The perfect storm and the feral
city By Tom Engelhardt
The headline read, "Direct hit in New
Orleans could mean a modern Atlantis"; the first
paragraph of the story read, "More than 1.2
million people in metropolitan New Orleans were
warned to get out Tuesday as [the] 140-mph
hurricane churned toward the Gulf Coast,
threatening to submerge this below-sea-level city
in what could be the most disastrous storm to hit
in nearly 40 years." That was USA Today and the
only catch was - the piece had been written
September 14, 2004 as Hurricane Ivan seemed to be
barreling toward New Orleans.
I commented
at the time, "When ‘Ivan the Terrible' threatened
New Orleans, correspondents there had a field day
discussing whether the city might literally
disappear beneath the waves - this was referred to
as the 'Atlantis scenario.'" I was then trying to
point out
that
we might indeed be entering a new, globally warmed
world of Xtreme weather and no connections
whatsoever were being made in the media. At the
time, global warming, if discussed at all, was a
captive of the far north (melting glaciers,
unnerved Inuit, robins making miraculous
appearances in Alaska), and "Atlantis scenarios"
were the property of distant islands like the
atolls that make up the tiny South Pacific nation
of Tuvalu, threatened with abandonment due to
rising ocean waters and ever fiercer, ever
less-seasonal storms And yet just short of a year
ago, not only was it well known that New Orleans'
levees weren't fit for a class 5 hurricane or that
the Bush administration was slashing the budget of
the Army Corps of Engineers, but the "Atlantis
scenario" was already somewhere on the collective
mind. Now, it has been upon us for almost a week.
Much of New Orleans became the Atlantis
from hell, a toxic sludge pool of a looted former
city, filled with dead bodies and fires in places.
The city is threatened with diseases such as
cholera and typhus that haven't visited the Big
Easy since early in the last century, and with
thousands upon thousands of the black poor and a
few of the stranded better-to-do such as doctors,
nurses and a few local officials left for days on
end with next to no way out. It was, in short, the
feral city that 30 years of science fiction films
(and post-apocalyptic novels) have delivered to
the American public as entertainment as well as
prophesy. (Think, Escape from New York).
Now, try this passage: "The evacuation of
New Orleans in the face of [the] hurricane ...
looked sinisterly like Strom Thurmond's version of
the Rapture. Affluent white people fled the Big
Easy in their SUVs, while the old and car-less -
mainly Black - were left behind in their
below-sea-level shotgun shacks and aging tenements
to face the watery wrath." Admittedly a vivid
description, but certainly commonplace enough at
the moment - except that it, too, was written back
in September 2004 by Mike Davis, also for
Tomdispatch, and prophetically labeled, "Poor,
Black, and Left Behind". It too concerned not
Katrina's but Ivan's approach to New Orleans. So
there we are. It was possible to know then the
fundaments of just about everything that's
happened now - and not just from Tomdispatch
either.
In the last week, we've seen many
of the black poor of New Orleans not only left
behind in a new Atlantis, but thousands upon
thousands of them - those who didn't die in their
wheelchairs or on highway overpasses or in the
ill-fated convention center or unattended and
forgotten in their homes - sent off on what looked
very much like a new trail of tears. Right now,
above all, New Orleans and the Mississippi coast,
as so many reporters have observed with shock, are
simply the Bangladesh of North America (after a
disastrous set of monsoons), or (without the
resources) a Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of the
Congo). Soon, if Speaker of the House Dennis
Hastert has anything to do with it, the city may
simply be consigned to the slagheap of history or
a lot of it, as he so delicately put it to a
suburban weekly in Illinois (where a few farmers
who need the crucial deep water port of New
Orleans to send their upcoming crops onto the
global market may take umbrage), perhaps
"bulldozed" (although he later retracted his
comments). Someday, Katrina may be seen as the
"perfect storm", the harbinger of a future for
which we remain far more adamantly, obdurately
unwilling to prepare than even the Bush
administration was for this localized "Atlantis
scenario".
Iraq in America: parallels
and connections New Orleans is not the
only toxic sludge pool in sight. Let's not forget
the toxic sludge pool of Bush administration
policy, which came so clearly into view as Katrina
ripped the scrim off our society, revealing an
Iraqi-style reality here at home. Unlike conquered
and occupied Iraq, the stripmining of this country
in recent years has taken place largely out of
sight. While Baghdad was turned into some kind of
dead zone of insecurity, lack of electricity, lack
of gas, lack of jobs, lack of just about
everything a human being in a modern city has come
to expect, American cities - until last week -
stood seemingly untouched in what was still
proudly called "the world's last superpower". But
just out of sight, the coring, gutting and
dismantling of the civilian governmental support
system of the United States, that famed "safety
net", was well underway. Bush administration
proponents and conservative ideologues had long
talked about "starving the beast"; but, until
Katrina hit, it remained for many Americans at
best a kind of political figure of speech.
