More on Katrina

I just can't stop reading about what's going on in New Orleans right now. It's like some post-apocalyptic American nightmare happening where a proud city of 1.3 million once stood.

I didn't really know how it all worked before, never having been to Louisiana, but apparently the City of New Orleans is organized as something of a bowl. Around the city, on high ground, are levees designed to keep water out, while the most-populated areas of the inner city are low-lying. So now that the levees are being overrun, basically, the bowl is filling with water.

And it's not just water, either, but undrinkable, unswimmable toxic water. Toxic because of all the spilled chemicals and...shudder...rotting flesh in it.

Martial law has been declared down there. It's apparently something of a crazed dystopian End Times chaotic free-for-all.

So how can you not write about that incessantly on your blog?

August J. Pollack makes many great points on this post, possibly the best I have read yet about the socio-political causes and implications of Katrina.

He first points out that Katrina is far, far worse than any act of terrorism ever committed against the United States, and even makes the point that this devastation somewhat lines up with the fallout we've always feared from a nuclear device. Infrastructure is damaged, the city is uninhabitable, mass chaos has broken out, thousands are dead, thousands more are missing (including Fats Domino!).

It's going to take months before many parts of New Orleans have power and running water. Months. MONTHS. Now, bearing in mind that the more well-to-do affluent neighborhoods tend to be located along the higher-ground portions of the city, how are all of these poor inner-city New Orleansians (New Orleanders? New Orleans residents?) supposed to relocate?

Here's unbelievable nitwit Michael Chertoff, head of your Department of Homeland Security on NBC's "Today" today!

"The critical thing was to get people out of there before the disaster. Some people chose not to obey that order. That was a mistake on their part."

I'll repeat again: YOU CAN'T EVEN SWIM OUT. There aren't buses taking these people out of the city, and even if they could get out of the city, where would they go? What if they don't have wealthy relatives who can take them in, and can't afford a stay in the Shreveport Motel 6?

Atrios reports this from CNN this afternoon:

There are thousands of people just laying in the street. They have nowhere to go. These are mothers. We saw mothers. We talked to mothers holding babies. Some of these babies are 3, 4, 5, months old living in these horrible conditions. Putrid food on the ground. Sewage, their feet sitting in sewage. We saw feces on the ground. These people are being forced to live like animals. When you look at some of these mothers your heart just breaks. We're not talking about a few families or a few hundred families. Thousands of people are gathered around the convention [center].

Unimaginable...Seriously. I can't even imagine what I would do in this situation. Curl up into the fetal position (trying to avoid water-borne feces) and rock back and forth until it was over, most likely.

August continues by pointing out that all the National Guard troops from Louisiana and Mississippi who are serving in Iraq right now (about 6,000 men and women) could be helping out here at home. After all, wasn't the whole point of going to Iraq in the first place to prevent devastation from coming home to a major US city.

Guess what's going on right now in a major US city?

And I understand that right-wingers and conservatives alike are going to savage this- "how dare I blame the President." And if any of them even remotely opened a history book a day in their lives they would realize the correct statement is "how dare we not?" If you condensed every single official duty of the President of the United States into a list of perhaps four or five things, taking responsibility and management of his or her own citizen's welfare would be one of them. And on that topic the President has- not just in the last 36 hours but by the last 36 months- totally failed at this.
And it isn't just the lack of manpower that's hurting efforts to aid some of these unfortunates. It's the lack of financial resources in the months leading up to Hurricane Katrina. Arianna on HuffPo links to this crucial article from Editor & Publisher:

In early 2004, as the cost of the conflict in Iraq soared, President Bush proposed spending less than 20 percent of what the Corps said was needed for Lake Pontchartrain, according to a Feb. 16, 2004, article, in New Orleans CityBusiness. On June 8, 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, told the Times-Picayune: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."

Oh, man...Doesn't that make you angry? Devastation of this magnitude may not have been fait accompli. Certainly, there would have been massive damage either way, but right now there is a 2-block hole in the levee that is pouring water into a populated area of New Orleans. Maybe we could have sealed that up extra-tight if everyone hadn't been busy in Tikrit, you know?