...this seems like the wrong moment to dwell on fault-finding, or even to point out that it took what may become the worst natural disaster in American history to pry President Bush out of his vacation. All the focus now must be on rescuing the survivors. Beyond that lies a long and painful recovery, which must begin with a national vow to help all the storm victims and to save and repair New Orleans.
People who think of that graceful city and the rest of the Mississippi Delta as tourist destinations must have been reminded, watching the rescue operations, that the real residents of this area are in the main poor and black. The only resources most of them will have to fall back on will need to come from the federal government. (NYT)
In a society hooked on access to instant and overwhelming quantities of information, it was remarkable how much was unknown about the scope of the disaster wreaked by Katrina; the storm had simply destroyed much of the information network. More often than not, calls to southern Louisiana were answered by a polite recording saying that hurricane damage had rendered telephone service impossible. In most of the storm-socked area, there was no power to run computers, much less pumps to remove the water. The Times-Picayune, New Orleans's main newspaper, was doing a heroic job of covering the crisis until suddenly, at 9:40 yesterday morning, its entire staff had to evacuate the building to flee the rising waters coming through breached levees. On CNN, harried reporters told their anchors on camera that they didn't know much more than what they could see from the hotel rooftops on which they had taken refuge. (WaPo)
“one homosexual can pollute a government office” —U.S. Senate subcommittee report, 1950
3 comments:
I was almost floored by a rare moment of TV journalism honesty, courtesy of CNN's Jeanne Meserve- probably the unnamed CNN reporter on the rooftop, only able to report on what she could see with her own eyes. Meserve, her voice cracking, just pleaded with her studio anchor & her TV audience to understand that this was a matter of class (not her word, of course), that the people still in New Orleans were those financially unable to leave, who didn't own cars, who couldn't afford hotels - for whom escape wasn't financially possible.
I do need to pick a nit with the NYT's historical amnesia: utterly horrific as Katrina is, as devastating as the unfolding picture is, I might humbly remind the Times staff of the 1900 hurricane and tidal wave in Galveston that killed 6000-12,000 people -- a topic which I will lecture about in a week or two when we get to Progressivism.
I wrote the above this morning when the death toll "only" -- I use that "only" VERY advisedly -- looked like it'd be a few hundred, & more comparable to other disasters. But it's now looking like a comparison to Galveston is more apt than I could have imagined -- and the regional reach of this far exceeds any catastrophe I can think of in U.S. history. The comparison to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake also seems increasingly apt, in terms of the scope of urban destruction.
New Orleans is a great city. I hope it can fully recover.
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