The Soap Box

Much indignation and blame has been whipped around in the aftermath of the Katrina tragedy, most of it well-deserved. Far too many people have died, and conditions for many of the survivors have been unspeakable; leadership on any level above the street has been virtually non-existent; the president’s attempts at rallying the American people have amounted mainly to smarmy commiseration and photo ops. And the press are eating it up. After four solid years now of abdication and acting as nothing more than a government mouthpiece, they are seizing upon this failure of government to buy back some lost credibility at the expense of their former masters.

Primarily, it is the Bush Administration that has been on the receiving end of the media’s tongue-lashing for its paltry and much-delayed response to a forseeable disaster. Many people, the media tells us, have known for years about the dangers of New Orleans flooding during a big storm. Yet rather than channeling money to this area, the Bush Administration actually cut funding to help secure the levee system, the only protection New Orleans had against becoming an Atlantis. As a result, and because the full force of the federal government was slow in coming, who knows how many thousands of people drowned, and thousands more were stranded for days without basic sanitation, food, or water, say the talking heads. And they’re not taking a strong position on it, but the media tells us this tragedy may even have been the result of apathy caused by racism.

For plenty of reasons, the president deserves a good tongue-lashing - and much, much more - over his response to this crisis. But mostly those reasons are taking a back seat to these unfounded criticisms which have restored the media to the good graces of a bewildered, formerly mistrusting public. Let’s take a few of these cynical ploys in order. . . .

Foreseeability
Ever since New Orleans was built, it could be foreseen that one good storm could fill the entire thing up like a wash basin. If only President Taft, or President Wilson, or President Eisenhower - or President Coolidge after southern Louisiana flooded in 1927 - had spent the money it would have taken to shore up those levees and redirect the Mississippi away from the city, thousands of lives could have been saved. Who can tell the class, how many presidents have there been since New Orleans’s earliest days? Bush was just the unlucky one on duty when the levees were breached.

To lay the blame on President Bush for not making New Orleans more safe, especially in a time of great homeland security spending, is to blame the school principal for a schoolyard brawl: ultimately responsible, but with little practical control. Every American, to a person, agreed with the president on August 27th that our homeland security dollars should have been spent securing our ports, airlines, nuclear reactors, etc. and not on the New Orleans levee system. And anyway, it’s Congress who controls the purse strings of the federal government. Though the president can promote his priorities among the legislative branch to influence the outcome, only Congress can determine how the government’s money should be spent.

This was not the first storm to hit New Orleans. Far from it. It could always be foreseen that perhaps one day a storm big enough would hit New Orleans in just the right manner to sink it (no doubt at one point Hurricane Camille was also predicted to be The Big One, and wouldn’t President Nixon’s face have been red…). But it could not be foreseen that this was that storm. Indeed, the brunt of Katrina did not even hit New Orleans. And for the first twelve hours or so after the storm hit, the very media who are now so indignant that the president could have been surprised by the devastation were reporting that New Orleans was in the clear. It wasn’t until well after the storm had passed that the levees were finally breached and the city flooded.

“A last-minute eastward jog by Hurricane Katrina saved low-lying New Orleans from an unprecedented catastrophe yesterday,” Newsday reported on August 30th, a full day after the storm hit. “Why was New Orleans spared the devastation that had been predicted over the weekend?” asked the Philadelphia Daily News. It’s a good thing for the Bush Administration that they were slow to respond; had they sent in personnel and supplies en masse the day after landfall, the media would have skewered the president for wasting precious homeland security resources that are supposed to protect us from terrorists.

They Could Have Been Saved
Surely most of the people who perished as a result of Hurricane Katrina could have been saved were we able to predict a storm’s path and intensity with one-hundred percent accuracy. And many of the people who were killed in the 2004 tsunami could have been saved if we had operable tsunami early warning systems in the Indian Ocean. No doubt, the three thousand people who were killed on September 11th could have been saved as well had we known all of Al Qaeda’s day-to-day operations. Katrina was an immense storm; it was going to be a disaster no matter what the Bush Administration did. We have to learn to accept this fact and the media should be reporting it, just as the experts tell us that there will be another terrorist attack no matter how safe we think we are (something else they don’t like to report).

That is not to say there were not some people who perished but otherwise could have been saved had the Bush Administration been more prepared and responded more quickly. Some of the criticism that the president was slow to act is well deserved, even taking into consideration that much of the nation believed for the first half-day or so that New Orleans would emerge relatively unscathed. But the blind rage which the media has constantly portrayed from day two - and in many cases has itself echoed - paints a picture of a disaster caused principally by ineptitude. This is just not the case.

Put aside for a moment the fact that we all thought New Orleans was in the clear, and that local and state officials have always been the ones in charge of the immediate response to a hurricane with federal support provided as needed. If FEMA, the Coast Guard, the National Guard, the military, and the Red Cross were all lined up outside New Orleans on August 28th, with perfect knowledge about when the levees would be breached, just waiting to provide rescue and recovery services, how many of the thousands of people who either could not or chose not to evacuate the city, now stranded on rooftops in the middle of a small sea, could have been saved? The only honest answer is that we have absolutely no way of knowing. Do we even have the right equipment? What would the plan have been? After all, when was the last time an American rescue operation was undertaken in a city that had been completely submurged under water? When was the last time a city anywhere was completely submerged under water?

