JIM GERAGHTY - NATIONAL REVIEW
Anne Rice blames America, not local officials: "To my
country I want to say this: During this crisis you failed us.
You looked down on us; you dismissed our victims; you dismissed
us. You want our Jazz Fest, you want our Mardi Gras, you want
our cooking and our music. Then when you saw us in real trouble,
when you saw a tiny minority preying on the weak among us, you
called us "Sin City," and turned your backs."
- novelist and New Orleans resident Anne Rice
Let me get this straight. Ms. Rice, you live in (what was) a
very attractive city which lies below sea level. On one side
you have a giant lake; on the other side you have the Gulf of
Mexico. Running through the middle is the Mississippi River.
All of which are above you. Preventing those giant bodies of
water from flooding and drowning you are levees. These levees
are described as "century-old." People have been warning
about the devastating effects of a direct hit from a hurricane
for decades.
I've heard a great deal of complaint in recent days that the
federal government may not have allocated enough money to speed
up the upgrades to those levees. This does, however, raise the
question of why city and state residents were waiting around
for the federal government to send enough money to upgrade this,
instead of paying for it themselves. I mean, it was only your
homes, businesses, and lives at stake. Perhaps these upgrades
would have been expensive. If only this city had some sort of
events to attract tourists, from which to collect taxes.
Anyway, your state and local officials decided to spend your
tax dollars on something else that they (and presumably you)
found more important, and then they waited for the rest of the
country to pay for these life-preserving necessities. Your beloved
city and region has a colorful political history, in which there
is, oh, a wee bit of corruption. I'm from New Jersey, so I can't
throw stones at that glass house. But you guys have managed
to pick leaders who give you the worst of both worlds - they're
scandal ridden and incompetent in a crisis.
Look, Rudy Giuliani might have run around with Judith Nathan
before his divorce, but he was a hell of a leader in our darkest
hours. You know the National Review
crowd isn't a fan of Pataki, but the man was a rock after 9/11
compared to Governor Weepy I'll-Evacuate-Eventually and Mayor
It's-Everybody's-Fault-Except-Mine. Nobody's throwing around
the adjective "Churchillian" about any of your officials
these days. We didn't pick your local officials; you guys did.
Rice asks, "how many times did Gov. Kathleen Blanco have
to say that the situation was desperate? How many times did
Mayor Ray Nagin have to call for aid?"
Ahem. What about those buses left unused, less than a mile from
the Superdome? JunkYardBlog notes that it's written in the Southeast
Louisiana Evacuation Plan that buses are supposed to be used
for evacuation of those who don't have personal vehicles. As
JYB observes, "there is something very peculiar about a
city and a state that have a plan on the books for years that
outlines what to do when a hurricane is about to strike, yet
when a hurricane comes roaring in, the responsible officials
just chuck the plan and try winging it. Delaying and then winging
it in the face of a monstrous Cat 4/5 hurricane is never, ever
a good idea, especially for New Orleans." (See more here.)
Ironically, Nagin told CNN, "I need buses, man," when
he had plenty sitting around unused before the storm hit. Now
they're flooded and useless. But it's not like state and local
officials could have seen this coming. They have never had a
hurricane bearing down on them
before and. oh, wait, there was Hurricane Ivan just last year.
And after that dodged bullet, Blanco and Nagin both acknowledged
they needed a better evacuation plan.
I would note that we've seen some pretty intense disasters
in other parts of the country, like planes crashing into skyscrapers
and subsequently collapsing, earthquakes, tornadoes, blizzards,
and yet somehow, none of these disasters had the total breakdown
of law and order, civil society, etc. Jonah Goldberg's early
joke about a Mad-Max style post-apocalyptic tribal anarchy may
have been in poor taste, but it has turned out to be nightmarishly
prescient.
We failed you? No, oh brilliant creator of Exit to Eden, you
failed. You might not think of it this way, but: Your leaders
failed to upgrade the levees. You elected a bunch of weepers
and blame-shifters who lost their head in a crisis. Over the
past decades, your elected officials have let a criminal element
incubate and grow until they ruled the streets, instead of the
forces of law and order. In pop culture, a New Orleans thief
is always a charming rogue with a devilish smile. In reality,
they're a bunch of thugs.
If the number of residents who are looting thugs were such
a "tiny minority," we wouldn't have seen this widespread,
relentless anarchy. Madam, a noticeable number of your neighbors
saw this disaster as an opportunity to smash a window and run
away with a television, an act that reveals much about the inadequacies
of the local school system, since that thief won't be enjoying
that television with any electricity anytime soon.
I would also note that this is one hell of a police force your
local officials hired and that you and your neighbors tolerated.
50 percent turned in their badges during the crisis and quit.
Your police superintendent is conceding that some cops were
looting. Just want to refresh your memory - four years ago,
New York and
Washington, planes falling out of the sky, thousands dead, no
idea what the hell is coming next. and the cops, among others,
showed up to work.
To save you guys now, I - and a lot of other Americans - will
pitch in. We are witnessing the biggest mobilization of civilian
and military rescue and relief crews in history. But I have
a sneaking suspicion you're going to want the rest of us to
pay for the rebuilding of your city. (In the near future, we're
going to have to have a little chat about the wisdom of building
below sea level, directly next to large bodies of water.)
And if you're going to come to the rest of us hat in hand,
demanding the rest of us clean up after your poor judgment,
I'd appreciate a little less "you failed us" and a
little more "we've learned our lesson."
