Troubled Waters

"...the scenes of horrific destruction, the corpses, the refugees and the looting resemble nothing as much as Baghdad and Fallujah, during the shock and awe attack on Baghdad and the siege of Fallujah. There, too, corpses lay in the streets, hospitals were incapacitated by the lack of electricity and supplies. People were displaced by the hundreds and looting- both for survival and for gain- was rampant. And again, populations waited in vain for help that was either slow in coming or never intended to be sent in the first place."

And again there is a mediated remove that renders these poor ( as in unfortunate, clobbered wretches) - very much the Other.

Human nature is a funny thing. It seems taken by extremes, lauding heroism, gasping at perfidy, seldom stopping to think of them as two sides of the same coin. And this same human nature seems to have such a short, ethnocentric memory, as well.

Take the current disaster in New Orleans, for example- truly a disaster in so many senses of the word.

One that makes you shake your head and say, what the hell happened? What the hell happened is that Nature slammed into us and revealed us for what we are, a nation morally and logistically challenged at its highest levels, a society so stretched to the breaking point by its mission to "bring democracy to the world," that the so-called greatest democratic society today is very undemocratically culling some of its least able, least demographically desirable citizens through ineptness and incompetence. Sound racist and classist? My, my, welcome to the "new" America. What were you thinking?

Only a mere week ago, we were shaking our heads over Iraq's lack of a constitution, debating Cindy Sheehan camped out near Bush's ranch as he was debating decamping.

No one thought of a coming storm...

Oh, please.

This is NOT some Monty Python skit -"No one expects the Spanish Inquisition...".

Any weatherman or woman worth the green screen behind them can tell you that there are very clear indications of changes in the weather: pressure drops, build-ups, etc.

Reports out of Miami, Wednesday, August 24, indicate 40 miles per hour winds off Florida. The National Weather Service (NWS) predicted higher than normal hurricane activity for August. By Monday, August 29, at 5 p.m., the NWS was clearly concerned about high inland winds, inland flooding and loss of life.

But listen to Bush and much of the media and it sounds like everyone was caught with their pants down.

The rhetoric harkens back to 9/11. Newscasters and talking heads constantly compare New Orleans to New York, as if Nature had suddenly joined the "axis of Evil," a sort of meteorological terrorist group with an ill-understood hatred of "our way of life" and an unspeakable desire to harm innocent, decent people in their own country.

Actually, the scenes of horrific destruction, the corpses, the refugees and the looting resemble nothing as much as Baghdad and Fallujah, during the shock and awe attack on Baghdad and the siege of Fallujah. There, too, corpses lay in the streets, hospitals were incapacitated by the lack of electricity and supplies. People were displaced by the hundreds and looting- both for survival and for gain- was rampant. And again, populations waited in vain for help that was either slow in coming or never intended to be sent in the first place.

And again there is a mediated remove that renders these poor ( as in unfortunate, clobbered wretches) - very much the Other.

Bush flies over New Orleans much as he flew over Baghdad. He claps his FEMA director on the shoulder, chuckles, and says good job, much the way he hung out with his generals in the Green Zone for Thanksgiving. Bush cannot actually see or hear the misery down in New Orleans from 1700 feet, he cannot feel the poverty that is driving the people, many of them poor, Black and highly limited in their resources, to acts of desperation and depravity, just like he cannot see or hear the disaster that lurks just outside the Green Zone, preying daily on ordinary Iraqis- again not a part of White mainstream America..

Turn the sound track off and New Orleans looks like disaster footage from somewhere in the Caribbean- a disconnected Third World scene. So, what good job is he talking about?

It's not as if FEMA needs nearly impossible to find translators to read the reports off the weather satellites.

Read the NWS website for yourself. This is not hindsight. This is the NWS tracking Katerina as it develops.

Where was the Louisiana National Guard? Why weren't they standing by at the ready?

Oh, right.

They're in Iraq.

And watching in shock as one of the jewels of their state and our cultural history turns into a freak show, narrated by the media who are clearly not hurting for shelter, water and food.

Why didn't FEMA, someone, anyone, call for sandbagging the levees? Levees break.in times of great structural stress, That's what levees do. What happened to the disaster budget?

Has it, like much of our funding, been sunk into Iraq and the war against Terrorism?

Why did no one plan anything?

Were they all too distracted by the Comedy of Errors at Camp Crawford? By the renewed call to "stay the course" in Iraq?

The Times Picayune suggests a bit of both. William Bunch, writing in Editor and Publisher August 31, tells of a twice told tale from the TP of officials begging for disaster funds, first from a strapped state, whose funds were diverted to the war in Iraq, and then of the Feds who chose to fund democracy abroad but not basic, civilian security at home. At least nine articles, says Bunch, appear in the TP from 2004-05, specifically citing the war in Iraq as the leading cause of inadequate funding for levee repair and storm preparedness.

Or perhaps, ignoring the warning signs was easier and more fiscally rewarding than being federally responsible to a constituency of mainly poor, mainly Black voters, most of whom don't attend fancy fundraisers or even pay though the nose for gas for their humvees.

Yes, human nature is a funny thing.

Funny how we can work ourselves into a tizzy over the installation of "democracy" abroad and yet we turn a blind eye, as our federal government, duly and democratically elected, fails in its democratic duty to provide the very services our fellow citizens have every right to expect.

Rebecca Romani is a freelance journalist and documentary maker currently based in San Diego, CA