Hurricane George: Four Years After Katrina
August 30th, 2009
I guess the people at Bacardi thought the folks of the Ninth Ward in New Orleans needed a strong drink to deal with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. You can see the waterline on the empty billboard space below the Superior Comeback sign. The flood waters ranged from 12-15 feet deep in places…
by Glynn Wilson
NEW ORLEANS, La. — On August 29, 2005, I watched from afar as Hurricane Katrina veered east once again, like so many storms before that took aim at New Orleans up the Mississippi River. I went to sleep that night, like so many, thinking the city had been spared.
I could have been there, on the payroll of The Dallas Morning News and The Christian Science Monitor. But I had just made it back to Birmingham from Washington, D.C., and the free-lance offers with no health insurance or guarantees of battle wages made me hesitate. I figured I could get down to the coast and cover the aftermath, like so many hurricanes before, including Isadore and Lili.
Hurricane Katrina was no ordinary storm, however. It turned out to be “the big one,” not so much for the category 4 winds that mostly lashed an evacuated Mississippi Gulf Coast. It was the one that breached the levees, filling New Orleans like a bowl.
Even if I had wanted to go down after the storm, I would not have been able to get into the city without a boat. Even with a boat, there was no way to communicate out by phone for days. No power either, no Internet access, and the cell phone towers were down for weeks.
Watching the coverage on CNN, I wrote then, Katrina was “no doubt the worst natural disaster in U.S. history.” But a big part of the disaster, we now know, was not natural at all.
Call it Hurricane George.
After calling New Orleans home for four of the most important years of my life, teaching at Loyola and then having the free-lance writing ride of my life, I found it excruciating to watch from a distance. On one hand I wanted to be in the middle of it. On the other, I was relieved not to be. Because the worst of it was not the storm itself or even the flood of the century. The worst of it was how it was handled by the government, mainly the Bush government, as W. vacationed in Crawford, Texas — and the National Guard waited for orders to act.
I know most people would rather forget and not look back. I have faced my own difficulties with re-watching the images again on film. But on Saturday, four years after the fact, I made myself watch When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, a documentary by Spike Lee.
At first I cried, again, and then I got pissed off all over again. So please forgive some of what I am about to say and the language I am going to use to say it.
As it says in the HBO promotion for the film:
“As the world watched in horror, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans on August 29, 2005. Like many who watched the unfolding drama on television news, director Spike Lee was shocked not only by the scale of the disaster, but by the slow, inept and disorganized response of the emergency and recovery effort. Lee was moved to document this modern American tragedy, a morality play witnessed by people all around the world. The film is structured in four acts, each dealing with a different aspect of the events that preceded and followed Katrina’s catastrophic passage through New Orleans.”
I also revisited my own archive on the time, but today I will share the first major Sunday column I published a few days out, and a few of the images I picked up on trips down after the storm.
The headline and key quote are now unforgettable, at least for me.
The Problem With Bush and the GOP
“The problem with these Christian Conservative Cowboys now running our government is that they are great at bashing government, but not worth a damn at running it.”
Let that be a lesson for us all. We must never forget, as much as we may want to put it behind us.
I saw the reddened face of the main man who gave us this disaster at Senator Edward Kennedy’s funeral Saturday on TV. Mercifully, he was not asked to speak.
But there are other men responsible, one who, in the film, is cursed by a resident of Mississippi like he once openly cursed an honorable Congressman on the hallowed floor of the U.S. Capitol.
“Go fuck yourself, Dick Cheney,” the young man says, to the Vice President’s face, like Cheney once told that Congressman.
And lest we forget, there is another man of this corrupt administration still running around spinning his lies in The Wall Street Journal and Newsweek magazine and on Fox News. His name is Karl “Turd Blossom” Rove, and he can fucking kiss my ass. If I ever manage to see him in person, I will punch him in the nose.
Any news organization that would employ that political weasel — or defend him, like my home town newspaper we sometimes call around here “The Birmingham Ruse” — does not deserve to survive in the Web era. Anybody who pays for those publications or advertises in them — or supports their Web site by sharing their lousy links on Facebook — is complicit in these crimes against humanity.
It is not an innocent thing to pretend from afar that it is not your fault. To everybody who voted for Bush, twice, and still listens to his spin master, and still believes in the mythical world of unreality they tried to create, it is your fault!
As I have said before and will no doubt say again and again before I’m through, politics matters. You can’t change the policy without changing the people in charge. That goes for you, my Sweet Home Alabama.
