POLITICS, KATRINA, AND SHOPPING AT THE WINN-DIXIE

I’ve been so overwhelmed by what’s going on in New Orleans and how it’s affecting life here in Baton Rouge that I haven’t really written much about the political fallout from Katrina’s destruction. But I’ve been reading about it. Indeed, the left wing of the blogosphere was hitting the issue in full force by last Tuesday afternoon at the latest, which is when we got back to Baton Rouge, allowing me to make my daily rounds. I thought about jumping into the criticism of the Federal response, myself, but decided that I had plenty going on in my own life to write about, and that’s what I did. That’s what I’m continuing to do.

I heard on Saturday that the NAACP had issued a statement to the effect that now is not the time to be pointing fingers; now is the time to deal with the crisis. Usually, if one can ever think of a major crisis as being “usual,” I think that’s a wise thing to say. But this has not been a “usual” crisis, at least not for the United States. Compounding immeasurably the damage from the hurricane itself was the incredibly slow response from the Department of Homeland Security: it strikes me that all the finger pointing of the last week was crucial in getting the Feds to get to work. That is, the people who were supposed to “assume primary responsibility” for rescue and recovery, as the DHS proudly proclaims on its site, did not do it. They weren’t dealing with the crisis, and it is my belief that America’s massive outpouring of outrage essentially stuck a bee in the bottom of the Federal Government, forcing them to finally do something.

I have a great deal of respect for the NAACP, but they’re wrong this time. Given their failure thus far, I think public discourse really, really needs to dog the Feds in order to make sure that they complete the job. It took a lot of heat to get them to act, and I fear if that heat lets off, the action will end, or at least greatly lessen. Indeed, this is the most obvious lesson of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States: the government will not serve the people unless the people insist that it does so. Democracy only works if citizens participate.

Personally, I prefer the wisdom of African-American singer Kayne West: “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” Ain’t that the truth. It’s amazing how this disaster has left utterly exposed the vile racism that conservatives insist no longer exists. Most of the people who rode out the storm in New Orleans didn’t do so by choice; they did it because they didn’t have the economic means to get out. In other words, they’re poor. And most of them are black, essentially left behind by whatever evacuation programs the city and state were able to put together without Federal help. The Feds should have filled in the gaps on this, but didn’t. You may be uncomfortable calling that racism, but, whatever you want to call it, it’s a bunch of non-white people getting majorly shafted. There’s no getting away from that. Government inaction clearly and explicitly fucked over thousands of black people, killing many of them, a high-tech lynching of Biblical proportions.

Of course, that’s been going on slowly and quietly for decades. We just don’t talk about it. Well, we’re talking about it now.

The reactions of many white Americans simply add insult to injury. As West pointed out in his off-script speech on television the other night, the news media has been true to form, naming blacks “looters” and whites “finders.” I, myself, participated in a commenting debate at one of the Houston Chronicle’s blogs on the subject of NO evacuees coming to the Astrodome. I was utterly disgusted by what some Houstonians had to say about how the city was going to go to hell because of all those (black) people coming to town. My buddy Mike G emails me from H-Town:

The white New Orleanians have been on the talk radio shows warning Houston about the black people from NO coming to get them and some middle class subdivisions are trying to stop the smaller shelters from opening there. I guess the upshot of this storm is that the strong racial and economic divides of not just NO will be examined but of all over the country.

This is still a deeply racist nation. I know that many Americans are not racist, but we’re fooling ourselves to think that everybody, in their heart of hearts, agrees with us. All it took was one major crisis for the morons to start shooting their mouths off.

Beyond the race issue is the question about why FEMA, which is now a sub-agency of the Department of Homeland Security, waited so long before doing anything. The conservative response to that question that seems to be shaping up is that no one asked them to help until it was too late. But that’s total bullshit: Bush declared an emergency in Louisiana and called in FEMA on August 26th, days before the hurricane made landfall. Where were they? Why didn’t they take charge and coordinate the entire effort? Why did Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff not know about the horrors of the convention center until Thursday afternoon? This was their responsibility, and they failed utterly. DHS is an agency under Bush’s authority. Consequently, Bush failed utterly.

As Atrios over at Eschaton has asked, “what have they been doing for four and a half years?” All these billions of dollars they’ve been spending to revamp Federal response to disasters like this has apparently gotten us nothing. Nothing. What happens if there is another major terrorist attack? We’re screwed, big time.

And what's all this business about the Army Corps of Engineers budget for maintaining and improving the levees being gutted and transferred to the war effort? For god's sake, it was just a few hundred million! Now they're spending billions to clean up. The thing that really gets me is that I and countless other Americans have been loudly insisting for years that Bush’s evil isn’t simply because of his own weird brand of wrong-headed conservatism; the man is straight-up incompetent. Incompetent. People bashed Michael Moore, saying that his use of the footage of Bush reading My Pet Goat while the Twin Towers collapsed in Fahrenheit 9/11 was a cheap shot, but it’s pretty clear that he did the same thing again with Hurricane Katrina, eating birthday cake and rocking out with a country and western singer while people were dying in New Orleans.

I am sickened and disgusted by this man, which is surprising because I already thought that I had been as grossed out as I could get by the Iraq war. But these are fellow Americans Bush’s incompetence has killed. This is my favorite city that he seems content to drown. This is just down the road from where I type this right now. Throughout all these years of his awful leadership, if it’s fair to even use the word “leadership,” I have never felt hate for George W. Bush. But I do now.

So here I sit in a city that has doubled its population in a week’s time. The traffic, already nightmarish, has gotten worse. Stores are under stocked. The crime rate has gone up, but that’s all okay, because we’ll sort it out, and all these people have to live somewhere, don’t they? Just this afternoon, Becky and I went grocery shopping at the Winn-Dixie. For the first time, the majority of people there were not LSU students. No, these shoppers were middle aged and well dressed. I traded jokes with one woman who spoke with the distinctive New Yorkish dialect of a person born and raised in the Big Easy. I later reached between two suburbanite looking women in their 50s to get a bag of potato chips and heard this exchange: “Hey, you’re here too?” “Yeah, I’m a refugee like all the rest of us.” After that, one of the store’s employees was a bit more helpful and friendly than usual; “Are you finding everything that you need allright? Just let me know if you need help.” It seemed like he thought Becky and I were evacuees. Once he walked away, I realized that I hadn’t shaved in three days and was wearing a ragged Ocean Pacific tee shirt that I bought in 1982, and Becky still had grass in her hair from mowing the yard this morning. I guess we did look the archetypal part, but the funny thing is that most of the homeless there looked way better than we did. Hurricane Katrina has obviously hit across class lines—not even that fact, however, seems to have been enough to get the President to do his job. The couple in the checkout line in front of us bought $237 dollars worth of groceries, and much of that was pots, pans, plates, and cooking utensils. They were obviously setting up to stay for a while.

The point is that political and personal have become deeply intertwined here in the state of Louisiana. This is no longer simply an abstract debate on TV about events thousands of miles away in the Middle East. This is right here, right now. This is about peoples’ lives. This is about peoples’ deaths. For me, now, there is no difference between politics and my personal life. I’ve watched from the sidelines, fifty yard-line seats in fact, while politics have destroyed both a city I love deeply and the lives of every other person I meet on the street.

You bet I’m going to talk about politics.

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