Hurricane Katrina: Who's to Blame for this
Unnatural Disaster
by
Ari Kelman
"Those responsible for this unnatural disaster hope that
we will forget the storm's victims and survivors."
This article originally appeared in The Nation. We think it is flawed, but
worth reading.- The Editors.
August 29, two years ago, Hurricane Katrina slammed into New Orleans. The
howling wind shattered trees, moss-shrouded oaks that had shaded grateful
pedestrians across centuries; it whipped roofs from shotgun houses, Creole
cottages and antebellum mansions constructed by slaves brought to the city in
chains; and it scattered people across the continent, whole families whose
ancestors settled New Orleans before the United States became a nation. Then
the water rose, an inundation caused by the storm's voracious tidal surge, the
loss of thousands of acres of coastal wetlands sacrificed upon the altar of
commercial gain, and levees built on the cheap and poorly maintained. The flood
scoured away whole neighborhoods, leaving behind potters' fields.
No names of the dead will be engraved on walls; there will be no Freedom Tower.
Instead, those responsible for this unnatural disaster hope that we will forget
the storm's victims and survivors. For politicians, petroleum executives and
engineers, there is little to be gained from our remembering Katrina - no wars
to be ginned up out of this ruined city, no elections to be won by waving the
stained garments of the dead. Meanwhile, New Orleanians are still on hold with
insurance companies, busy hauling away moldy sheetrock or otherwise too
consumed with sorting heirlooms encrusted with muck to scold us for ignoring
them. What we have are scholars, memoirists, journalists and activists recalling
the storm and foreshadowing what we'll miss if we continue on our path of
forgetting.
Their books, for now, are the best memorials to Katrina we
have.
Douglas Brinkley's The Great Deluge, Jed Horne's Breach of Faith
and Christopher Cooper and Robert Block's Disaster reject the Bush
Administration's hollow plea not to play the "blame game." All three
share subject matter - the run-up to the storm, the chaos after the levees
failed and then, to varying degrees, the start of rebuilding - as well as a
perspective of third-person omniscience. This point of view allows them to
collapse time and space, surveying a panorama that includes Washington,
Houston, parts of the Gulf Coast and New Orleans. But despite all they share,
the three books differ on a critical question: how to apportion blame to
characters ranging from the merely incompetent to the criminally negligent.
"Brinkley, writing with fetid water still covering much of New
Orleans, had to grasp for heroes where he could find them."
Take Brinkley's Great Deluge, a fine-grained account of the week
surrounding Katrina. A historian at Tulane University, Brinkley crams huge
quantities of riveting material into 700 pages. But working as a
participant-observer, he's too close to the action. What results is less a work
of "history," as promised, than a small archive - a trove of
information and anecdotes - packaged as a disaster narrative, kin to David
McCullough's Johnstown Flood or John Barry's Rising Tide.
Brinkley, writing with fetid water still covering much of New Orleans, had to
grasp for heroes
where he could find them, usually in stories of regular people coping with the
catastrophe. And he often resorts to cliche. Laura Maloney, an activist who
saved hundreds of animals from the storm, "could have been a fashion
model, with her long blond hair, perfect white teeth, and eyes that implied an
internal kindness."
Still, most of these portraits, particularly the case of New
Orleans disc jockey Garland Robinette, who never stopped broadcasting as he
rode out the storm, command attention and flesh out the disaster. And on the
particulars of the events Brinkley covers, his book should be the definitive
account for years to come.
What's most questionable is his argument that New Orleans's embattled mayor,
Ray Nagin, deserves the lion's share of blame. For Brinkley, Nagin failed in
ways too vast and various to be forgiven: to provision the Superdome, to
evacuate the needy, to coordinate rescue and relief. Many familiar horror
stories - New Orleanians trapped on rooftops, starving in fetid shelters or
dying for want of medicine - are punctuated in The Great Deluge with
images of a callous Nagin. Rather than ordering an early mandatory evacuation,
the mayor dithers as the storm approaches. With the water rising, he hides out
at the Hyatt, ignoring havoc down the street at the Superdome. He later takes a
luxurious shower aboard Air Force One, oblivious to a stream of displaced New
Orleanians sweltering just minutes away.
"The mayor dithers as the storm approaches."
On most counts, Brinkley's case has merit. But with drumbeat repetition, fair
criticism becomes vendetta. It doesn't help that some passages flirt with
racially coded language. Nagin is an Uncle Tom ("always deferential to
whites"), a trickster ("spew[ing] anti- corruption jive"), all
flash and no substance (a "show horse and not a nuts-and-bolts
workhorse"), and he preens when he could be saving lives ("like a
primping teenager"). The Great Deluge appeared on the eve of New
Orleans's 2006 mayoral election, and it reads like campaign literature for the
other side. But if that was the book's intent, it failed. Nagin won a second
term.
