A correspondent wrote to me, apparently misunderstanding something I'd written here, that he too wanted to hear no more about Hurricane Katrina. What I meant was that those of us who've done all we can (donations, mostly) cannot continuously think about it and nothing else. We have to — to use a phrase I've never liked — get on with our lives. But we also can't make like nothing happened down there. There's a lot to fix and in our own microscopic ways, we can and must apply some pressure to those who are in a position to fix it.
We had also better get used to hearing about the Gulf Coast devastation because there's a lot more bad news to come, starting with an ongoing body count that will probably be rising for many months. It wasn't long after the towers fell on 9/11 that the world had some sense that around 3,000 lives were lost. This tote's going to mount in continous and sickening increments for a long time as they find bodies in houses and drained communities, and as people who were ill or injured succumb. The Mayor of New Orleans is saying it may hit 10,000 and I'm not sure how he can possibly know that now…but no one's rising to claim he's way off.
And then we're going to have hearings about what went wrong. Actually, one assumes there will be hearings about what went wrong but we may first have to go through the hearings to determine whether we should have hearings about what went wrong. If we do, we're going to hear a lot of reports like this one, excerpted from an online account by NBC newsguy Brian Williams…
In a strange way, the most outrageous news pictures of this day may be those of progress: The palettes of food and water that have just been dropped at selected landing zones in the downtown area of New Orleans. It's an outrage because all of those elements existed before people died for lack of them: There was water, there was food, and there were choppers to drop both. Why no one was able to combine them in an air drop is a cruel and criminal mystery of this dark chapter in our recent history. The words "failure of imagination" come to mind. The concept of an air drop of supplies was one we apparently introduced to the director of FEMA during a live interview on Nightly News on Thursday evening. He responded by saying that he'd been unaware of the thousands gathered at the Convention Center. Later that evening an incredulous Ted Koppel on ABC was left with no choice but to ask if the FEMA director was watching the same television coverage as the rest of the nation.
In fact, read Williams's entire report. I'm sure there's a lot to disaster relief that the experts know and we don't. But even interrogating the so-called experts, Williams can't figure out why things weren't done that any of us could have thought of. (The "director of FEMA" he mentions is Michael Brown, the guy who was fired from running horse shows and then our government put him in charge of disaster preparations. I'm not sure if Mr. Brown is going to take all of the blame or none of it, but either option would be grossly unfair.)
The hearings may be more explosive than most because, I suspect, Americans are going to be madder at this than they have been about 9/11 or Iraq. The 9/11 deaths do not seem to have been preventable and there have been few assertions of human error or negligence by those "first-responders." Besides, many of the rescuers on 9/11 were victims themselves, and it all occurred before we realized we had to do more to prepare for such disasters. This hurricane is an indicator that a lot, maybe even most of that Homeland Security appropriation went for pork and the illusion of better preparation for disaster. You get the feeling we spent $30 billion just to have some rude people make us take our shoes off at the airport? Don't you wish we'd spent about 2% of that on the levees in Louisiana?
Meanwhile, the Iraq deaths are occurring out of sight, out of mind, and a lot of people think they're for a good cause. The hurricane deaths — which if that mayor's right, could top 9/11 and Iraq combined — were for no good purpose and it's going to be argued that a lot of them were preventable and due to negligence…and there are even a few class and race cards in that deck. Does anyone think they won't be played? What's more, it all happened right here in the U.S. of A., live on our TV screens, and was covered by reporters on the scene, many of whom were furious at what they witnessed. If someone tries to argue that everything that could have been done was done, it's going to be interesting to see how Brian Williams and Ted Koppel, to name but two, will report it.