The Lessons of New Orleans: What Really Went Wrong in the Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina
By Jason M. Farrell
Posted On September 12, 2005

You would think, with 9-11 only four years in the past that it wouldn’t shock us so much how immense disaster can strike without warning, crippling its victims and leaving us all wondering why more wasn’t done to prevent it. The scenes, like four years ago, are horrific; bodies lying in the streets where they died, floating along what used to be poor, sub-sea-level neighborhoods, or sitting upright, still in their wheelchairs, some covered with blankets as they wait for the coroner, the creased, tear-streaked faces of the anguished who are caught in a horrible limbo, homeless, jobless, and some, hopelessly searching for family members who were long since carried away by the waters or remain trapped in flooded attics. Its 9-11 all over again, without the terrorists to blame, on ten-times the scale. A full ten thousand or more are expected to be deceased in New Orleans and Mississippi, mostly poor black people who couldn’t afford bus-fare out of town, or wouldn’t leave even if they could, vainly holding on to their only valuable possessions- their homes. Compounding the tragedy the government was astoundingly sluggish in its response; the National Guard, the supposed defenders of American soil, didn’t seem to show up until nearly a week later, leaving looters and bandit gunmen free reign over the city, hundreds more to die from dehydration, disease, drowning and God knows what else, and the people of America and the world to wonder- what the hell happened?

And the fur is flying as we knew it would. Nancy Pelosi, along with many other congressional Democrats and even some Republicans have all joined in the chorus of criticism, predictably citing President Bush as chiefly responsible for the shockingly slow government response. Having just returned from a leisurely vacation at his Texas ranch, Bush signed a $10.5 billion dollar emergency relief bill on September 1, three days after the hurricane devastated the gulf coast. His goofy, awkward public appearance in the area a few days later did little to dispel public criticism: he joked about rebuilding Trent Lott’s big expensive house in Mississippi, tottered around between harsh words for looters and sympathy for citizens, and directed some distraught folks to a nearby Salvation Army Center that, as it turned out, had been wiped out. Bush appointee Michael Brown, head of FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the organization in charge of managing natural disasters and crises) seemed even more in the dark- he told Ted Koppel days after the hurricane that he had been unaware of any reports of thousands of hungry, thirsty, dead and dying people being quarantined in the New Orleans Superdome, for lack of anywhere else to put them. The other 270 million people in America had been seeing photos and reading reports from the Superdome for days. Koppel, dumbfounded, queried, “don’t you watch television?”

FEMA did fail the people of New Orleans, and so did President Bush. But it doesn’t stop there. It’s easy, especially for the growing number of Bush-haters to want to put a face on the disaster, as we were able to put Osama bin Laden’s homely, bearded, visage on the events of 9-11. Without a terrorist to concoct the disaster in New Orleans, devoutly leftist writers, such as the battalion of them at the L.A. Weekly went to work on the President, as is their routine, hacking away at him with their word processors and putting little collaged photos together to belittle the “All American Nero”, as one caption puts it, who sat around on vacation while New Orleans became the American Atlantis.

Such strictly partisan sniping is extremely prevalent in both the media and government. Unfortunately, it not only doesn’t help anyone in New Orleans or anywhere else, it is part of the reason for the government’s sluggishness and tiptoeing to the disaster to save the poor victims of Katrina. Cowardice, intrigue, and rampant self-interest are traits that are commonly perceived of government officials by an increasingly cynical public, but that perception has been amplified- or perhaps just exposed to the roots- by the poor response of the government in disaster relief. As more reports surface, the big picture becomes clearer: the primary reason for the astounding failure of the government to perform its principal duty- protect its citizens- was a colossal failure of the bureaucracy, brought on by a severe case of cowardice that spread across multiple layers in the government faster than the malaria in New Orleans. Sadly, precious time was lost in saving the people at the Superdome and elsewhere because of nervous, flaky bureaucrats rushing to cover their own asses from the inevitable, post 9-11 political fallout. According to a National Public Radio report, Bush telephoned Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, the governor of Louisiana, shortly after the disaster and haggled over the right to control National Guard troops: Bush demanded the White House to have full control over official disaster relief efforts; fearing inevitable criticism from Democrats for just about every possible thing that could go wrong, he wanted nothing left to chance. The troops would not be deployed until that condition was met. The governor, equally bothered by political effects that would have, decided to sleep on it for twenty-four hours before finally conceding, leaving the people of New Orleans in the dark and increasingly frustrated for another day- a day in which another thousand people likely lost their lives needlessly. When the finger pointing began almost immediately after, Blanco and the White House didn’t lose a precious second in rushing to the media to blame each other for the sluggish disaster relief.

