"All that is old and already formed can continue to live only if it allows within itself the conditions of a new beginning."
Katrina: Someone Must
Pay For This Failure
Posted 4:25 p.m., Sept. 1, 2005
"The levees are sinking. Everything is sinking, and if we don't get the money fast enough to raise them, then we can't stay ahead of the settlement. The problem that we have isn't that the levee is low, but that the federal funds have dried up so that we can't raise them."
-- Al Naomi,
Army Corps of Engineers,
New Orleans Times-Picayune,
Feb. 16, 2004
... "I think, considering the dire circumstances that we have in New Orleans--virtually a city that has been destroyed--that things are going relatively well."
-- Michael Brown,
director, FEMA
CNN's Situation Room
Sept. 1, 2005
... "This is a national disgrace."
-- Terry Ebbert, director,
New Orleans emergency operations,
The U.K. Guardian,
Sept. 1, 2005
How's this for a facile observation? The White House and the Congress, it would now appear, will soon be lost to the Republicans. They have themselves, and Katrina, to blame.
That's said with a certain diffidence. With all the horror and Hades-like torment being endured by the residents of New Orleans right now, who can possibly care about politics?
But if it's worth making the observation, it would appear that the political die is cast, and it was tossed--speaking metaphorically--by a wrathful God, against the party of God.
The writing is on the wall. The Republicans, who after all are not exactly doing gangbusters in Iraq, either, can expect rejection, certainly in the next mid-term elections, most probably in the 2008 presidential race. This week, the camel's back has surely snapped.
I say that with no particular relish. I say it because we now know, definitively, that despite all the posturing about homeland security and keeping us safe, this administration and this Congress--and recall that includes plenty of Democrats, too--have proven utterly hapless in either preventing or responding to catastrophe. Yet security was the only trump card this government had left to play.
Of course, that has long belied the facts. This is a government that moved to slash funds to shore up the failing levees astride New Orleans. It's a Congress and a White House that has been utterly complacent about investing in the protection of chemical plants and other dangerous facilities that might serve as de facto weapons of mass destruction for terrorists.
No one deserves blame for a natural disaster. But God isn't responsible for stretching our military so thin that apparently there are vastly too few troops available for immediate dispatch to New Orleans, to protect people--many languishing without water, food, shelter and medicine--from insidiously building madness, mayhem and violence of snipers and roving armed criminals who apparently refuse to leave this world without taking a few other souls along for the ride.
It's an unbelievable, totally lawless situation for an American city, resembling some kind of dystopian fantasy like "Escape From New York" or "The Road Warrior."
Incredibly, President Bush declined to break off his itinerary immediately after the calamity so that he could deliver a routine speech in San Diego on the 60th anniversary of VJ Day. When he finally did get around to directly addressing the disaster in the Rose Garden yesterday, it was, as the New York Times observed, the worst speech of his life. It was certainly the most ineffectual.
There Bush was, once again, apparently, trying to exude a sense of confident calm, smiling that beguiling smile of his. It wasn't so much what he said, but his manner of saying it, that telegraphed an air of insulated unreality. The president appeared for all the world as if he really didn't get it, that he really missed the point of what had happened. How bad it was. How horrible was the pain. Even the archconservative New Hampshire Union Leader editorial page registered its disgust.
Contrast this speech with the somber, purposeful speech given by President Bill Clinton immediately after Oklahoma City. Contrast it with this president's own inspiring, almost heroic performance immediately after 9/11.
Earth to president: The disaster on the Gulf Coast gives every indication of dwarfing the tragic dimensions of 9/11.
Thousands died that day, yes. We were all terrified, yes. It was an act of war, yes. No one can minimize the dread we experienced that day.
But Washington, D.C., and New York City were back and defiantly operating at near full capacity within days. New Orleans will remain one of the more miserable rings of hell for months to come, at a minimum. For now, bodies float unattended in a cesspool that used to be Louis Armstrong's hometown; rescuers simply push them away with sticks to search for the living.
And what's worse, some survivors are slowly dying. Fatal third-world diseases--malaria, cholera and West Nile virus--might soon rise from the awful vapors of those boulevard canals like visitations from furious ghosts of the untold thousands, killed in horror and helplessness, under a wall of crushing water--many unable because of poverty and lack of transportation to flee to safer places.
None of this takes into account whatever misery is being felt by those to the immediate east of New Orleans in places like Bay St. Louis, Gulfport and Biloxi.
So the prospective fate of Congress, the fate of the presidency, any politics at all, pales when contrasted with the scenes of mayhem crowding the TVs and permeating the waking and sleeping thoughts of those lucky enough to be far from the chaos.
But mark it. This will not soon be forgotten. This is purely a failure of leadership, a failure of planning, an epic failure of response. Someone, somewhere, must pay.
