Unworthy Thoughts

Coming to grips with Katrina – and neo-liberal America

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
09/02/05
http://www.mytown.ca/zepp

When I was in the seventh grade, my science teacher told me that central Ontario was one of the safest places to live.

I was a bit dubious, since for four months out of the year, the central Ontario climate was doing its level best to try and kill me. Screw up once, and I wake up a corpsicle. But good Canadian kids are taught to regard -30 degrees as a minor inconvenience. Blizzards are just an opportunity for a little healthy exercise, is all.

But, the science teacher explained, central Ontario didn’t have earthquakes. It didn’t have tornadoes (back then). No typhoons. No volcanoes. No poisonous snakes. The climate discouraged tropical diseases like malaria and breakbone fever (and the teacher, no dummy, knew a good clinical description of breakbone fever would keep a herd of winter-weary twelve-year olds spellbound).

I left class that day feeling vaguely superior to all those savages who lived near volcanoes or behind dykes or who ran the risk of encountering wolves or polar bears or tigers. At least, I reflected, as the frost from my breath turned my eyebrows white, I had the good sense to live in a place that was safe.

So when I realized late Saturday that Katrina, already a Category Four hurricane and still 30 hours out from New Orleans, had the potential to be a catastrophic storm, my first thought about New Orleans being flooded was, “Well, Jeez, what did they expect?”

Someday my big neighbor Mount Shasta will erupt. It does do that, about once every 300-600 years, and the last one was about 300 years ago. And some snotty type will think to himself, “Well, Jeez, what did they expect?”

Chances are some people read about the incredible destruction from the ice storm that hit central Ontario some years back and thought, “Well Jeez, what did they expect?”

This is all by way of saying, “No place is safe.” No matter where you live, there is always SOMETHING, some natural catastrophe that can disrupt and even end your life.

Some places are riskier than others, of course. Where I live is riskier than, say, Iowa. But it’s pretty, and a lot more culturally varied than Iowa. I once lived in Santa Barbara, regarded as one of the most desirable places to live in all of North America. But if you look at Santa Barbara’s history of fires, flood, earthquakes and even tsunamis, the heat wave when it reached 132 degrees, you wonder not that so many people live there, but that there are so many survivors. People spend a million dollars for a tract home that they can’t get insurance for because the Santa Ynez mountains will eventually send a wildfire down into that neighborhood.

My second unworthy thought was the same one Dennis Hastert had: they shouldn’t rebuild New Orleans. It’s hard not to think of that one, especially in areas where the disasters are recurring. The hills and canyons of Malibu get ravaged by fire or flood every few years, and every few years new multimillion dollar homes go up. And I couldn’t imagine replacing the French Quarter or Bourbon Street. It would be a Disneyland New Orleans, concrete where brick had been, plastic wood beams. Mardi Gras would be a Unitarian holiday.

Of course, for millions of people, it was home, and home is where you go, no matter what. And New Orleans wasn’t there by happenstance: a major port at the mouth of the biggest river in the country, it played at least as significant a role as New York in the history of America, and even today the city represented immense strategic and economic value to the country. Railroad tracks may have replaced barges, but those tracks often still led straight to New Orleans.

Maybe they won’t REPLACE New Orleans, but something will grow back there. It’s just too valuable and important a location to be left to the swamps and the alligators.

And of course, for 3.4 million people, it is home. A lot of people are thinking, “Yes, this was a horrible thing, but I lived 50 years in the Big Easy, and I’ll live another 50, gawd willin’ and the crick don’t rise.” Don’t rise again, that is.

My third unworthy thought was, “This was just a pinprick compared to the Boxing Day tsunami.” Americans are so insular, so arrogantly certain that one American life is worth more than 10,000 lives in Bangladesh or China. In my own defense, I’ll note that I thought that Sunday night, when we thought the death toll might be about 80, and that the worst of the storm damage was past.

Now, of course, we know that it was worse. By the scale of the disaster, certainly. The death toll appears certain to be in the tens of thousands, and property damage may exceed one hundred billion, making it the biggest natural disaster in American history. We’ve seen the pictures, heard about the little old lady dead in her wheelchair, the fellow who despaired and jumped in the Superdome. We know about the news agency that described blacks as “looting” and whites as “finding food.” We felt the disaster become personal when we heard Fats Domino had gone missing, felt relief when he reappeared. We heard about the kids who went through hell and high water (literally) to save their cats and dogs, only to be told by indifferent bus drivers that they must abandon their beloved pets.

We watched Putsch show up two days too late to reassure the nation, and fail miserably in that endeavor. More than anything, the nation went away with the feeling that he wasn’t so much trying to lead and reassure as he was simply trying to manage a sticky political situation. He acted like he had to look grave because some people were really uptight about it. He simpered. He lied, claiming that “I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees.”

And we realized just how much worse it really was. Not just the horrific scale. Not just the human suffering. Not just the deep sense of loss of an incredible city.

When you hear about things like huge earthquakes in Turkey, or massive storms hitting Bangladesh, or killer floods in China, you realize that part of the horror stems from the fact that these are nations that have limited resources, and you feel lucky that you live in a country where it is the function of the government to safeguard the lives of its citizens, where they have cofferdams and national guard and Red Cross and lots of modern equipment and transportation ready to rush to any area to suffer natural disasters.

Only in America, the richest country on earth, that is no longer the case. It took the Feds five days to get into New Orleans, mostly because the Republicans had taken the disaster management agency FEMA, all but dismantled it and subsumed it into the bureaucratic monolith known as “Homeland Security.” The National Guard, those state militias specially trained to function in disasters like hurricanes, were in scant supply. Thirty-five percent of Louisiana’s National Guard was in Iraq (one wag wrote, “They’re fighting hurricanes in Iraq so they don’t have to fight them at home”) and because few kids want to go to Iraq and get their asses blown off for no particular reason, enrollment in the Guard is way down. When it came to light that people had been in the city’s Convention Center for four days without food or water or electricity, the administration explained that nobody had told them those people were there – even though the news channels had been broadcasting their plight for several days. When Putsch was asked about it, he lied again, claiming it had been secured. It hadn’t.

The richest, most technologically advanced country on earth, and people are dying in the streets because there is no money, no resources for a natural disaster.

No place on earth is safe. And certainly, no place in America. Remember that when you have your own unworthy thoughts.

The same people who vowed to get government off our backs did so by cutting funding for all social services, particularly disaster relief. Putsch cut funding for levee repair and enhancement by 83% in 2002. Oddly enough, free market forces did not step in to take up the slack, and as a result, New Orleans is a charnel house and a third-world disaster. In the world’s richest country.

Grover Norquist launched the neo-liberal campaign to get government off our backs. He famously said, “I don’t want to kill government. I just want to weaken it enough that I could drown it in the bathtub.” The GOP embraced it mightily.

They didn’t succeed. Government is one third larger than it was in 2001, has far more powers to search without cause and arrest without reason and control your bedroom behavior. But they DID manage to weaken it.

They couldn’t drown the government.

But they did a bang-up job of drowning New Orleans.