Brinkley does catalogue the Bush Administration's ensemble cast of villains and
buffoons. But his Nagin fixation and tendency to parrot Republican talking
points - readers are asked, for example, to muster sympathy for Trent Lott,
champion of tort reform, as he sues his insurance company for a payout on his
Gulf Coast home - keep attention too tightly focused on local political figures.
Horne's Breach of Faith, by contrast, feints at local and state politicians
before focusing on federal officials: Congressional appropriators, enthralled
by visions of small government; technocrats at the Army Corps of Engineers, as
incapable of building stout structures as they are of telling the truth;
Cabinet-level cronies, including Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff;
and President Bush himself.
For Horne, an editor at New Orleans's Times-Picayune, Katrina's tragedy
grew out of politics and policies - entrenched and complex systems - rather
than anything so idiosyncratic as individual failures. Nagin is criticized for
his mistakes but isn't demonized; his blunders are understood as byproducts of
the disparate interests he must satisfy - including New Orleans's
African-American and business communities? - and the complex city he governs.
Horne also discusses Louisiana's lost wetlands, bemoaning longstanding regional
economic priorities - petroleum production valued over ecosystem protection -
that imperiled New Orleans. And he takes on the politics of flood control and
the Byzantine relationships among agencies responsible for the city's decrepit
levees and floodwalls. Horne's effort to fix blame for the flooding is
excellent detective work and fine storytelling. He uncovers a variety of
colorful characters, including the opinionated Ivor van Heerden, who waded
hip-deep into controversy when he began investigating the levees' failures,
excoriating the Orleans Levee Board and the Corps of Engineers.
"People with no experience in emergency management filled five
of FEMA's ten top spots when Katrina hit."
The Corps isn't the only federal entity Horne unmasks. At FEMA,
horse-show-promoter-turned agency-director Michael Brown represented the norm,
not the exception. People with no experience in emergency management filled
five of FEMA's ten top spots when Katrina hit. The disaster thus became a case
study for Grover Norquist's school of governance: The federal apparatus, though
not yet small enough to drown in a bathtub, was no longer big enough to rescue
New Orleans from the flood. And, Horne argues, the Bush Administration's
obsession with terror compounded the problem. After 9/11, money once earmarked
for levees or disaster
response instead funded wars in Afghanistan and Iraq or found its way to the
Department of Homeland Security's budget. "What mattered in the narrower
context of the Katrina response was that both tenets of the Bush faith - the
small-government mantra and the conviction that the nation's gravest threats
were posed by the likes of bin Laden not Katrina - conspired to gut the
nation's disaster response bureaucracy in the name of making the nation
safer," Horne writes. The storm, then, demonstrated that a secure homeland
was little more than Republican spin.
In Disaster, Wall Street Journal reporters Cooper and Block also suggest
that New Orleans should be remembered as collateral damage in the "war on
terror." They argue that creating the Department of Homeland Security,
which swallowed FEMA in 2003, left the nation more rather than less vulnerable.
The authors' evidence includes "Hurricane Pam," a planning exercise
conducted by FEMA in 2004 to study the impact a huge storm might have on the
Gulf Coast. The ugly results, which suggested that the region was woefully
unprepared for a disaster that might cause significant loss of life,
particularly if the levees failed in New Orleans, prefigured Katrina's wrath.
But FEMA couldn't pursue its findings because its abusive parent agency had
raided its budget. The Department of Homeland Security then ignored natural
disasters that were not merely predictable but predicted. This myopia extended
to Congress, which slashed the New Orleans Corps district's budget by 44
percent between 2000 and 2005. And after the storm, the cavalry arrived late
for similar reasons. Two wars stretched National Guard units to the breaking
point, while commanders, heeding false rumors of armed mobs menacing the
Superdome and Convention Center, planned, according to Cooper and Block, a
"complicated military operation, one in which federal soldiers might have
to kill American citizens, perhaps in great numbers." Military leaders, in
sum, readied to put down a phantom insurgency instead of rushing aid to the
dying. Here was compassionate conservatism's military wing.
"Military leaders readied to put down a phantom insurgency
instead of rushing aid to the dying."
Books written to provoke outrage rarely do. Disaster, though, unnerves by
recalling incompetence in exacting detail, reliving decisions that, had they
been reversed, would have saved lives. But it's not definitive, because Cooper
and Block blur causation and correlation. It's never entirely clear, for
instance, if, as they argue, the government botched Katrina due to bloated
bureaucracies and turf wars or because of the hacks in charge: ideologues like
Chertoff and bootlickers like Brown. Not to mention the President, who comes
across in all of these books as out of his depth in crisis and focused on
public relations rather than the public. Reluctant to cut his vacation short,
President Bush first lingered on his Crawford ranch as Katrina's storm surge
dissolved New Orleans's levees. He then flew over the Gulf Coast without
landing. When he finally toured the ruined districts, he lauded Brown for doing
"a heckuva job" and held up Senator Lott as the face of the tragedy.
