Thursday, September 08, 2005
Dr. Paranoia: Hurricane Katrin writes a requiem for New Orleans
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
Dr. Paranoia writes: Adrianne, an Acquisitions and Mergers lawyer with Sherman and Sterling, was at the NYU Law Careers center early on Friday, the fifth day of the Katrina disaster, stuffing teachers' recommendations into the envelopes of her applications for out-of-town federal court clerkships.
A native of New Orleans, six years a New Yorker, she had reached her decision to leave the city well before the disaster. She had not been at work all week, trying to reestablish connections with her widespread family in South Louisiana, and just that morning had located her grandfather, in a shelter. She told stories of cousins whose homes in the Garden District were defunct, now housed in Fairmount Hotel in the center of NO, locked in their room, fearful of going out because of the day-time looters and night-time robbers roaming the streets.
There was much bitterness in her tales about the abandonment of her below sea level city by the national tax-cutting politicians, and of the corruption of the local officials, school boards, FEMA administrators and state legislators. She was going to go back to NO and help her city recover. Another young lawyer commented wryly that NO will need a lot of lawyers. I held my tongue, having the memories of jailed Louisiana governors, Long to Edwards, and of prior reformers failing to budge the old boy system in the Big Easy.
It is really incomprehensible that in this era of national preparedness and recent history of hurricane disasters and nature changes, official Washington has steadily cut the funds for the Army Corps of Engineers, levy construction and emergency evacuation. It demoted FEMA from a near cabinet level to just another agency in the basket of the Department of Homeland Security's 22 entities, with a non-professional political appointee Michael Brown, a failed horse show administrator for 11 years, designated to run it into the ground. Or so it would appear, if one were a conspiracy theorist, watching the "cut taxes, drive up the deficit and choke government to death" doctrine, as preached by Rowe's confidant and GOP strategist Grower Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, being implemented in the actions of such administrators as rhose for Pure Air and Pure Water Acts, killing emission controls in coal-firing power plants, and of the White House official who rewrote the findings of scientists about greenhouse effects (not unrelated to the growth of viciousness of hurricanes).
This time even the red states may protest, despite the President's expressed satisfaction with Washington's reaction to the disaster, although he is "dissatisfied with the results." What is adequate about picking up the phone on Monday, if the National Guard is not sent until Friday? Maybe it is, by Bush standards - after the first viewing of the disaster he too took off the next day, to play golf. Now we are potentially facing the death of a great city, a ruin without housing and jobs. Refugees needing paychecks are scratching for employment in Houston, and banks are re-quartering in their Baton Rouge offices. Washington will blame the locals, but the Feds who cut the levy and ACoE money are the major culprits. And now Bush is planning another tax cut.
Hurricane preparation is simple in principle; people of the Florida Keys have had it pegged since the 1992 Andrew. Give people advance notice to evacuate and arrange emergency lodgings, negotiate school, public building, military base and tent city space on high grounds for others, use school buses and public transportation to pick up indigents, reverse road directions, mark up sources of emergency supplies, food and water, rally emergency workers ahead of time. New Orleans is more complex, a city of 200 sq. miles, a half-million population, 70% black, with 30% of the population on a sub-poverty income level. No tax money for the poor is part of the Norquist mantra.
New Orleans was a fun town, playgrounds for Super bowl and jazz fans, Presidents (before they swore off booze) and conventioneers. It is a horror to find that this hospitable city has turned violent, just like a Third World tribal country, with the Superdome sanctuary turning into a scene of death for unattended hospital patients and the old, shootings and violence towards others. Katrina is 9/11-like nightmare, with thousands of Americans drowning, and more dying of thirst, hunger and lack of care for five days. The NYTimes Friday cover of a dead woman floating past the embankment where another is feeding her cat will haunt our consciences forever, like the stacks of the dead in Burundi and the naked child running in Vietnam. Can this be America, not a weird country that can be forgotten as we retract into the US Open and other oblivion-makers?
We can donate money for relief, and try to rebuild a great city, God bless the effort, but the odds are high. Will we re-build in the flood plain? Create a Holland, with dikes? I do not expect to breathe in the total darkness of the night on the Punchtrain Causeway again, nor eat at another Commander's, nor visit Restoration Hall , not in this incarnation. [Ed.: Punchtrain is local for Pontchartrain.]
