Regards, Mike B)
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9/1/05: Yes, the world is going more than a little mad, or, more accurately, the madness is coming closer to home. Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast from New Orleans to Mobile, taking dead-center aim on Biloxi, with 145 mph winds and a 28 foot flood surge. A full day after Katrina passed through, her 200 mile-diameter rains gorging rivers and streams, swelling Lake Pontchartrain to the north, levees broke in New Orleans, one on either side of the city (east and west), and flooded a 250 square mile area that included downtown. It had been bad enough in New Orleans, no electricity or water, but suddenly, in the post-storm calm, the water crept onto the streets and rose at a slow but alarmingly steady rate. Soon the streets were under 5 feet of water, 15 feet in some areas. Hundreds of thousands are homeless. Looting is rampant. Desperate people are smashing store windows and carting off water and food. And clothes. And beer and liquor, of course. And teevees. And jewelry. And guns. Gangs are flexing their muscles, intimidating people, fighting among themselves, feeling out the territory while the cops stand around doing nothing. About 80% of the city's population fled before Katrina blew ashore. Most of the trapped survivors are poor and black. Some are camped out on the top of a freeway ramp with no food or water. Some of them have died. They're desperate and feel betrayed. (This is something new?!) Some are inside the Fucker Dome, the local monstrous monument to the cash cow of professional football, with little or no food or water. Some are trapped in their homes, on their roofs, rotting islands surrounded by the miasma of fetid, stinking, polluted, stagnant water adorned with drifting garbage, sewage, and corpses filling the streets. Farther east in Biloxi and Gulfport, the survivors are rural, fewer, mostly white, and not as poor. Fact is, it's the Riviera of the Gulf Coast, with million-dollar homes and beautiful beaches and parks and ports and trees. Or it was. The initial onshore tide surge flowed and dissipated, but the shrieking winds flattened everything. The landscape resembles Hiroshima after the bomb, blasted and barren with every tree, every structure blown to the ground, a litter of lumber, cars, boats, streetlights and signs laying about, piled up in a jack-straw, hodge-podge array of wind-induced geometric designs. In Gulfport, a 4-lane concrete bridge highway across the bay to the luxurious high-roller peninsula was blown apart. Ditto for the I-10 bridge/causeway crossing the NE corner of Lake Pontchartrain from downtown New Orleans to Slidell. In Biloxi, entire floating casinos were thrown ashore, one the size of a Navy small carrier lifted out of the water and deposited on top of the onshore Holiday Inn a fitting image to the power of capital to sometimes survive more or less intact. Although tens of thousands of well-meaning people sprang into action, none of the local, state, or federal governments have got a hand on any of this. It's the biggest natural disaster to ever hit the U.S. Ever! New Orleans is nearly a ghost town, the poor black survivors seething with despair and hatred befitting their role as post-apocalyptic victims left to fend for themselves, to fight over the few remaining resources, to carp about the government’s unwillingness to help them in their desperation. It's preposterous that they should be outraged by this scenario because the role of the abandoned, the ignored, the unwanted, has, even in “normal” conditions, ever been theirs in the scheme of things. What do they expect? A superhuman effort is underway to help them. But it’s too little too late, a hastily thrown-together reaction to a situation that everyone knew was coming but pretended wasn’t, one in which choices about who to sacrifice are now necessary. The existing infrastructure was so fragile it simply collapsed, and, since all its energy was focused on the day to day production and distribution of commodities in the service of profit, there was little to no provision for dealing with a disaster of this magnitude. The mayor of New Orleans thinks there are “thousands” of dead trapped in houses in the flooded neighborhoods. Their rotting cadavers will help exacerbate an already disastrous public health problem. But, for now, the race is on to rescue the thousands of living stranded there as well. It’s not that people don’t care about them; it’s that they don’t care about them very much, that they accept a class structure which creates these losers and forever relegates them to the lowest rung, the last in line. It'll probably be months before the water can be pumped from the city (the levees have yet to be repaired) and its more affluent citizens can even drift back to check the damage, years before things are put right, before anything close to normal rises from the wreck. Most of those left behind to suffer and die (many of whom, granted, react to their exploitation and structurally enforced ignorance with violent, stupid behavior, like over-eating junk, over-breeding, and lazing about in their squalor is this racist?) will simply be forever displaced. But that's ever been their lot. They'll have no homes to return to, to rebuild. Many of them were renters, or had no insurance. Whatever new building takes place will likely not include provisions for housing the New Orleans poor population whose very existence depended upon the aging dilapidated housing stock in poor old neighborhoods, a resource which will simply disappear when the demolition and rebuilding begins. What will happen to them? Where will they go? This unprecedented disaster has revealed the fragile, thin skin over the economic and civil structure of our society, where violent anarchy and chaos, abandonment and death, lurk just beneath the seemingly placid functioning surface, where our vulnerability cries out in the face of ecological and economic collapse.
****************************************************************** "...Leith had salvaged immediacy; had kept faith with the fugitive vow of every man in battle: If I get through this, the hours will be made to count." from THE GREAT FIRE, by Shirley Hazzard
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