Now we know for real. The beast has been
starved; or rather, the beasts have been fed and
the much-maligned part of the state that protected
its citizens with something other than guns has
been starved. What Katrina's course through
Mississippi and Louisiana revealed was the real
meaning of starvation. It seems we no longer have
the capacity for a full-scale civilian response to
a major disaster. The Federal Emergency Management
Agency (FEMA), absorbed into the Department of
Homeland Security and led by an incompetent who
had been fired from his previous job as head of
the International Arabian Horse Association, has
had "its ties to state emergency programs …
weakened, and … has reduced spending on disaster
preparation".
In the same way, we now know
that the Army Corps of Engineers was financially
reined in on crucial levee work in New Orleans.
Much of this sort of thing was done under the
guise of preparing for, or fighting, or funding
the "war on terror" at home and abroad. Many
pundits, for instance, have remarked on the
obvious fact - which had previously worried the
governors of many states - that significant chunks
of the National Guard and, just as important for
disaster relief, its heavy equipment are to be
found in Iraq, not here to be called upon in an
emergency. (And when the avian flu, or the next
health disaster, suddenly hits our country,
consider it a guarantee - the media will again be
filled with the same sort of shock about the
civilian response to the crisis, because our
public health system has also been gutted and
de-funded under the guise of the "war on
terrorism".)
Over the last years, just
about everything of a helping nature that is
governmental, other than the military, has begun
to be starved or stripped by the looters of this
administration - set loose in Washington rather
than Baghdad or New Orleans. If you want a signal
of this, we should all be wincing every time the
president gets up, as he did the other day in the
presence of his father and Bill Clinton, and
shakes the tin cup, urging "the private sector"
and generous citizens to fill in - an
impossibility - for what his administration won't
pony up.
The Bush people undoubtedly
thought that they would be able to slip out of
town in 2008 without paying the price. But when
Katrina roared onto the vulnerable coasts of
Mississippi and Louisiana, it swept all of the
Bush administration's devastating policies -
environmental, fiscal, energy and military, as
well as its plans for the unraveling of the
civilian infrastructure - into a perfect storm of
policy catastrophe that, ironically, may threaten
the administration itself. By the time motorists
in non-disaster states return from a Labor Day
with $3-4 a gallon (or more) gas (and possibly
long lines) to an ongoing catastrophe that will
take months, if not our lifetime, to fully unfold,
it's possible that the levees of the president's
base of support - that 40% that still approved of
his administration in the latest Gallup Poll,
conducted the week before Katrina hit - will have
been breached for the first time.
Think of
our last two years in Iraq, which has left the
world's most powerful military running on baling
wire and duct tape, as a kind of coming
attractions for Katrina. In fact, so many bizarre
connections or parallels are suggested by the Bush
administration's war in Iraq as to stagger the
imagination. Here are just six of the parallels
that immediately came to my mind:
1
Revelations of unexpected superpower
helplessness: A single catastrophic war
against a modest-sized, not particularly
dramatically armed minority insurgency in one oil
land has brought the planet's mightiest military
to a complete, grinding, disastrous halt and sent
its wheels flying off in all directions. A single
not-exactly-unexpected hurricane leveling a major
American city and the coastlines of two states,
has brought the emergency infrastructure of the
world's mightiest power to a complete, grinding,
disastrous halt and sent its wheels flying off in
all directions.
2 Planning ignored:
It's now notorious that the State Department did
copious planning for a post-invasion, occupied
Iraq, all of which was ignored by the Pentagon and
Bush administration neocons when the country was
taken. In New Orleans, it's already practically
notorious that endless planning, disaster
war-gaming, and the like were done for how to deal
with a future "Atlantis scenario", none of which
was attended to as Katrina bore down on the
southeastern coast.
3 Lack of boots on
the ground: It's no less notorious that, from
the moment before the invasion of Iraq when
General Eric Shinseki told a congressional
committee that "several hundred thousand troops"
would minimally be needed to successfully occupy
Iraq and was more or less laughed out of
Washington, Donald Rumsfeld's new, lean, mean
military has desperately lacked boots on the
ground (hence those Louisiana and Mississippi
National Guards off in Iraq). Significant numbers
of National Guard only made it to New Orleans on
the fifth and sixth days after Katrina struck and
regular military boots-on-the-ground have been few
and far between. No Pentagon help was
pre-positioned for Katrina and, typically enough,
the Navy hospital ship Comfort, scheduled to help,
had not left Baltimore harbor by Friday morning
for its many day voyage to the Gulf.
