The grim lessons of Katrina
Walter Ellis says that for many Americans New Orleans revealed the slimy underside of national life
New York
It is tempting when looking back on natural catastrophes to see them as symbols of the affected nation’s fatal departure from good sense or moral progress. Hubris is retrospectively invoked to justify the evident nemesis. The horrific events in New Orleans and surrounding territories are being picked apart, like entrails in aboriginal Africa, as though there might be a clue, even a message, that will explain how America has begun to fall apart.
In a bid to pre-empt at least some of Congress’s investigative zeal, the President announced on Monday that he would carry out his own inquiry into the catastrophe, but senators and congressmen refuse to be deterred and are to launch their own investigation. One thing that is certain is that no one will emerge from the audit with much credit; certainly not the state and municipal authorities, who have shown themselves to be whining incompetents. Much of the sniping at Bush has been infantile. Critics have depicted the President as uncaring, callous, even racist, which those who know him or have worked with him will recognise as risible. Far harder to rebut, however, will be the charge that he and his advisers failed to heed the central lesson of 11 September 2001: that danger can strike at any time from any quarter and the nation must be prepared. Plan B is all very well, but there has to be a Plan A.
Since 9/11 the administration has abandoned the tradition of deferring to local authorities in cases of disaster. Under the National Response Plan of 2004 the federal government pre-empts local and state government in its responsibility to act when there is ‘any natural or man-made incident, including terrorism, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the population, infrastructure, environment, economy, national morale, and/or government functions.’ Hurricane Katrina was the test of that doctrine, and by any reasonable reckoning the administration failed the test.
New Orleans is one of the poorest cities in the Union. Half the households have an income of less than $22,000; nearly 30 per cent of the population lives officially in poverty; and it has one of the worst violent crime rates in America. Nearly two thirds of the population are black, and most of those live in the areas worst affected by flooding. Katrina opened the floodgates not just to the waters that poured in, but to resentments that had built up over many years. Violent criminals, also black, were freed to operate without restraint. They robbed and raped with impunity. Some, out of a kind of madness, even took to firing on their rescuers, provoking a deadly response from the tardy National Guard. But for thousands of others, looting was less an opportu nity than a necessity. Shops and stores became open invitations to people who had struggled for years and now found themselves at the mercy of the elements, abandoned and forgotten by the authorities. This was Lord of the Flies on a metropolitan, even an operatic scale. For Americans outside the stricken area, it was as if the slimy underside of their national life and character had suddenly been exposed. They were embarrassed and ashamed by what happened in New Orleans.
But similar deprivation exists in Detroit and St Louis, as well as in large sections of New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Los Angeles. For nearly half of the people of the United States, these are hard times. The gap between the haves and have-nots has widened to almost Third World dimensions over the past 30 years. The rich and successful have flourished, but the middle classes are in trouble, saddled with debt and uncertainty (to say nothing of college fees), while many Hispanics barely scrape a living. Factories have been closing at an alarming rate, with much of the slack being taken up by China, whose power in the world America is only now beginning to appreciate. Unemployment in August stood at 5 per cent (10 per cent for blacks). Of the 132 million non-farm jobs, only 14.3 million were in manufacturing. Forty million Americans cannot afford health insurance, and the number is growing. In New York, health premiums rose by more than a quarter during the first half of the year, adding to the sense of crisis. Over the same period, for every two additional cents paid to low-paid workers, 50 cents extra went to top earners.
Positive discrimination may be on the way out, but for millions of black children the idea of going to college was always unreal. Their schools had prepared them for a lifetime of welfare dependency and petty crime, not study. White trailer trash fared little better. They weren’t even allowed to kick blacks around any more. And Hispanics? Well, they were the people who cut your grass, picked your oranges or delivered your groceries.
The flag was supposed to be what held these disparate groups together. Underneath, no matter what, everyone was an American. The terrorist attacks of 2001 appeared at first to reinforce the sense of shared citizenship. There was pride in adversity and a determination to take the fight to the enemy. But economic difficulties, high unemployment, a declining dollar and the cost of the war in Iraq began to eat away at the ties that bind.
While proclaiming itself the champion of freedom, ready to spread democracy throughout an often unwilling world, America turned in on itself, endlessly debating who and what it stood for. Equal under God Americans may have been, but equal in the sight of Washington apparently they were not. The poor made up the overwhelming majority of the armed forces, just as they were 90 per cent of those trapped in the Gulf State floods. No senator’s son wore uniform in Iraq.
It’s looking bad for Bush. Republicans such as Senator Chuck Hagel are calling for troops to be pulled out of Iraq. This week, referring to the handling of the New Orleans crisis, another Republican senator, Susan Collins, said bluntly, ‘Government at all levels failed.’ Announcing that the Senate governmental affairs committee would hold hearings, she added, ‘It is difficult to understand the lack of preparedness and the ineffective initial response to a disaster that had been predicted for years, and for which specific, dire warnings had been given for days.’ No one can say for sure what the longterm political fallout will be from the intertwining crises of Iraq and Katrina, but the President’s approval rating fell last month to a record low of 45 per cent, hit not only by the continuing quagmire in Iraq but by spiralling gas prices — and this was before Katrina struck. Although he will not be standing for re-election, Bush has more than three years of his remit left to run and must be seen to assist his party’s cause as it heads towards the increasingly uncertain mid-term congressional elections.
On the Democrat side, the assumption has to be that Bush’s danger is a liberal opportunity. It’s an ill wind that blows no good. But the record of the opposition party has been dismal in recent years. Even members of the Black Caucus, indignant that so many of the dead and bereaved in New Orleans are African–American, have so far been muted in their criticism. They appear to believe that nothing can be done until the Republican establishment runs out of steam and collapses of exhaustion and its own ineptitude.
Too many people in politics these days, just like many of those in industry and commerce, seem to be in business mainly on their own account. Shorn of the moral exigencies of the New Deal and the Great Society, the Democrats’ endorsement of tax cuts has reached the point where they have no idea how they would raise money to pay for their half-baked reforms of welfare, education and health provision. Liberalism has come to mean little more, in ideological terms, than tolerance of gays, acceptance (up to a point) of abortion and a more relaxed attitude towards religion and the death penalty. It has little to do with a new vision for America, still less the smack of firm government.
The American Right, meanwhile, is lost in denial. It denies that its invasion of Iraq was at best muddle-headed; it denies that poverty is stalking the nation and that the emergence of de facto apartheid (as in New Orleans) has resulted in the cultural Balkanisation of the Republic. Much of the denying is done by George Bush and his White House entourage, but there are echoes up and down the country. When I lived in rural Connecticut, I was struck by how little ordinary Americans knew about what was happening in the world. What they really cared about was gas prices, jobs and country music. How did they feel about
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