The President eventually addressed the country from New Orleans's Jackson
Square, promising to rebuild the city. His handlers managed to turn New
Orleans's power on for the first time in weeks so that this bit of political
theater could be staged just so. Then, with the flimflam delivered via
satellite uplink, the city sank once again into darkness. Since then, despite
the fact that fewer than half of the city's residents have returned, and those
who have often live without basic services, the President has barely mentioned
New Orleans. His silence is designed to foster a collective amnesia that serves
his interests.
These books share a common flaw: They sometimes duck questions of race and
class, the disaster's root rather than proximate causes. "To some,"
writes Brinkley, "the crowd stranded at the Superdome conjured up images
of both slavery and slave insurrection. Of course, such over-the-top comments
were irresponsible." Really? Why? He also writes about New Orleanians
seeking high ground in the neighboring town of Gretna and the white police who
blocked their way. Of officials who denied that race had anything to do with
the confrontation, Brinkley concludes, "One might as well take them at
their word on that." Indeed, one might as well - if one is crafting a
colorblind account of events in which color mattered. For their part, Cooper
and Block argue, "New Orleans, while uniquely fragile geographically and
confusingly exotic culturally, is just an average place in the scale of
risk." This assumes, somehow, that the scale of risk ignores variables
like race, class and culture, that it didn't matter that New Orleans was 67
percent African-American and among the nation's poorest cities when the storm
hit.
"Most whites saw the failures as emblems of race-blind
incompetence."
Horne is best on Katrina's racial and socioeconomic
dimensions. He asks probing questions about the disaster's origins and then
notes how black, white, rich and poor experienced and perceived the debacle in
different ways based on history, culture and relative privilege. Some members
of New Orleans's African-American community, for example, tended to view the
ruined levees in the context of the city's long history of environmental
injustice. Most whites instead saw the failures as emblems of race-blind
incompetence. Even these issues, though, sit on the periphery of the analysis.
Michael Eric Dyson's Come Hell or High Water directly answers questions
other Katrina books usually only imply. Why were poor and black people left
behind? Why was relief so late arriving? Why was the nation surprised to
discover poverty in its midst? And does George Bush care about black people? In
order: Because poor people and people of color often live in harm's way and are
forgotten. Because Republicans gutted disaster response in favor of limited
government. Because cultures of conservatism and consumption render black
people and the impoverished invisible. And, no, President Bush doesn't care
about black people. It's nothing personal, writes Dyson, a humanities professor
at Georgetown University: "The black poor of the Delta lacked social
standing, racial status, and the apparent and unconscious identifiers that
might evoke a dramatic empathy in Bush and Brown." Although the book
relies heavily on Dyson's earlier work on rap music, African-American religion
and popular culture, its insistence on the centrality of race and class during
Katrina is powerful and well taken.
The authors whose essays appear in the anthology What Lies Beneath
expand on Dyson's arguments. They suggest that New Orleans suffered because it
was a blue island floating in a sea of red politics, that global warming
supercharged the storm, that poverty and racism trapped people in the city. The
book, in other words, incorporates many of the left's concerns. It's also
occasionally a bit overblown. Nonetheless, it reminds readers of the moment
after the hurricane when the nation forgot irony and revived dormant
conversations about the impact of racial and socioeconomic inequities. It seems
like an age ago, especially with the media making a mockery of presidential
candidates for trying to continue these discussions. Pundits harp on one's
haircut or ponder whether another is black enough to appeal to African-American
voters. The noise is distracting. What Lies Beneath tries to refocus
attention on Katrina's core lessons.
One of which was the value of high ground. Or so Mike Tidwell, author of the
global-warming jeremiad The Ravaging Tide insists. He warns that
"every coastline in the world" may soon suffer New Orleans's fate
because of rising ocean levels. But even if true, fearmongering and reductive
analysis - "September 11 happened because of oil, plain and simple" -
undermine the message, ensuring nonbelievers will remain skeptical and offering
Alexander Cockburn something to ridicule. By contrast, nobody will mock Rebuilding
Urban Places After Disaster, because nobody will read this collection of
scholarly essays on New Orleans's future. Such is the fate of published
academic conference proceedings. Still, a highlight here is MIT professor
Lawrence Vale's "Restoring Urban Viability," which considers
conditions - economic, political, cultural - that historically have allowed
cities to rise from ruin. This material, in more depth, appears in his book The
Resilient City, required reading for anyone interested in context for New
Orleans's reconstruction. In that volume Vale, his co-editor, Thomas
Campanella, and several contributors all argue that cities do typically recover
from disasters, but their rebirth takes a long time. And their resilience
hinges on their economic centrality, utility as a symbol of state power and the
sway of their citizens. For all these reasons, New Orleans's prognosis, Vale
suggests, is murky.
