I was slow in grasping the full magnitude of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. Hurricanes are common enough this time of year that I got anesthetized to the annual site of a summer storm wreaking some havoc. But as reports of murders, rapes, and 80 percent of the city being under water continued to come for days on end, and the government did such an astonishingly inept and clueless job handling it all, it finally began to dawn on me that this an event that truly alters the nation’s psyche.
As the waters recede, people seem almost universally been horrified by how poor people in particular were left behind. And then Barbara Bush, grand-mere of the Republican party and George B. Bush’s mother, confirmed the mindset we all suspected:
"And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this--this (she chuckles slightly) is working very well for them."
As a recent op-ed piece by Paul Krugman articulates, FEMA’s incompetence also bespeaks a larger, inter-bureau crisis in federal government:
“The lethally inept response to Hurricane Katrina revealed to everyone that the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which earned universal praise during the Clinton years, is a shell of its former self. The hapless Michael Brown has become a symbol of cronyism. But what we really should be asking is whether FEMA's decline and fall is unique, or part of a larger pattern. What other government functions have been crippled by politicization, cronyism and/or the departure of experienced professionals? How many FEMA's are there? Unfortunately, it's easy to find other agencies suffering from some version of the FEMA syndrome.”
At the same time, the post-Katrina tragedy has made the plight of the poor a front-burner issue for the first time in many years. It’s impossible to say whether it will last, but I don’t think the voters will forget some of these images any time soon.
And speaking of indelible images, over the weekend a friend recalled to me his watching of Richard Simmons, still in his sequined French-cut short-shorts, going to his hometown of New Orleans as a "reporter" for Entertainment Tonight to commiserate with his family and other flood victims, telling audiences: “I'm going to New Orleans [to] serve water and food and make 'em feel better and hug and kiss 'em.” I suppose we can't expect ET to ignore the disaster, especially when celebrities actually seemed to be doing some much-needed good. But have they no shame? Couldn't Richard Simmons dress like a grown-up just this once?
And after the dead are properly mourned, then comes the city itself. For years I have routinely named New Orleans as the American city I most wanted to visit. But I never made it, and now I think of so much that has disappeared that I’ll never see. It’s entirely possible that the city will rebuild itself physically and spiritually in the years ahead, and that much of the built landscape will endure. But just as with New York before September 11, one will never be able to go there without thinking what transpired there—and not just during Mardi Gras.
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