Friday, September 09, 2005

Everyone Complains About the Weather but Nobody Does Anything About It

The problems in NO are not unanticipated.  Their practice of supraterrestrial burials in crypt cities is of renowned longstanding there because it’s necessary – graveshafts in NO are wells, opening into Big Muddy herself, filtered through riverine accretions going back to time immemorial.  They knew that they couldn’t bury folks down under the water table, and also that eventually the river would smack them all a good one.  Nature will always eventually get the better of you.  It may take a good long time but nature is patient, and patience is a quality much respected in hot, genteel places. 

No, NO knew it was at risk.  It did all that an economically-depressed locality could do with levees and zoning regulations but, to survive as a city, it was going to need help from a higher power. The unspoken mantra in such cases seems to be that the lord may forsake you but the federal government will eventually have to come in and clean up the mess. 

Thus, when the people of Iraq found themselves condemned to live under a dictator whom even we considered a threat to our own self-determination, it was our federal government that stepped in to fix things for them.  Even though those guys were foreigners, and non-christian folk too, we went out to fight and die in the desert for their sake.  And maybe we had a quick war and a long, painful, protracted post-war conflict that has us mired like a man with one foot on the pier and one in a boat that’s slowly drifting further and further out into the river, into which a hungry snapping turtle has crawled.  But, showing remarkable resiliency and determination, we figured out how to fight the good fight in Iraq against an enemy that’s more of an ideal than a man of flesh and blood.  Who’d have thought, after those lessons were well-digested, that we’d get so tripped up by a natural disaster? 

Then we saw what happened to those poor people with their tsunami.  Of course, they were living in dangerous conditions, barely over sealevel in old ramshackle buildings, a mass of society’s downtrodden, already too near desperation to be able to sense much of a change after hell washed them out, but still, we offered them aid because we are a giving, generous people along with being the world’s richest nation.  Our aid offer was paltry, though – so paltry that we were a laughingstock.  It took several corrections of course before our contribution came close to reflecting our ability to help, to say nothing of the enormity of the disaster.  We’d known immediately how to respond on 9/11, but it took us a while to get our sealegs when we had a big flood on our hands in Indonesia. 

That was late December, ’04.  Here it is now, early September, ’05.  Not a year has passed and we face disaster in our own precincts.  New Orleans was at the core of our national history and heritage.  Pirates and ghosts, whores and sharks.  Coffee and beignets.  Jazz and Andrew Jackson firing at will from behind flaming bales of cotton in the final triumphant bloodbath of a war already over.  And NO was full of dilapidated old buildings full of poor dark people, and they were our people, and we still didn’t know what to do for them (or about them).  The president didn’t visit for days – in fact, the end of his vacation was a more pressing concern for him than to attend to the devastated zone.  When he got an eyeful of aftermath, he chastised the relief effort rather than apologizing for it. 

Our flailing was commensurate to our obstinacy in being unprepared.  The scent of failure was that of rotting corpses trapped in flooded attics.  We knew, in ever one of those cryptic graveyard cities, that New Orleans was surviving by the grace of a provident fortune, just as we know that the west is running out of wood and water and our children are fatter and more ignorant than ever before.  We put our efforts into school testing programs instead of teacher salaries; food classification systems instead of poverty prevention and local farmers’ markets; desert hotels that replicate coastal playgrounds instead of intelligent growth and land management.  And in New Orleans the money needed to shore up the antiquated levees was spent on x-ray equipment for the airports, and local kids who actually cared enough to volunteer to serve their country are 7000 miles away and serving a very attenuated purpose while their neighbors spray red Xs on houses harboring corpses. 

When the waters recede I expect that the famous old cemeteries of NO will be found torn wide open.  Marble and limestone will carpet the pathways with morbid abandon, a mosaic of shattered dates and names, bits of carved angels and mourning lions, pilasters and domes and arches; and the bodies will litter the rubble, their mute jawbones cakes with sludge, yet still intelligibly indicting us for our hubris, our shortsightedness, and our gullibility.  We ignored every clue that god gave us.  It’s the old story of the man surrounded by rising floodwaters who sent away a cop in a police car, then one in a boat, and then one in a helicopter, each time assuring his spurned rescuers, “the lord will provide.” As the waters closed over him at the peak of his roof he asked the lord why no provision had, in fact, been made for him.  “What are you talking about?,” the lord asked as malevolent floods consumed him.  “I sent you a police car, I sent a boat, a chopper….” We were given every warning that this disaster was potential, probable, imminent, ongoing, worse than we imagined. 

We couldn’t deal with it.  In the face of a local catastrophe on a global scale, we foundered like some laughable archipelago that can barely field a summer Olympic team.  Now the sun may have set on the House of the Rising Sun, and all we can do is damage assessment.  What happened to us, and why was it so bad?  The worst thing was that we absolutely, utterly fell apart.  We collapsed as a nation.  Google’s home page black ribbon bound us together more than presidential leadership did.  I’m not hoping that this disaster results in a change in national leadership, though that would be a good start.  What I really hope is that it results in a change in national priorities. This is a disaster that dwarfs the physical impact of 9/11, and is likely to claim more lives when all is said and done. It is the first worst thing to happen to us since the twin towers came down.  In the chronology of our crises, this one ranks primary now by mere virtue of novelty.  Maybe that means that we can move on, finally, from the WTC.

By which I mean, move back – to being a nation that cared enough for its poor not to stand idly by while they drowned in a totally predictable inundation.  A society in which people turn out in the streets to help each other rather than to steal each other’s stuff and shoot at rescuers.  A place that doesn’t have to fill up with water before we recognize that it’s a behavioral sink.  I may be asking for too much here – Katrina was only a category 5 hurricane, after all.  It can’t work miracles.  For that, I’m afraid we may need the federal government.  To the extent that it’s paying any attention, that is.