or even New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin: what did anyone do when stories of rape and murder inside the Convention Center first surfaced? Why weren’t troops airdropped immediately, to patrol inside at night? A word of advice to whoever tries to answer: pretend you are looking not into a camera, but straight into the eyes of the fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters of those who were raped or killed.

Since the levees were designed to withstand only level 3 hurricanes, and Katrina was clearly going to be a level 5 or level 4 storm by the time it made landfall, why weren’t the disaster management people prepared for massive flooding? Why wasn’t the public warned this wasn’t a hurricane you could ride out? Why wasn’t the mandatory evacuation enforced? You don’t have to be a rocket scientist or even a particularly intelligent bureaucrat to realize that many poor people will not have the means to evacuate. The time to be lining up buses at the Superdome and the Convention Center was before the hurricane, not after. Nagin did a superb job of slicing and dicing the feds. At what point will he look in the mirror and stop complimenting himself for ordering the evacuation and take the responsibility for not enforcing it? Is that possibly the source of his anger, the slowly sinking realization that he let his people down?

Since FEMA itself in 2001 had identified breaching of New Orleans’ levees as one of the three most likely catastrophic disasters facing the US, why was nothing ever done to strengthen them? Would it have anything to do with the fact you can’t cut taxes, fight war after war, and still fund things like the strengthening of the levees? The fact that taxes would have to be raised to come up with the money? The fact that to a politician anything is better than raising taxes? What a pity we don’t have leaders in this country any more, that we only have politicians, blow-dried, poll-watching, spin-doctoring, be-elected-at-all-costs politicians. And e.e. cummings put it best:

“a politician is an arse upon which everyone has sat except a man.”

Does it seem far-fetched to say that the grand, historic city of New Orleans stands pretty much wiped out today because of the vicious cycle in American politics whereby every politician is taught to think: “I can’t afford to raise taxes for any reason whatsoever, because if I do, THEY will beat me over the head with it in every election I ever stand in for the rest of my life, and I will lose every last one.”

Maybe this can be part of New Orleans’ lasting legacy to American politics: to make it politically acceptable, under the right circumstances, to raise taxes? (“He wants to raise taxes” would be parried with “He wants us to end up like New Orleans.”) The other part will surely be that no one will ever again assume that it is enough, in the face of impending catastrophe, to just order an evacuation, without making sure that everyone who needs help to evacuate receives it.

A final question for Mikey One and Mikey Two. Has it occurred to you yet to do the patently obvious: to order an immediate assessment to determine where else in the country we have disaster defenses inadequate to handle events which have a non-trivial probability of occurring? I’m sure I’m the only one in the country cynical enough to think that if this had occurred to them yet, we would be hearing about it every 15 minutes on CNN Headline News.