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September 1, 2005

poor, black and at the bottom of the river

or REMEMBER NEW ORLEANS!; or, bush killed the big easy; or....

Most of New Orleans is under water. 8067% black and 80% under water. NO has always been the moist, miscegenate city at the bottom of the well (Pierce Lewis' previously obscure formulation pairing "inevitable city" and "impossible site" has now been made ubiquitous by Katrina) and now the well has went and got filled, Lake Pontchartrain pouring in over the sides of two, one (maybe three) broke levees and doing a fairly straightforward, biblical-type number on the city. The impossible, 8067% black place at the bottom of the well is now being evacuated - all of it - being abandoned to water and to the putrefaction of corpses and to the chaotic ministrations of first the nation's pity ("OUR TUSUNAMI!") and then its judgment ("LOOTERS TAKE ADVANTAGE OF NEW ORLEANS MESS"). Overmatched NOPD are either depicted keystoning it out of looted big-box stores or quoted ominously/authoritatively about "meeting resistance" outside of WalMart. What few National Guardsmen that are still Stateside await call-up for unexpected local duty, no doubt experiencing a kind of ambivalent gratitude at having been diverted to the Big Easy while on the way to Fallujah or Mosul.

Drudge shifts effortlessly, blithely from one urban pacification to another. "BATTLE FOR NEW ORLEANS" screams his headline over a picture of an APC filled with SWAT.

Everyone of every race who is left in the city is now a black Ninth Warder. Stranded conventioneers in the Ritz Carlton call into CNN to describe the awfulness of their confinement. They report to Wolf Blitzer that the government is nowhere to be seen, leading inevitably to the question of where the government has been. Everyone is asking: Where is the National Guard? Answer: protecting Bush and Cheney's oil in Iraq.

Has a major American city ever been so abandoned before? Atlanta, "fairly won" and then razed by Sherman? Chicago and San Francisco, ravaged by fire and earthy? By "cities" and "abandoned" I mean not the red-tagged mansions stupidly clinging to mudslide and wildfire prone hillsides in Cali, nor do I mean northwest communes hunched paranoid in spitting distance of active volcanoes. I mean whole fucking cities with major league sports teams, dateline type-places that occupy unstable sections of the national imagination so vast that they can never be rebuilt once lost, only poured over with liquid elegy.

What we are witnessing is unprecedented, science-fictional. Potentially 10000 dead, the redistribution of hundreds of thousands of refugees across some of the poorest states in the Union, an enormous gaping hole in the culture, an eruption of Third World misery in our most Third World region. (Cholera? Diphtheria? Tent cities?) Will this national trauma, already tipping over into an awful but starkly illuminating chaos, re-order the world as radically as 9/11 did? Will we declare a global war on government mismanagement and under-preparedness? Will we seek out the spider-holes of the kleptocrats whose catastrophic priorities led to the diversion of millions of dollars from New Orleans' capital investment plans (i.e., shoring up levee's) to the war in Iraq and "homeland security?" Will "Remember New Orleans" become a rallying cry encapsulating the criminal culpability of the Bush Administration in leading this country down the road of fiscal collapse?

The right wing corporate media is already at work diverting our attention and outrage from the obvious. Watch and listen carefully as the right use racism to inoculate themselves against the implications of this disaster. Watch and listen as the focus shifts from human death tolls to crimes against property. Watch and listen as pundits and politicians who have ritually evoked 9/11 to justify every possibly outrage against civility and convention announce it's unfair and cynical to analyze how a government allocates funds, how it prepares for and then responds to threats to the safety of its citizenry. Watch and listen as the talking heads on Fox dismissively refuse to asses this Administration's stewardship of the common good, suggesting smugly that the poor black folks who couldn't get out of harm's way last week either got what they deserved on the front end by not owning cars, or on the back end by being living in the same city as the inevitable handful of looters. Watch and listen as some explain in the most banal tones possible that New Orleans deserved to die, that it was built in the wrong place and that everyone knew it and that acts of cowardlice like leaving the poorest of the poor to fend for themselves are actually a sign of strong leadership.

I get a headache every time I think about this, I shake a little bit with frustration and rage. The destruction of New Orleans and the divisive racial shadow play that is sure to follow is an object lesson on a par with 9/11, the chaos of Iraq and New Orleans illustrating the enormity of the stakes in our disagreement with the current Administration and its supporters. In the last five years we have accepted electoral fraud, the falsification of evidence in support of an illegal war, the catastrophically incompetent management of post-Saddam Iraq, the steady ratcheting-up of global insecurity, the historic transfer of American wealth to the petrochemical combines, the elevation of religiously derived quack-science to national debate, the erosion of civil liberties, and the vast, near imperial expansion of the powers of the executive branch. Now we can add to the list the preventable deaths of potentially tens of thousands of vulnerable citizens and the loss of an entire American city. How much more are we going to take?

Posted by ebogjonson in new orleans, on September 1, 2005 2:45 PM