Seeker Blog

In fairness, one has to grant that Bush did poorly in the first test of symbolic leadership: the need to appear before the public quickly and decisively and reassuringly. But none of the other accusations was deserved, and in sum they amount to one of the most breathtaking bum raps in memory.

The new Commentary has a great analysis of Katrina - what really happened, for those interested in the blame-game - where the blame should be apportioned, and thoughts on a sane approach to rebuilding of N.O. This is not written by an “anchor” in Manhattan, but by Prof. Wilfred McClay, formerly of Tulane University (N.O.) 1987 - 1999, and now at the University of Tennessee.

To begin with, it is now clear that, as calamitous as were the hurricane’s effects, things could have been a great deal worse. It might seem both bizarre and callous to contend that New Orleans got off easy from Katrina, but there is a measure of truth in it. Katrina turned out not to be the apocalyptic “big one” that has always haunted the New Orleans imagination—“not even close,” according to Hassan Mashriqui of the Hurricane Center at Louisiana State University. Nor is Mashriqui alone in arguing that human factors, beyond and apart from the sheer power of the storm, were what turned “a problem into a catastrophe.”

. . .

There is a case to be made for that rebuilding, as for New Orleans in general. There is a case for the city’s economic importance as a key American port. And there is a historical and cultural case for preserving so unique an American city; indeed, declining to do so could be seen as an admission of national failure. But any effort commanding widespread support will have to proceed on the basis of sober and disinterested realism, with complete honesty about the risks, and costs, and tradeoffs involved.

And there’s the rub: in the fractious atmosphere of contemporary American public discourse, sober and disinterested realism seems well on the way to becoming extinct. In particular, our understanding of what happened with Katrina has been so tainted and distorted by sensationalism, emotional oversimplification, and ideological opportunism that it may require a miracle for Americans to think through clearly what needs to be done.

Perhaps the foremost culprit in this regard are the mainstream mass media. If one had no evidence beyond the wild journalistic coverage of events as they were unfolding, one would have thought that the fury and carnage of Hurricane Katrina, and the widespread suffering in its aftermath, rather than representing what used to be called an “act of God,” could be blamed entirely on the crimes of commission and omission perpetrated by political leaders, and chiefly President George W. Bush.

. . .

In the campaign to score political points, an impressive litany of charges was assembled in record time. The severity of the storm itself was said to have been caused by global warming, which Bush had notoriously refused to address, and by the erosion of the southern Louisiana wetlands, alleged to have been caused principally by the rapaciousness of his fat-cat developer friends. The breaks in the levees were the result of inadequate funding from the Bush administration, including a cut in the most recent budget for the Army Corps of Engineers. The violence in the streets, the grim living conditions at the last-resort shelters in the Superdome and Convention Center, and the plight of unrescued citizens waving desperately from the rooftops of their submerged homes in the Ninth Ward and St. Bernard Parish—all these were attributed to the tardy and inadequate federal response to the storm, stemming from the fact that needed National Guard troops had been deployed in Iraq (another Bush crime) and from incompetent management of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) by a Bush crony, not to mention FEMA’s having been placed under the Department of Homeland Security, an indication of the administration’s overemphasis upon terrorism to the exclusion of natural-disaster relief. Worst of all, Bush was caught lollygagging on vacation at his ranch in Texas and was unconscionably late to respond to the crisis publicly.

And so on. Everywhere they looked, the media found George Bush’s fingerprints all over Katrina.

In fairness, one has to grant that Bush did poorly in the first test of symbolic leadership: the need to appear before the public quickly and decisively and reassuringly. But none of the other accusations was deserved, and in sum they amount to one of the most breathtaking bum raps in memory.

. . .

If villains are to be sought, then, they have to be sought among officials like Kathleen Blanco, the hapless Louisiana governor who was late in ordering an evacuation, late in requesting federal troops, and late in getting the Louisiana National Guard onto the street, who declined to permit President Bush to federalize rescue and relief efforts, and whose own Louisiana Department of Homeland Security inexplicably barred the Red Cross from bringing water, food, and health supplies to the stricken New Orleanians camped out on bridge overpasses and in the two megashelters. Or Ray Nagin, the mayor of New Orleans, who also waited too long to evacuate and failed to implement the city’s own evacuation plan—which, as officials knew, was the only real defense the city had against catastrophic storms—allowing hundreds of municipal school buses under his direct control to sit idly in a parking lot.

. . .

Thus did the news media, and in particular the hotdogs of television, make themselves not merely a nuisance but an important contributing factor to the very problem they were reporting on. Not, of course, that they saw it that way. The coverage of Katrina was “one of television news’s finest moments,” crowed CBS ex-anchorman Dan Rather, a past master of hotdoggery, adding that “covering hurricanes is something I know something about.”

Rather thrilled to the sight of reporters like Cooper who “were willing to speak truth to power.” But in light of the astonishing level of inaccuracy in what was reported, one would have to say instead that this was one of television news’s worst moments, an exceptionally shameful performance made all the more so by the self-congratulation that accompanied and followed it.

In what is becoming a routine of news reporting, some web-based bloggers and blogsites were quick to expose the falsity and bias that pervaded much of the work of the mainstream media, to be followed in due course by print media like the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and New Orleans Times-Picayune, which eventually detailed the extent of the journalistic errors made. But the damage had been done. Although Bush’s strong speech to the nation from a deserted Jackson Square on the night of September 15 did much to reverse the perception of him, and won him high marks even from evacuees living in the Houston Astrodome, the instant litany of charges and complaints was successful in giving decisive shape to public understanding of the event.

. . .

Consider, for example, the issue of whether or not the “new” New Orleans should include a reconstructed Lower Ninth Ward, or whether the area should be allowed to revert to swampland. This may be the single most difficult of the many decisions facing those beginning to think about the shape of the post-Katrina city.

For the foreseeable future, all signs point to a much smaller New Orleans, stabilizing at perhaps half its pre-Katrina population. As many as 250,000 houses are unlivable at present, and many of the city’s former inhabitants have emphatically declared their unwillingness to return. The largely black and poor Lower Ninth Ward was especially hard hit, as it often has been in the past, and there is literally almost no structure left in it worth preserving.

Hence the starkness of the choice—either demolish the entire neighborhood and rebuild on a massive scale, or demolish it for the purpose of letting it return to the elements. The difficulty in deciding the case is not scientific or logistical. Craig E. Colten, a geographer at Louisiana State University, told the Washington Post flatly that the oft-flooded area “should not be put back in the real-estate market”; even if the former residents regarded such a decision as an insult to them, it would, he asserted, “be a far bigger insult to put them back in harm’s way.”

But detached and humane rationality of this kind will do nothing to contain the potentially explosive political reaction to any such decision, or the immense political price to be paid for abandoning a poor and black neighborhood as a place unworthy of preservation—particularly if, as seems all but certain, the Lakeview section and other predominantly white parts of the city are rebuilt. Action of this kind will surely lend credibility to the malicious charge, already voiced by the ever-alert Jesse Jackson, that the Katrina aftermath is being used as a way of “whitening” the population of New Orleans and thus changing Louisiana’s “political order.” In the face of such hardening dogmas, it is small wonder that Mayor Nagin has so far been noncommittal about the area’s future.

Definitely, read the whole thing.