4
Looting: The inability (or unwillingness)
to deploy occupying American troops to stem a wave
of looting that left the complete administrative,
security, and even cultural infrastructure of
Baghdad destroyed is now nearly legendary, as is
Donald Rumsfeld's response to the looting at the
time. ("Freedom's untidy, and free people are free
to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad
things. They're also free to live their lives and
do wonderful things. And that's what's going to
happen here." To which he added, on the issue of
the wholesale looting of Baghdad, "Stuff
happens.") In New Orleans, the president never
declared martial law while, for days, gangs of
armed looters along with desperate individuals
abandoned and in need of food and supplies of all
kinds, roamed the city uncontested as buildings
began to burn.
What, facing this crisis,
did the Bush administration actually do? The two
early, symbolic actions it took were typical.
Neither would have a significant effect on the
immediate situation at hand, but both forwarded
long-term administration agendas that had little
to do with Katrina or the crisis in the
southeastern United States: First, the
Environmental Protection Agency announced that it
was relaxing pollution standards on gasoline
blends in order to counteract the energy crisis
Katrina had immediately put on the table. This
was, of course, but a small further step in the
gutting of general environmental, clean air and
pollution laws that strike hard at another kind of
safety net - the one protecting our planet. And
second, its officials began to organize a major
operation out of Northcom, Joint Task Force
Katrina, to act as the military's on-scene command
in "support" of an enfeebled FEMA. The US Northern
Command was set up by the Bush administration in
2002 and ever since has been prepared to take on
ever larger, previously civilian tasks on our home
continent. (As the Northcom site quotes the
president as saying, "There is an overriding and
urgent mission here in America today, and that's
to protect our homeland. We have been called into
action, and we've got to act.")
There were
to be swift boats in the Gulf and Green Berets at
the New Orleans airport, and yet Donald Rumsfeld's
new, stripped-down, high-tech military either
couldn't (or wouldn't) deploy any faster to New
Orleans than it did to Baghdad, perhaps because it
had already been so badly torn up and stressed out
in Iraq (and had left most of its local "first
responders" there).
5
Nation-building: As practically nobody
remembers, George Bush in his first run for the
presidency humbly eschewed the very idea of
"nation-building" abroad. That was only until he
sent the Pentagon blasting into Iraq. Over two
years and endless billions of dollars later - the
Iraq War now being, on a monthly basis, more
expensive than Vietnam - the evidence of the
administration's nation-building success in its
"reconstruction" of Iraq is at hand for all to
see. That country is now a catastrophe beyond
imagining without repair in sight. (For Baghdad,
think New Orleans without water, but with a
full-scale insurgency.) So as the Pentagon ramps
up in its ponderous manner to launch a campaign in
the United States and as the Marines finally land
in the streets of New Orleans, don't hold your
breath about either the Pentagon's or the
administration's nation-building skills in the US.
(But count on "reconstruction" contracts going to
Halliburton.) If Rumsfeld's Pentagon - where so
much of our money has gone in recent years - turns
out to be even a significant factor in the
"reconstruction" of New Orleans, we'll never have
that city back.
6 Predictions:
Given the last two years in which the president as
well as top administration officials have
regularly insisted that we had reached the turning
point, or turned that corner, or hit the necessary
tipping point in Iraq, that success or progress or
even victory was endlessly at hand (and then at
hand again and then again), consider what we
should think of the president's repeated
statements of Katrina "confidence", his insistence
that his administration can deal successfully with
the hurricane's after effects and is capable of
overseeing the successful rebuilding of New
Orleans. ("All Americans can be certain our nation
has the character, the resources and the resolve
to overcome this disaster. We will comfort and
care for the victims. We will restore the towns
and neighborhoods that have been lost in
Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. We'll rebuild
the great city of New Orleans. And we'll once
again show the world that the worst adversities
bring out the best in America.")
Feral
continent? As an aside, one great
difference between the American public's
experience of the Iraqi War and of the aftermath
of Katrina shouldn't be overlooked. This time, our
reporters weren't embedded with the troops and so
weren't experiencing mainly the administration's
artificially created version of reality. Instead,
they made it to the distressed areas of the
southeastern US way ahead of the troops, remained
in their absence, saw unreconstructed, unspun
reality for themselves, and were generally
outraged. So, for instance, when Homeland Security
Chief Michael Chertoff made ridiculous claims
about what the government had accomplished,
reporters were able to say, emphatically, that his
version was a lie and other Americans knew it was
so, because they had seen it for themselves.
And don't even get me started on
comparisons to Bush administration behavior from
the moment, also in Crawford in August 2001, that
the president and his advisors ignored the
infamous CIA daily intelligence briefing on Osama
bin Laden ("Bin Laden determined to attack inside
the US"), delivered at a length and with a
simplicity that even Bush should have been able to
absorb. Speaking of deja vu all over again, his
recent behavior re Katrina echoed strangely his
September 11 behavior. After all, on September 11,
he first sat paralyzed in a classroom in Florida,
then boarded Air Force One and headed not for
Washington but (gulp …) for Louisiana. It was an
act of panic if not cowardice that was quickly
covered over when he finally did make it to
Washington and later New York City, talking tough
and launching his war against evil.
