10 Days
Katrina has thus far proven to be something the Bush Administration can't manipulate to serve its ends. For various reasons, strategies and emotional appeals that work to manipulate a war, or a terrorist attack, do not work in addressing forseeable natural disasters. Nor do they work when the public regards you as negligent in what had been the number 1 national priority before Katrina, Homeland Security. We gave Bush a pass on the preparedness for 9/11, but not this time. They can't blame Clinton for this one.
The Daily Show was remarkable tonight, I thought. NBC Anchor Brian Williams (not Vikings defensive back Brian Williams, nor still-insane Beach Boys frontman Brian Williams, nor the late Bison Dele, originally named Brian Williams, and I regret a panel discussion featuring all of these men was not arranged) was on, describing what he had personally seen in New Orleans. Williams was in the SuperDome for the first two or three days, long enough to see the place get trashed. Eventually his crew was relocated and got to see more parts of the city, and tonight Williams was, I thought, outspokenly critical of the situation on the ground there.
He said dead bodies littered the streets, staying in the same places for days in many cases. FEMA is trying hard to perform damage control (which figures, given the backgrounds of the #2 and #3 people of FEMA are in marketing and running campaigns), trying to limit media photos of corpses. Williams wrote on his blog about military people raise their barrels at members of his crew with cameras when they tried to take a position near a building. He said the amount of military force on the ground there now is so unbelievable, there are more automatic weapons in New Orleans right now than anywhere else in the world. Whether he meant that literally or not, I couldn't tell, but he certainly said it (twice) with conviction, and other accounts I've read are starting to tell the same story. Late to the game, but once there lock that place up and don't let anybody in, especially if they have a camera or notebook. Don't get me wrong, those people need to be out, but they needed to be out in force so much earlier. And maybe they could have substituted some boats and temporary bridges and food and water for a few of the weapons.
The response by the Administration was comical to me at first. My thought was pretty much, "So typical", followed by some basic primal schadenfreud for seeing the Bush Administration finally be exposed in a way they hadn't been before. But each day, the reality of both the disaster and of the inadequateness of the response has just overwhelmed me, in the sense that I believe this last 10 days are perhaps the 10 most historic days of my lifetime, and like so many things in history, the moon landing the only exception I can think of right now, it was a bad 10 days. You could say the Wall coming down, I suppose, and certainly Watergate. Bush election 2000, probably yes. But what have we ever seen to rival an event like this? This will change our society, numerous regional cultures, views about government, poverty, race, media coverage--nothing like this has happened here before, not in my lifetime.
Katrina has been bad in an expectedly ugly and revealing way, and we don't know how to deal with that as a nation because we can't rally against anybody but ourselves, or if you're Mike Brown, perhaps the people who chose not to or couldn't leave New Orleans. We love to rally, to unite, but especially to unite against something or someone, and somehow I don't think Ray Nagin or Governor Blanco are going to satisfy that itch when there are so many flashing red lights pointing to the people who thought Mike Brown should head up FEMA.
Perhaps even more important, here we are, 10 days out, and the Katrina coverage hasn't slowed down. If anything, it's gotten better, because there's more to cover. Now there's more than the apocalypse in the Crescent City, there's a government that has been caught with its pants way down, when a lot of people have been wanting so desperately for that moment to happen. They aren't able to cow the media, at least so far, and the media gets much more bold when there is palpable national outrage and, sorry, blood in the water.
When Brian Williams is on the Daily Show, granted in front of a sympathetic audience, but still on a very highly watched and talked-about show and calls out the government the way Williams did tonight, that government is in trouble.
1:31:45 AM 
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