Dr. Paranoia writes: Adrianne, an Acquisitions and Mergers lawyer with Sherman and Sterling, was at the NYU Law Careers center early on Friday, the fifth day of the Katrina disaster, stuffing teachers' recommendations into the envelopes of her applications for out-of-town federal court clerkships.
A native of New Orleans, six years a New Yorker, she had reached her decision to leave the city well before the disaster. She had not been at work all week, trying to reestablish connections with her widespread family in South Louisiana, and just that morning had located her grandfather, in a shelter. She told stories of cousins whose homes in the Garden District were defunct, now housed in Fairmount Hotel in the center of NO, locked in their room, fearful of going out because of the day-time looters and night-time robbers roaming the streets.
There was much bitterness in her tales about the abandonment of her below sea level city by the national tax-cutting politicians, and of the corruption of the local officials, school boards, FEMA administrators and state legislators. She was going to go back to NO and help her city recover. Another young lawyer commented wryly that NO will need a lot of lawyers. I held my tongue, having the memories of jailed Louisiana governors, Long to Edwards, and of prior reformers failing to budge the old boy system in the Big Easy.
It is really incomprehensible that in this era of national preparedness and recent history of hurricane disasters and nature changes, official Washington has steadily cut the funds for the Army Corps of Engineers, levy construction and emergency evacuation. It demoted FEMA from a near cabinet level to just another agency in the basket of the Department of Homeland Security's 22 entities, with a non-professional political appointee Michael Brown, a failed horse show administrator for 11 years, designated to run it into the ground. Or so it would appear, if one were a conspiracy theorist, watching the "cut taxes, drive up the deficit and choke government to death" doctrine, as preached by Rowe's confidant and GOP strategist Grower Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, being implemented in the actions of such administrators as rhose for Pure Air and Pure Water Acts, killing emission controls in coal-firing power plants, and of the White House official who rewrote the findings of scientists about greenhouse effects (not unrelated to the growth of viciousness of hurricanes).
This time even the red states may protest, despite the President's expressed satisfaction with Washington's reaction to the disaster, although he is "dissatisfied with the results." What is adequate about picking up the phone on Monday, if the National Guard is not sent until Friday? Maybe it is, by Bush standards - after the first viewing of the disaster he too took off the next day, to play golf. Now we are potentially facing the death of a great city, a ruin without housing and jobs. Refugees needing paychecks are scratching for employment in Houston, and banks are re-quartering in their Baton Rouge offices. Washington will blame the locals, but the Feds who cut the levy and ACoE money are the major culprits. And now Bush is planning another tax cut.
Hurricane preparation is simple in principle; people of the Florida Keys have had it pegged since the 1992 Andrew. Give people advance notice to evacuate and arrange emergency lodgings, negotiate school, public building, military base and tent city space on high grounds for others, use school buses and public transportation to pick up indigents, reverse road directions, mark up sources of emergency supplies, food and water, rally emergency workers ahead of time. New Orleans is more complex, a city of 200 sq. miles, a half-million population, 70% black, with 30% of the population on a sub-poverty income level. No tax money for the poor is part of the Norquist mantra.
New Orleans was a fun town, playgrounds for Super bowl and jazz fans, Presidents (before they swore off booze) and conventioneers. It is a horror to find that this hospitable city has turned violent, just like a Third World tribal country, with the Superdome sanctuary turning into a scene of death for unattended hospital patients and the old, shootings and violence towards others. Katrina is 9/11-like nightmare, with thousands of Americans drowning, and more dying of thirst, hunger and lack of care for five days. The NYTimes Friday cover of a dead woman floating past the embankment where another is feeding her cat will haunt our consciences forever, like the stacks of the dead in Burundi and the naked child running in Vietnam. Can this be America, not a weird country that can be forgotten as we retract into the US Open and other oblivion-makers?
We can donate money for relief, and try to rebuild a great city, God bless the effort, but the odds are high. Will we re-build in the flood plain? Create a Holland, with dikes? I do not expect to breathe in the total darkness of the night on the Punchtrain Causeway again, nor eat at another Commander's, nor visit Restoration Hall , not in this incarnation. [Ed.: Punchtrain is local for Pontchartrain.]
# posted by Wally Dobelis @ 10:49 AM 
