You know what I'd really like to see? (Other than actual, effective aid coming to the hurricane victims, that is.) I'd really like to see George W. Bush, and Michael Chertoff, and that jackass failed horse lawyer head of FEMA Mike Brown—oh, and Condi Rice too, in her nice new $3000 Ferragamo pumps—I'd like to see them all air-dropped into the Ninth Ward somewhere with nothing but the clothes on their backs and told to make their own goddamn way to safety. That's what I'd like to see. That, to me, would look like justice.

Not that I imagine that, even then, the experience would create any capacity in any of them for empathy. Actually, by the end of the second day Condi'd probably have eaten the rest of 'em anyway.

posted by michael  11:34:59 AM  
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Paralysis. Jordan Flaherty, editor of Left Turn magazine, is a New Orleans resident and an evacuee who's just left the city. From his account:

In the refugee camp I just left, on the I-10 freeway near Causeway, thousands of people (at least 90% black and poor) stood and squatted in mud and trash behind metal barricades, under an unforgiving sun, with heavily armed soldiers standing guard over them. When a bus would come through, it would stop at a random spot, state police would open a gap in one of the barricades, and people would rush for the bus, with no information given about where the bus was going. Once inside (we were told) evacuees would be told where the bus was taking them - Baton Rouge, Houston, Arkansas, Dallas, or other locations. I was told that if you boarded a bus bound for Arkansas (for example), even people with family and a place to stay in Baton Rouge would not be allowed to get out of the bus as it passed through Baton Rouge. You had no choice but to go to the shelter in Arkansas. If you had people willing to come to New Orleans to pick you up, they could not come within 17 miles of the camp.

I traveled throughout the camp and spoke to Red Cross workers, Salvation Army workers, National Guard, and state police, and although they were friendly, no one could give me any details on when buses would arrive, how many, where they would go to, or any other information. I spoke to the several teams of journalists nearby, and asked if any of them had been able to get any information from any federal or state officials on any of these questions, and all of them, from Australian tv to local Fox affiliates complained of an unorganized, non-communicative, mess. One cameraman told me “as someone who’s been here in this camp for two days, the only information I can give you is this: get out by nightfall. You don’t want to be here at night.”

There was also no visible attempt by any of those running the camp to set up any sort of transparent and consistent system, for instance a line to get on buses, a way to register contact information or find family members, special needs services for children and infirm, phone services, treatment for possible disease exposure, nor even a single trash can.

We're seeing reports accumulate now that indicate that the suffering in New Orleans has mounted, not just because of haplessness and indifference, but because the city has been cordoned off—literally—by a regime of utterly heartless inflexibility. (Watch Shepard Smith and Geraldo Rivera all but breaking from the effort to thrust the reality of this into Sean Hannity's smug, overfed face.) The Red Cross has confirmed that it was ordered not to enter New Orleans with relief. (The "logic," if it can be called that, is that the presence of aid "would keep people from evacuating and encourage others to come into the city." State agencies have a different explanation, claiming it's unsafe for relief organizations to be in a disaster zone, but likewise admit the policy is in place.) Private individuals attempting to bring aid have been stopped and turned back. There is reason to question whether even authorized relief was forced to cool its heels till it could arrive in New Orleans to maximum political effect, as a backdrop to Bush's "compassion" tour yesterday.

And the people on I-10 who couldn't tell Jordan Flaherty anything, or set up a "transparent and consistent system" for dealing with the refugees in their care? They're not inflexible, or indifferent, because they're cruel. Hell, they're on that miserable freeway to help. (I'll set aside, for now, the racial politics that has caused civil authority consistently to treat refugees as a species of criminal suspect.) But they're under stress, and it's forced them to shut down in crucial ways. It's what happens when you've got enormous and immediate responsibility and no way to fulfill it. The aid workers, the Guard, the state police, have themselves been abandoned—told nothing, given no clear instructions, given no way to relieve the situation. They're being required to improvise, under the direst circumstances, and given nothing to improvise with.

And this is what emerges, over and over, as the chief characteristic of this grotesquely unnecessary tragedy: abandonment and improvisation. No plan, no information, and people freezing in place because of it. What we have here—as the perfect and final expression of the Bush Way—is not government, but anti-government. People are resourceful in times of need: left simply to their own initiative, New Orleanians in their isolated, improvised communities would have figured things out, though the cost would have been awful. (Which is why you have planning in the first place, so that you don't have to bear the cost of figuring it out yourselves in the moment of crisis.) But when you expect leadership—and find yourself, instead, in a vacuum—that's when paralysis sets in. The question now is whether, as a country, we can shake ourselves at last out of the paralysis of these last five years.

posted by michael  10:26:09 AM  
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