"Every coastline in the world may soon suffer New Orleans's fate
because of rising ocean levels."
And finally we come to the memoirists: Joshua Clark, Chris Rose and Billy
Sothern. Forsaking the godly perspective of third-person omniscience, these
authors have written first-person accounts of lives destroyed and remade. Their
books are memoirs of metamorphosis, with the hurricane serving as the agent of
change. Because they share personal stories, still raw, these books will help
shape our collective memory of Katrina, reminding us of the disaster's impact
at the smallest, most human scale.
Joshua Clark, an independent publisher who survived Katrina in the French
Quarter, begins Heart Like Water as a romp through New Orleans's
countercultural arts community. The book then becomes a libertarian screed,
outraged not just that government failed but that anyone expected the flimsy
social contract to withstand Category 3 winds. Finally, it arrives at a
communitarian vision, in which the state and its citizens can only prevent
another Katrina by working together to save the Gulf Coast's remaining
wetlands.
Clark carried a tape recorder with him everywhere he went after the storm, and
he includes many of the interviews he conducted verbatim. But the book doesn't
succeed or fail based on this conceit so much as the author's willingness to
include an unflinching self-portrait. Clark appears hypermasculine and
self-absorbed for much of Heart Like Water. He treats his partner,
Katherine, who wanted to leave before the storm, terribly. Then, after the city
was devastated, Clark remained contemptuous of rumors of suffering and chaos,
basing his opinions on the fact that he encountered so little mayhem himself.
He was much taken with his own bravado (looting is hilarious!). Because of this
narcissism, although Clark was often surrounded
by friends, he remained isolated.
And then he gained perspective - literally. Clark climbed a bridge and took in
a bird's-eye view of the drowning city. As quickly as that, his tone changes;
he gains empathy. The transition, though not wholly convincing, underscores
divisions within New Orleans and the way topography became destiny after
Katrina. High ground in the Quarter suffered only minor damage, while flooding
erased low-lying communities. Before the storm, Clark never considered many of
the inundated districts part of his city: "We simply didn't cross the
Industrial Canal." Then Katrina expanded his horizons, just as the storm
brought many Americans face to face with the realities of race and class in
their country.
In "1 Dead in Attic," Times-Picayune columnist Chris Rose is similarly
self-reflective about the tragedy. This collection of essays, which were
published in the year after Katrina, commemorates the day-to-day struggle of
living in New Orleans after the storm: how to raise children without consistent
government services; how to remain rooted as one's community fractures; how to
survive behind decaying levees. The book includes happy tableaus - working
traffic lights, neighbors watering flowers, Dr. John's music - but fatalism
gradually erodes hope. The prose becomes angrier, dissonance builds to a
crescendo and at last Rose acknowledges his depression. He visits a therapist,
gets a prescription and, not without some bumps along the way, begins feeling
better. "1 Dead in Attic" should not be read in one sitting. The stories bleed
together, like impressionism viewed too closely. But consumed over time, in
smaller doses, these episodes become, if not a masterpiece, something stirring,
beautiful and very sad.
"Katrina brought many Americans face to face with the realities
of race and class in their country."
Billy Sothern, a New Orleans death-penalty activist, wanted to remain in the
city throughout Katrina. Sothern changed his mind only because of his wife's
better judgment and a marriage counselor who helped the couple "make the
right decisions in life." The couple's agonized decision to evacuate
before the storm hit sets up Down in New Orleans's recurring themes: the
ways money insulated the privileged from Katrina's hardships and the hold the
city maintains on its residents. The book is only half a memoir, rounded out by
Sothern's essays on social justice.
These chapters are invaluable for providing context to Katrina. Disaster
narratives typically are teleological, stories in which everything that comes
before the destruction is preamble to what now appears inevitable. By including
essays on the city's broken criminal justice system, local fights over the
minimum wage, the politics of race in neighboring parishes and the history of a
largely middle-class and overwhelmingly African-American community destroyed by
Katrina's flood, Sothern reminds readers that structural inequalities plagued
the city long before Katrina. In doing so, he suggests, if only implicitly,
that the storm was just another chapter in New Orleans's history. Tragic, to be
sure, but not necessarily the epilogue in a long story peppered with hardship.
At the same time, Katrina offered a lens through which Sothern examines
problems facing not just New Orleans but the entire nation: "The issues
that will define us to future generations - the consequences of conservative
governance, our continuing national struggle to confront issues of race and
poverty, environmental disregard, mass incarceration, immigration, and the 'war
on terror' - appeared in New Orleans as magnifications of the thousands of
instances in which these matters arise in daily American life."
"If nobody makes the effort
now, New Orleans may soon exist only in our collective memories."
(c) 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights
reserved.