The Bush-Blanco delay was not the only case of ass-covering: National Guard rescuers forbade many average citizens from helping in search and rescue operations for fear of liability, deliberately limiting their own slim resources; the U.S. congress and Louisiana officials also covered their own asses by yelling the loudest, masking with outrage the little-known fact that legislation long-ago proposed to help the safety infrastructure in New Orleans was shot down, mostly for lack of foresight, another pattern of behavior of government officials.

Despite the fact that the problem at New Orleans was yet another massive structural failure by a government that was again blindsided by a disaster, the blame for the severity of the aftermath of Katrina doesn’t fall on our officials alone. Some of very people of New Orleans themselves share in the blame; Outraged and starving people at the Superdome aggressively rushed the helicopters that tried to bring them food, leaving them to drop it from the air. Loonies with shotguns running around in pickup trucks terrorized survivors, looted houses and shops and shot at rescue choppers with reckless abandon, further delaying rescue efforts and attempts at restoring order. Many people died who had stubbornly refused to leave their houses for fear of looting. The opportunism of the looters and crooks in the lawless remnants of the city knew no bounds, people knew even before the storm, and they would stop at nothing to get theirs.

As we pull back a bit from the devastation in New Orleans, we can see larger issues. Why was the government hemming and hawing at a time when they should have been jumping on speedboats to New Orleans, saving every life possible? Perhaps we all share in the blame. Every time we pick up a tabloid that brags about exposing the private lives of public people, or listen to attack-dog talk show hosts we support a hostile, blame-laying, finger-pointing culture that ensures our leaders will usually be cowards and crooks; even the best intentions of the greatest talents are eventually broken by constant, media, government, and public scrutiny, stifling bold leadership and making bland, wary and cautious bean counters with squeaky-clean backgrounds the most powerful officials in the richest nation on earth. The folly of the Clinton Impeachment is a great example of mutual hostility within government ranks. The Republican Party used their chief opponent’s Achilles Heel- his extra-marital lustiness- as their attacking point, only to have their own Speaker of the House, Bob Livingston, resign in shame after his own affairs were revealed, and the whole sordid mess ridiculed as a hypocritical witch hunt.

True to this model, the shameless witch hunters at the L.A. Weekly jumped gleefully at the prospect of exposing another Bush folly this past week, publishing no less than sixteen Bush-bashing articles in one issue. Indeed, the articles seemed more about Bush than the disaster. Newspapers, TV shows and radio stations around the country also joined in on cue, assailing already insecure, career-obsessed government officials with a barrage of de-constructive criticism. “Boldly, rapidly stride in to help poor people in dire need of assistance? Eh, too risky. We have to do a study first, weigh the risks involved, ensure minimal litigation, then calculate what funds we’ll need, personnel availability, man hours, project media backlash… Whew! This is going to take some time!”

The prevailing thought this week of everyone from media pundits to the average working-class grunt seems to be one phrase: “This shouldn’t have happened in America.” Sadly, perhaps inevitably, it has. Third world countries in Africa and South America are offering us disaster relief. Even Cuba, whom we’ve had an embargo on for forty-three years has offered its physicians. Perhaps we should accept all the help we can get, even from Fidel Castro. Above all, the most important thing we can do is take a lesson from this; to question ourselves, to hold ourselves as accountable as we like to hold everyone else, and act like adults for chrissake. If that becomes the basis of American culture, our elected officials will be encouraged to follow suit. We may even get some real leaders in government, instead of vultures with law degrees who foam at the mouth whenever their opponents stumble. The days of a media that respected some small degree of privacy and a public that invested faith in its leaders is thirty or more years in the past, replaced since Nixon’s day or earlier with a cycle of suspicious finger-pointing and ass-covering. The problems hurricane Katrina exposed when she swept through the Gulf Coast have roots deeper than simple government bungling. The stagnant, putrid floodwaters of New Orleans have shown us a vision of who we are becoming- and what it will cost us.

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