Wash us away
By Steven
MAPLEWOOD, NJ -- Where’s the little fat man?
In the song “Louisiana,” detailing the flood of 1927, Randy Newman
sang about President Coolidge’s little fat man coming to Louisiana with a notepad in his hand, saying “ain’t it a shame, ain’t it a shame.”
New Orleans and the Gulf Coast are dying, and they’re still waiting for the little fat man.
I lived in New Orleans from 1980 to 1992, working in various editorial positions at The Times-Picayune. The city is a second home to me. I’ve got friends all over the Gulf Coast. Pass Christian, Gulfport, Mobile, Biloxi, these aren’t just names on a map, they’re beaches, seafood restaurants, summer afternoons and fond memories.
I don’t understand how the government response to the disaster could have been so inadequate. It was immediately apparent that the damage was on such an epic scale that no local agency could deal with it.
I’m foolish, I guess. I kept waiting for the Corps of Engineers to send in bridging units, to send in water purification units. I was looking for National Guard and MP units to bolster the pitifully small (and underpaid and undertrained) New Orleans Police Department. I was looking, I guess, for the airlift that bailed out Berlin. Mr. Bush sent in the Keystone Kops.
I was appalled to see that the levee breach was not immediately addressed. While the rest of us thought the problem was being fixed, the Corps dithered. I can understand being concerned about the long-term effect of a repair, but when the patient is dying, you keep him alive and worry about tomorrow’s problems tomorrow.
What I’ve seen so far is politicians and TV’s talking heads carrying on just as if Bill Clinton had just gotten
caught with his pants down again. Who cares what they say. Send food, send water, send medicine.
This storm itself wasn’t a surprise. Before it hit Florida, forecasters said it would cross into the Gulf, hit the warmer water and gather strength.
That New Orleans was going to get creamed wasn’t a surprise. The Times-Picayune’s excellent series “Washing Away” (available online at
www.nola.com) outlined the magnitude three years ago, and reiterated information that was repeated every hurricane season I lived in town. About the only thing that changed each year was the number of dead we could expect.
If this is the response from the government President Bush reinvented in his own image after 9/11, we might as well surrender now.
Asking New Orleanians to evacuate is a joke. The bartender at Igor’s used to laugh that the last time they closed was Hurricane Betsy, and then only because a health inspector “paddled a pirogue in and told us we had to.” Most Orleanians I know don’t own cars. They occasionally rent one, but usually take cabs, planes or the bus, depending on the destination. Well, cabbies had their own families, trains and buses are almost nonexistent, and the airlines stranded people who already had confirmed tickets. They certainly weren’t going to endanger their planes for the unwashed masses.
And there are unwashed masses. Despite its image as a carefree city, many of its inhabitants live in abject poverty. Some of this dates to the excesses of Reconstruction and its aftermath, some to the Jim Crow laws of the past century.
I blame it on the noble middle class that panicked when they were told their nice white children would have to sit next to blacks in schools. Many whites fled upriver to Jefferson Parish or downriver to St. Bernard, where schools were segregated not by race (that’s illegal, remember) but by sex. All the males would be in one set of schools, all the females in another, protecting the decency of Southern Christian White Womanhood.
The whites that stayed had more money and created their own option. Around 1985, while editing the Sunday news pages, I realized that I had been seeing a lot of announcements for 25th anniversary celebrations for schools. The fancy Episcopal Church next to me had one, the school around the corner another, the church up on St. Charles another, and on and on and on.
Somewhere during my stay in New Orleans, I had decided to reread all the books of my favorite authors (remember to pick up Mosquitoes and Pylon by Faulkner, two wonderful but often overlooked novels). I would pick an author and read all of his (or her) books in the order they had been written, watching the changes in style. One afternoon I was looking at yet another 25th anniversary announcement when the light in my head finally went off. Subtract 25 from the current year equals Steinbeck’s “Travels with Charley.” The Mothers. Ruby Bridges.
All those holier-than-thou folks had created their own schools and left the blacks to flounder.
No whites in the school, no reason to pay taxes to support the schools. No taxes, no education. No education, no hope. No hope and you get a breakdown in social order, as those pompadoured puffs on TV put it.
The schools were a good place to get money though. The Picayune did story after story on the fees paid to float the bonds to finance – and refinance – school bonds. Louisiana politicians and Wall Street financiers were lining their pockets with bond fees, refinancing bonds so many times that the schools they built would be decrepit and abandoned years before the bonds and their interest would be paid off.
But you don’t see those crimes. You see the flashy ones on TV. This crime isn’t particularly new, it had just been confined to the poor areas outside public sight. The police force kept it away from the tourists and under loose control (don’t ask how, you don’t want to know). But with the federal government abandoning New Orleans, with civilization casting them the rest of the way out, many are telling civilization to buzz off.
I give high marks to Mayor Nagin and Governor Blanco. They knew they didn’t have the resources to protect New Orleans before nor provide for survivors after a major hurricane. They begged the people to leave. They said all along they couldn’t help them if they stayed.
But if you don’t have a car, or can’t afford the gas, or have an extended family to consider, leaving isn’t an option. One woman said it cost her extended family $1,200 to evacuate for Dennis. That may not be much money for you, but it most assuredly is for most residents of New Orleans. Get told three or four times a year that you have to evacuate and the costs quickly surpass what most New Orleanians could afford. The state and the feds couldn’t – or wouldn’t – provide shelters, and I have little faith that the faith-based charities Mr. Bush prefers would do it for long.
Though the city flooded a number of times while I lived there (my insurance company can provide the exact dates), we never got hit with a big one. Hurricane Juan was a Category 1, or maybe a tropical storm, and it sat offshore dumping rain and overwhelming the pumping stations, as did others with and without names.
When I see the talking heads berating New Orleanians for not leaving, when guys in thousand dollar suits are berating starving people for a lack of manners, when I see a vapid president tell people without food, water, medicine to hang in there (how are they going to get
his message when there’s no electricity
for those looted TVs, channel it from a higher power?), I remember those days when my car was flooded, when friends woke up to find their beds floating, when I would go to work, riding my bicycle through hip-deep water, assuming the levees would hold and waiting for the pumps to catch up. Sometimes my wife would evacuate, but then the hurricane would hit the place she went to, so we quit worrying about it.
Would I have left for Katrina? Well, I’ve got kids now, and a
car that works. If I were still in New Orleans, I’d have a real job that would require my presence. I’d send the family, but I’d stay.
I never thought that the federal response would be so tepid, that five days later the rescue effort would be just ramping up, that civilians in airboats and flatboats and fishing craft would be doing the major rescue work. (My first boss at The Picayune was in the Navy Reserve, a local unit of brown-water boats perfect for the new Lake Orleans. Where are they these days?)
I’d be worried about my wife, worried about the next edition and by now, I’d be looking around for the little fat man.
It’s entirely possible that FEMA really had a plan and really was prepared. Last year, as a hurricane neared New Orleans, the Picayune’s hurricane beat reporter told me that FEMA had ordered up 30,000 body bags. When I exchanged instant messages Sunday evening with the reporter, he said FEMA had prepositioned 40,000 body bags this time around.
Great planning. Now send some real help, and send it fast.
Sept. 2, 2005
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Thank you,
Steven