When
Katrina hit, he sat in Crawford; then (perhaps -
to have a thoroughly unkind thought - continuing
his flight from Cindy Sheehan), he boarded his
plane and headed in the wrong direction, for San
Diego where he stood against the backdrop of an
aircraft carrier, the USS Ronald Reagan (don't
these people ever learn?), and pretended it was
actually World War II and we were occupying Japan.
By this time, every excuse for his war in Iraq
having peeled away (the al-Qaeda connection, the
weapons of mass destruction, even "freedom"), he
finally arrived at a new explanation for why we
were there. It was ... oil - or to be more exact,
an oil fantasy. ("If Zarqawi and bin Laden gain
control of Iraq, they would create a new training
ground for future terrorist attacks; they'd seize
oil fields to fund their ambitions; they could
recruit more terrorists by claiming an historic
victory over the United States and our
coalition.")
Maybe he should send David
Kay, who headed his fruitless
weapons-of-mass-destruction search team, back to
Iraq to look for oil, since it's been in short
supply there, and now is about to be here. Only
then did our president get on a jet heading in the
right direction - toward Louisiana, where he had
the pilot swoop down to 1,700 feet (as if that
were something daring) for a close look - on his
way to Washington. Nobody in the administration,
it seems, thought to put boot to the soil of
Mississippi or Louisiana in the first crucial days
of this crisis. (If you want the details -
Vice-President Dick Cheney remained on vacation in
Wyoming and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
was in New York buying shoes by the scads while
offers of aid poured in from such disparate
countries as Australia, Israel, Sri Lanka and
Venezuela - check out Maureen Dowd's latest New
York Times blast, United States of Shame.) The one
constant of this president and his administration
is that their most essential impulse is never to
head for the frontlines themselves - not in war,
not in disaster, not for our safety or our
planet's safety, not even on the campaign trail.
They are invariably at the front of nowhere at
all, and more than happy to be there. The old
"chickenhawk" label has a deeper meaning than we
ever realized.
In the meantime, what we
know from Katrina is that, in Bush's new America,
we are no longer capable, as a civilian society,
of rescuing ourselves. Even the more civilian part
of our military is gone. The Louisiana and
Mississippi National Guard, after all, are mainly
in Iraq, feeling, I'm sure, mighty helpless right
now, while chaos reigns in their home cities.
Thank you, George. Mission accomplished!
Before the Iraq War, it was already
evident that the State Department - the foreign
policy equivalent of a civilian effort - was
atrophying. (Administration officials were, after
all, starving that beast too.) "Diplomacy", such
as it was, was being conducted with other nations
ever more regularly by our military proconsuls
like our Centcom commander in the Middle East on a
military-to-military basis. A grim wag suggested
to me recently that the only way New Orleans would
have gotten some quick action was if the
administration had renamed Katrina "Osama",
claimed it left behind weapons of mass destruction
(as it may, in fact, have), and then invaded the
city.
When an administration that has long
believed that the resort to force should be the
initial impulse behind any policy finally acts,
force is unsurprisingly all it knows. If what
we've observed in the last week is the response of
the Bush administration to an essentially
predictable civilian catastrophe, then imagine how
prepared it is, after these four years of
"homeland security", for an unpredictable one. Or
what about, for instance, just another massive
hurricane in this age of Xtreme weather? After
all, though you can't find a word in the papers
about it at the moment, we are only halfway
through the fiercest, longest hurricane season in
memory. We should be scared. Very scared.
In the end, this country remains in a
powerful state of denial on two major matters that
help explain why the elevation of Bush and his
cronies was no mistake. We are now a highly
militarized society in all sorts of ways that any
of us could see, but that is seldom recognized or
discussed (except when the threat of base closings
sends specific communities into a panic).
Unrecognized and unconsidered, the militarized
nature of our society is likely in the future to
prove both dangerous and highly destructive. Right
now, we are a weakened superpower wired for force
and force alone - and if Iraq has shown us one
thing, it's that, when it comes to solving human
problems of any sort, military force is highly
overrated.
And of course, we are as a
society in denial over the toxic sludge pool where
climate change (or global warming) meets Middle
Eastern energy dependence. On this, our future
rests. If someone doesn't get to the frontlines of
planetary security soon, we may be living not just
with one feral city, but on a feral continent,
part of a feral world.
Tom
Engelhardt is editor of Tomdispatch and the
author of The End of Victory Culture.
(Copyright 2005 Tomdispatch. Used by
permission.)
