Date: September 9, 2005 7:48:18 PM PDT
Subject: The Big Easy Dies Hard
The Big Easy Dies Hard
by CHRISTIAN PARENTI
[from the September 26, 2005 issue]
New Orleans
The empty streets of this city present a vista of
apocalyptic desolation: wind-ripped roofs, downed trees,
smashed fast-food signs, dangling power lines, columns
of dark smoke and everywhere heaps of garbage. On a lawn
near the Ninth Ward three light brown mules, wandering
the city alone, graze peacefully. In the sky above,
helicopters drum the air. From the pale, empty stretches
of elevated Interstate 10 one can look down on wide
expanses of the city where homes are submerged in the
flat, brackish floodwater. Strangely, the wind now is
gritty and dry.
At first the city appears like a giant conceptual art
installation, or the set of some archetypal cold-war
disaster movie. But then comes evidence of what this
really means: dazed refugees wade through the filthy
water or push shopping carts down ravaged streets or
wait silently in lines for evacuation. And every now and
then there is the stench of abandoned corpses. Officials
have no idea how many people are lost, trapped in the
attics soon to be dead, or drowned and hidden in their
homes.
Few can fathom the near-total lack of planning and
coordination among local, state and federal authorities.
"I been hearing about this is gonna happen for my whole
life--how could they not have a plan?" says a man named
Reginald Bell as he drops off extra candles to a
neighbor.
On a side street in Algiers, on the flood-spared west
bank, the corpse of a young black man in blue pants and
white shirt lies rotting in the sun about ten feet from
a chained-up health clinic. Swollen, greasy and oozing
maggots, the dead man has become a symbol of official
neglect. There are scores of uncollected corpses like
this all over New Orleans.
"See, they just leave him here," says Malik Rahim, a
community organizer who is spearheading a grassroots
relief effort called the Green Cross. "He's been here
almost five days, man." A colleague and I look down at
the corpse dumbly. A police car rolls by. Another one
stops, but the two white cops in it are dismissive. "We
don't have the resources," says one.
"Their message to black people here is, Get out or die.
You on your own," says Rahim, as the cops pull away.
The next day at the infamous convention center, where
stunned refugees are being searched and then loaded onto
outbound helicopters, a dozen ambulances sit waiting for
orders. No rescues yet today, I am told. As for corpses,
no one knows what the plan is.
Archie Haley, an emergency medical technician from Oak
Grove, near the Arkansas border, squats as I scarf down
a military MRE food ration; he explains that the major
problem is "the large population of welfare-ized blacks
who can't help themselves." My interlocutor is white
like me, so he feels comfortable. "See, these people are
the city's disease." His is an attitude that is far too
common among officials here. Racism and incompetence
seemed to merge to create a sluggish response. Despite
all the troops, SWAT teams and out-of-town cops that
have arrived since September 5, there's still little
sign of a plan: On the ground, chaos reigns. Civilian
volunteers are still doing many of the rescues; no one
knows where to get water or MREs; the radio reports
nothing of use.
By the Wednesday after Katrina hit, people here began to
grow desperate as their stockpiles of supplies ran out.
Survival looting, facilitated by the police, gave way to
opportunistic rampaging and panic. "We grew more and
more frightened each day because there was never any
word from the government about emergency foods and water
distribution, and we listened to the radio pretty
regularly," says Mike Howell, a former academic, local
peace activist and Nation reader I happened upon in a
dark but open bar in the Bywater district. There is no
power or water in this joint but somehow there is cold
beer and free BBQ.
"All they kept saying was, Go to the Superdome, but we
knew conditions over there were horrible, and we heard
they weren't letting people back out who wanted to
leave," says Howell.
Several SRO hotels, he says, have organized themselves
into "communes" and do their survival looting in an
organized and collectivist fashion. Everywhere one hears
stories of mutual aid.
One of the most striking things about being in New
Orleans is the number of people who outright refuse to
leave. Howell calls them "the diehards." The mayor has
ordered a mandatory evacuation, but the diehards, as
well as thousands who live in dry, relatively unscathed
areas, are poised to defy the order.
Out east on elevated I-10, above the dark, oily
floodwaters of Elysian Fields, a man and his son are
camped in a looted mail van. Two empty bottles of
champagne sit on the dash; Black Power is spray-painted
on the side. "We're bringing food and water back down in
to the dogs. I got two of 'em still in the house." He
points off east to roof-deep water.
At the far eastern edge of New Orleans, where the
floodwater consumed I-10, a crew of rescuers from the
state Department of Wildlife and Fisheries--biologists
with boats--are getting ready to launch. They've been
out here for days, bringing in water and bringing out
the wounded, but as Clint Jeske explains, "A lot of
people are in there just wading around, getting supplies
and wading back in. They're living in half-flooded homes
and they don't want to come out."
Nearby, in a sodden trailer park in the Chef Menteur
Highway area, Paul Breaux sums it up thus: "I did two
tours in Nam, went through the LA quake. I was a federal
cop. I can deal with this. All I need is some resupply,
some MREs and water." Breaux and three of his friends
are camping outside their trailers; the water here had
been four feet high but flowed out after a day. Why
people should leave dry areas of the city is not at all
clear. When pressed, some local officials say they might
reconsider the order, which smacks of the incoherence
and high-handedness that have characterized the whole
evacuation. Refugees are loaded onto buses and just
shipped away, not told where they're going or for how
long. It's this sort of bad treatment that hardens
people's resolve to stay.
By a levee on the west bank, school buses wait to load
up. "I don't want to go far away, but I was in a boat
with my disabled neighbor for five days eating nothing
but potato chips and two gallons of water and some
Gatorade," says a tall, skinny man named Lee from the
totally submerged and oil-fouled St. Bernard Parish.
"They just told us, Out," says another man, from the
Algiers neighborhood, which has running water but no
lights. The mayor has threatened to force people out and
deny them food and water if they insist on staying.
Traditions of racism, exploitation and exclusion are
visible in every aspect of this crisis. One also feels
the repressive reflexes of the war on drugs and war on
terror. Rather than work on rescue and cleanup with the
mutual-aid networks, like the distribution efforts of
Malik Rahim and his neighbor, the increasingly
militarized local, state and federal agencies have
defaulted to their worst bureaucratic instincts toward
the dispossessed: silence, exclude, control and
intimidate. Never mind why or toward what end.
_______________________________________________________
portside (the left side in nautical parlance) is a news,
discussion and debate service of the Committees of
Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. It aims to
provide varied material of interest to people on the
left.
For answers to frequently asked questions:
To subscribe, unsubscribe or change settings:
To submit material, paste into an email and send to:
For assistance with your account:
To search the portside archive:
