9-14-05

Ecclesiastes 3
I took a lot of heat, both here and elsewhere, for my comic on September 5.  Apparently, some people thought that the thrust of the comic was that no one should ever investigate what goes wrong or went wrong with the New Orleans crisis.  One person who tripped over it in the archives, yet couldn't be bothered to look at the date, made a special point of asking when such second-guessing would be appropriate.  (To be honest, I'm sure the question was asked rhetorically, since the person went to the trouble of creating and deleting a hotmail account to post on a thread that hadn't been updated in a week and announce s/he would never be returning—sort of the internet equivalent of borrowing your aunt's car so you can throw rotten tomatoes at a street corner where people had been protesting the week before.)
          I was also accused of self-righteousness.  I found that irritating, for a couple of reasons, for one, while I am amazingly arrogant, i have never been successfully accused of self-righteousness.  I tend to complain the most loudly about my own sins (and include myself in the complaint).  This was the case in the comic.  I had said some hard things about European non-involvement early on, which I now deeply regret, which I was already starting to regret at the time of the comic (which is why it points out that Europe had nothing to do with the hurricane).
          Anyway, my point is that, apparently, I wasn't clear at the time that what I was asking (okay telling, in very florid language) people was not to never discuss the question of accountability, but that it was wrong and offensive for people to do so while there were still people in the water and babies dehydrating at the convention center.  It struck me as similar to ships passing the Titanic (but not stopping to assist) complaining that no one was controlling the ice bergs in the Northern Atlantic.  The time to ask questions like "How did this happen?" and find a good position to toss a political football around is after you have the situation under control, not before.
          Well, it seems to be under control, now.  The death toll, while still high, is much lower than feared.  People are moving back into their homes, and starting the long, slow process of rebuilding their lives.  There is still a need.  The Red Cross and the Salvation Army both still need donations to assist people in the process.  The Blood Centers in the coastal south desperately need donations to replenish reserves lost and used in the mayhem.  The situation, now, however, is no longer a crisis.  We can raise our heads from our tools, look around, and try to figure out how it got there.
The Innocent
          So, let's get to looking.  The first thing, I suppose, would be determining who is not, in any way, to blame.  Let's start small and work our way up.
          The people who were trapped.  These folks were, by and large, either indigent or disabled, or both.  The ones at the Convention Center and the Superdome had no way of knowing that they would be abandoned on concrete islands with no immediate means of survival for days.  Even if they chose to remain behind when they could have self-evacuated, they are blameless victims; we live in an arrogant time when the mass of people are convinced that humanity is godlike in its power to withstand natural forces beyond our comprehension.  A little hubris is to be expected.
          The people who had the foresight and the means to evacuate.  There's no shame in looking at the face of god and bowing down.
          The rescue volunteers and emergency personnel who spent Tuesday through Thursday pulling people out of the water and off of rooftops.  They thought they were taking victims to safety.
          The Red Cross.  There have been complaints that they didn't establish a presence in New Orleans immediately, or, at least, that they didn't support the presence that had been established on Monday.  They didn't cut anyone loose.  They were prevented from re-entering the city by road conditions, concerns over the safety of volunteers, and the Louisiana National Guard.
          The Army Corps of Engineers.  They had been warning about the ability of the levees to withstand a catastrophic event for years.  They have been facing budget cuts and increasing hostility from environmental and humanitarian groups for decades.
          The Federal Emergency Management Administration.  Yeah, I know, the head of FEMA was fired last week.  He was scapegoated.  The fact is that FEMA has been warning about its response capabilities since it was absorbed into the giant boondoggle of the Departmenet of Homeland Paranoia.  They have had funds, authorities, and personnel siphoned off almost since the establishement of that useless arm of the Executive Branch back in 2001.
          The US Military.  The two nearest bases were destroyed.  The past three Administrations have been successively closing home bases since the fall of  the Soviet Union in 1991.  The nearest base of strategic size was nearly a thousand miles away.  They are also limited in their ability to act; federal forces and police have to be invited into a city or state (except in very specifically defined cases such as foreign attack).
          The Oil Companies.  Yeah yeah, I know.  They're all bastards.  But the fact is they're bastards with a profit motive, and they were not the moving force behind the reduction of Mississippi River levee repair and improvement money; environmentalists who feared wetlands destruction and humanitarians who preferred aid spending were.  The oil companies would have preferred the widest road from New Orleans to the Rust Belt to be as safe and wide as possible.
          President Bush.  I know a lot of people are going to hack me about including him in the innocent, but they are—and remember I mean this in the nicest possible sense—dumb as dirt.  The President is limited by the Constitution in what he can do.  He can not, for instance, just declare a national disaster until the the governor of the state involved declares a state disaster and asks for assistance.  Even were this not the case, he is still just the very top of a long and intricate beaureaucratic tree.  To suggest that any failures in response were directly related to his alleged racism or incompetence is to ignore the intrinsic impediments of any beaureaucratic system, and the possible prejudices and poor judgements of the individuals on the ground.
          Running out of room.  I'll start on the actual process of who is to blame, later.