Will you ever give these corporate anti-government thugs another chance to run things into the ground? If you do, you deserve what you get. When the shit goes down again, this time it might be you out there crying in the rain, begging for help.
I suspect Obama’s government would not wait. Do you really think someone like Sarah Palin would come to your aid? You better think again…
Workers in the Ninth Ward must wear protective masks to try to avoid the “Katrina Cough” as they gut the old houses destroyed by oil and chemical-filled flood waters. [Click on the image for a larger view]
August 30th, 2009 at 5:55 am
Yesterday was tough as hell. I had all of these thoughts and memories. I remember posting my uncle missing on the coast guards website. We didn’t know for days if he was dead or alive. My nephew stayed at home because he wouldn’t leave his dog. Didn’t hear from him for days. Evacuated relatives dotted the map north of Baton Rouge and up toward Jackson. Evacuees filled up my parents’ motel in Panama City. Most paid nothing. Had nothing.
The news was excruciating to watch. The Republicans had succeeded in their quest to make government so small you could drown it in a bathtub. New Orleans was the tub. Condoleezza Rice shopped for shoes. George Bush played country music star and had cake with John McCain.
Not much good to remember. And really it’s not just a ::day:: to mourn failure as a nation. Because 4 years ago yesterday, today, tomorrow, and four more days after tomorrow, our family was racked. It was a week of hell until we could finally account for everyone.
August 30th, 2009 at 9:15 am
What’s important to remember is what happens when you elect incompetent, anti-government dumbasses to run the government. On the face of it, it should be obvious that is a disaster waiting to happen. I knew it was coming and said it then. Not enough people listened.
Now they should know, except for those who still live in the anti-intellectual cacoon of Fox News, talk radio and the Newhouse press. Some people around here still manage to survive without knowing, limiting their news consumption habits to outlets that support their prejudices.
You can have cable TV and still mostly limit yourself to the networks and the Hallmark channel. This is especially true in a place like Blount County, where the owner of the radio station who reads the New York Times and Common Dreams, but will not help promote this Web site — out of fear from conservatives who might get offended when they see the word fuck. Somehow it is OK if the preacher says damn and hell, but if a journalist does it, in Alabamaland it is considered offensive.
Sorry, but the reality is, you can’t change the world while wearing kid gloves…
August 30th, 2009 at 12:09 pm
I am going to stop watching CNN altogether, I guess.
On Sunday, this moron, Fareed Zakaria, an editor at Newsweek where Karl Rove writes a column, had James Baker 3rd on. He said, I kid you not, that there were WMD in Iraq and that the war would be considered “a success.” He had the gall to say we are all “better off” that George W. Bush was “elected” in 2001 than “the alternative.” (Of course, he was Bush’s lawyer who got the Supreme Court to hand the election to Bush, so remember, he was not “elected” at all)…
To call this “objective” broadcast journalism is an abomination. Thomas Paine is rolling over in his grave…
August 31st, 2009 at 3:42 am
Thank you Glynn for NOT forgetting an incredibly important lesson in U.S. history, the debacle known as Hurricane Katrina. On so many levels it represents our worst in government response, so called “Conservative Compassion,” and to this day little accountability. I was a tourist trapped in the Superdome during Katrina. My memoir, Diary From the Dome: Reflections on Fear and Privilege During Katrina was published last year and some questions were raised that no one has yet answered me concerning Katrina.
Why were the airport, train, and bus stations all closed 2 days prior to the mandatory evacuation order? Why can our President lie about knowing about the severity of Katrina yet later when proven on video that he was warned about its severity he is given carte blanche, while a previous President was impeached for lying about allowing a consenting adult to suck on a piece of his skin? One resulting in hundreds of deaths and the other caused turmoil in a family.
As long as accountability goes out the window we shall never ever achieve the greatness of our nation that is truly possible.
August 31st, 2009 at 7:58 am
Thank you for telling your story and commenting here. Good questions…
August 31st, 2009 at 9:37 am
Where was all the construction equipment The US Army Corps of Engineers should have been using to reinforce the levees? Most of it was sitting in Iraq where it had been since 2003. You have to know something to be able to effectively run the government at any level. It’s bad enough that we have to watch our country fall apart for very preventable reasons while these incompetent fools sit in office. Then, it’s like adding insult to injury when their right wing nut job followers come out of the woodwork to proclaim that it was simply God’s Will and there was nothing our leaders (who were supposedly chosen by God and not elected) could do to overcome the Will of God.
September 1st, 2009 at 12:44 am
There is no world in which any of this was any god’s will. Anybody who thinks that is a fucking moron…