The Other Gulf

[submitted to Folio Weekly as a backpage op-ed piece]

This wasn’t like the tsunami. These were Americans… and not just any Americans. Southerners. They spoke my tongue in my vernacular on streets that I have walked in and loved with complete surrender. This wasn’t like September 11th. We saw this coming. It was sick torture as the hurricane gained unprecedented strength, aimed squarely for the Big Easy. Then landfall. Then the blackout as the storm rolled over.

Lights on. It’s Monday afternoon and the storm chaser’s videos pour in, so do the stories. Gulfport is leveled. Biloxi casinos have moved inland. New Orleans took a battering, but the “worst-case scenario” we were talking about over the weekend didn’t happen. They eye had passed just west of Apocalypse. Another potential catastrophe averted

Monday evening we hear strange rumors that a levee broke and some water entering certain neighborhoods. Tuesday I have my high school classes talk to two amateur storm chaser friends of mine who went through the storm in Gulfport. The Worst Case never happened, so it’s fair game to portray hurricanes being as fun as they are dangerous. I share with them videos I took from inside the eyewall of Frances last year.

After that is some sick and slow blur of a self-inflected torture through my television. A wound opened and exposed to endless hours of cable news and obsessively checking the news online while at work. The images and sounds blur together into a single memory: the angry dreadlocked man at the convention center staring into the lens with his voodoo stare before leading the hungry and sweaty mob behind him into a coordinated cry for help; Coast Guard helicopters dropping rescue divers on roofs, tearing holes into them with axes before pulling people out; the front page papers showing a chemical slicked lake with rooftop Lilly-pads spread out in front of a crippled downtown island ahead; the grandmother quietly pushed into a corner of the Superdome with a blanket gently laid upon her decomposing body; behind her, another body; and above all, the underlying horror in the voices of those there. You could hear it in both the survivors and news anchors, you could hear it in Anderson Cooper as he choked up and attacked Senator Mary Landrieu for “patting politicians on the back” after he had watched rats eating a corpse all night because there was no means of disposing of Katrina’s victims.

You could hear it in the voice of a husband as he described his home splitting in half as the water came, then his wife slipping out of his hands as she told him to take care of the kids. “I don’t know what I’m going to do… I don’t have anywhere to go. I’m lost,” were his last words as the camera panned him walking off into the dismal abyss of Biloxi.

On Thursday the horror deepened as I heard in the voice of another CNN anchor asked Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael Brown about the deteriorating situation at the Convention Center. On air, he responded that “we learned about that [today], so I have directed that we have all available resources to get that convention center to make sure that they have the food and water and medical care that they need.” This was the same FEMA director that didn’t ask for military help until Tuesday evening. This is the same FEMA director whose pre-government career was in Arabian horse breeding. He somehow managed to get fired him from that job and hired into FEMA.

Horror turns to anger. We hear that National Guard troops were playing cards as New Orleans reverted to some sick Hobbesian nightmare. Upwards of half of New Orleans fire department and police department have not reported for duty. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, may he run for President one day, is on the television speaking the words right out of all of our minds, “Don’t tell me 40,000 troops are on the way! They’re not here! Get off your asses and do something and let’s fix the biggest goddamn crises in U.S. history!”

Insulated 3,000 feet above the carnage was the detached horror of our Commander and Chief as he asked his pilot to fly low so he could take a peek at the anarchy below. When he finally got back to D.C., his words of wisdom were to buy only as much gas as is needed. Though perhaps it’s to be understood he hasn’t had to fill his own tank in at least five years, perhaps an advisor should have informed him what $3 a gallon feels like to most America. Perhaps the full effect of the tripling of gas prices during his blood-soaked tenure isn’t quite clear to him yet. We’re not buying any more gas than is absolutely necessary.

Could Bush have tried harder to séance Nero as he strummed his guitar during a photo op in San Diego as the storm came ashore? Perhaps his round of golf Wednesday, closing out a five-week vacation, was an outdoor emergency cabinet meeting? Could his approval of the handling of the response be anymore disconnected from reality when he told the FEMA director, “"Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job," as he toured Biloxi.

As the skies clear and the waters recede, the focus is sharpening. Despite calls for restraint, it’s time for blame. We knew Saturday that this was a massive and growing storm that was heading towards the Mississippi Delta. On Sunday, I listened to an LSU professor tell the world that there was a 50/50 chance we’d be saying on Monday, “Dear God… we’ve lost a city.”

Despite the National Geographic articles and a clear disclaimer from the Corp of Engineers that the levees were only built to handle a Category 3 storm, we learn now from Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff that no plans existed to deal with the flooding. Despite Mayor Nagin’s mandatory evacuation because of flooding threats, Chertoff found the destruction "breathtaking in its surprise." None of this was surprising to any regular reader of current events.

The sheer incompetence of the relief effort will be the subject of intense national debate in coming months. Already I hear people blaming victims for staying town, ignorant of both the logistical impossibility of emptying a major city in two days and the lack of transportation available to those who were worse hit. The partisan lines are forming.

Republicans must answer for cutting funding for the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Program (SELA), which would have reinforced the levee system. The Corp of Engineers will have to answer for not pushing for long term solutions to the Mississippi River Delta, which will completely disappear by centuries end if the existing system isn't dramatically redrawn. FEMA and Pentagon must answer for not mobilizing days before the storm.

It’s time for heads to roll in Washington for all the dead bodies in 7th Ward attics. It’s time to start thinking the consequences of our decisions and think progressively about the long term problems that face our troubled nation. It’s time for an end to this goofy optimism that God will only bless America. Someone must answer for the horror.