For those who managed to get themselves out of their homes and to the city shelters, more absolutely should have been done. There was looting and lawlessness; but half of the police force had quit on the spot. Many were without food and water; but rescue workers were often intimidated or even shot at when they made attempts to deliver provisions. When local and state officials were unable to stabilize the city, it became the federal government’s responsiblity to do the job. If viewers of CNN or even the nightly news knew that there were thousands of people at the convention center with no provisions and a few corpses, and no one had yet given them any information, federal resources should have been there on the ground before the next newscast; they weren’t. The president should have been on national television in prime-time, preempting the new fall schedule, in order to respond to what nervous Americans were seeing on their television screens; he wasn’t. The Bush Administration deserves all of the criticism they’ve received for not taking care of those poor souls at the convention center until much too long after the crisis began, but to expect that federal resources would have been on the ground “the day of” to save everyone is simply ludicrous.

Those Racist Bastards
Perhaps the most outrageous accusation that’s reverberated since August 28th is that the Bush Administration’s inadequate response was motivated by racial animus. In this white man’s opinion, there is a kernel of truth to such an accusation, at best. Could there be any question that some in a Republican administration which at best garnered maybe ten percent of the black vote, which opposes affirmative action, and which didn’t even bother to address the NAACP during the campaign season don’t like black people? I wouldn’t be surprised to learn there are some who don’t even care for Colin, Condi, or Rod. But the case simply has not been made that the Bush Administration left the black folk to rot in the streets of New Orleans.

Offered as evidence that racism was the prime motivator is the suggestion that, had it been New York or Washington or some other majority-white city that was under 20 feet of water, the federal response would have been quicker. To start, such a premise is necessarily unproveable, but it is weak as well. Certainly some of the delay was due to the delay before the levees breached. And as already mentioned, it’s quite reasonable to assume that a federal response to a city under water would be inadequate anywhere in the country. Lastly, it’s a truism to say that the response would have been faster if it were New York or Washington (a majority-black city, incidentally) that was hit because of, in addition to the much larger populations and more plentiful resources in those cities, their importance to the nation. The United States could not function without the center of federal government or the financial capital of the world; but had it been any other white city - such as San Francisco or Philadelphia - more than likely the Bush Administration would not have been stirred into action any faster.

The media can sense that the real story of race in the United States has been laid bare by this ordeal, mostly because for once they are filling our screens with sympathetic stories about people of color. Trying to satisfy that twinge of social conscience, the best they can manage is to give airtime to wild accusations which no one believes and, when pressed, even those who utter them will not defend. The true story of race in all of this - inexorably tied up in poverty - the media are about as adept at grasping as the Bush Administration is at, well, responding to a hurricane.

The poverty piece they nearly get, but still only mention when it makes them look good. At the top of a recent episode of the Chris Matthews Show, Norah O’Donnell of NBC News quickly spouted off the astronomically high percentage of children in New Orleans who were living in poverty, and even insisted she be allowed to say it twice. But it is a safe bet that this was the first time she had ever referenced that statistic - or any like it - on air even though it has always been true and readily available. And when Andrew Sullivan of the New Republic tried to display his bleeding heart so as not to seem completely aloof, pondering aloud whether it could be that his fellow conservatives actually aren’t doing enough to help the poor in general, Matthews (to his credit) dismissed Sullivan’s self-serving sincerity, repeatedly answering, “But we know this!” The media has utterly failed to hold anyone accountable for the level of poverty in this country, and one week of appearing to care in the least cannot excuse their willful blindness. Had they ever spoken up with the intent to cause some sort of change rather than just to look good, perhaps there would have been no “poorest of the poor” to be devastated by this storm.

Worse is the part that the media does not even understand and so cannot report. The true racial aspect of this disaster - the real reason that most of the faces in the cameras are black - is that in the United States, levels of unemployment are routinely ten percentage points higher for black people than for white; that levels of family wealth for black families are one-tenth the levels for white families (ensuring that poverty will be passed down through the generations in the black community) and have just been reduced to zero for black families in New Orleans; that the country is at least as segregated today as it was when segregation was outlawed over fifty years ago, reserving the most degredated sections of our cities and towns, with their substandard housing, schooling, opportunities, and services, for black people.

A common refrain throughout the aftermath of Katrina has been that the United States looked like a third-world country; but for too many, urban and rural, far too many of whom are black, the United States is a third-world country, every day. And it’s not just a third-world country, but an apartheid state. Every one of those poor black people that flashed on our television screens represents the insidious racial ills which have been a silent scourge on this nation for half a century, and another missed opportunity for the media to break the silence. Instead, they toe the line that the Bush Administration may have let the black people down somehow.

The Bush Administration’s shameful response to the Katrina disaster will likely have been forgotten within a month or two. But we should all be ashamed that we have allowed the media to sucker us back into believing that they represent our side after four long years of leaving us to drown.