Ellington

The Times-Picayune is running a powerful editorial, trying to correct public misconceptions and rumors about the realities on the ground in New Orleans. This desperate plea for truth is similar to an editorial run last week by the Sun-Herald, which Ali Greggs is discussing on her blog. No doubt about it: The South—the Coast and New Orleans—are getting screwed by national media and political innuendo.

EDITORIAL: We needed levees, not more buses
One of the lingering myths about Hurricane Katrina is that everybody who died here was trapped here and that, in fact, no one would have died if local and state governments had provided buses out of town. That myth also assumes that upon hearing of a mandatory evacuation, everybody with the means to leave town does so.

The falsity of both claims has been well-established.

[...]Some members of the House Select Committee, which is ostensibly investigating the federal government's response to the crisis in the New Orleans area, insisted that Mayor Ray Nagin and Gov. Kathleen Blanco accept personal responsibility for the people who died.

U.S. Rep Jeff Miller, R-Fla., giving himself over wholly to demagoguery, told Blanco that the 1,086 Louisiana residents known to have died in the storm are about half the number of American lives lost in Iraq.

"You lost that many in one day," he said.

She lost that many?

Is Miller suggesting that Blanco's failure to drag people out by their ankles makes her culpable for their deaths? Is he so committed to partisan gamesmanship that he's willing to put Blanco's failings on par with the crumbling of the federal government's floodwalls?

Similarly, do Republicans Hal Rogers of Kentucky and Christopher Shays of Connecticut really believe Mayor Nagin should have told residents to leave New Orleans Friday morning when a mild-mannered Hurricane Katrina looked destined to hit Apalachicola, Fla. [...]

Rogers and Shays are pandering. What universe of people would simultaneously be impressionable enough to be convinced to leave on Friday but so stubborn that they wouldn't leave on Saturday or Sunday?

By criticizing Nagin for a mandatory evacuation call that came 19 hours before landfall, they leave the impression that the announcement was the mayor's first word of warning.

Actually, it was but one in a series of warnings that began early Saturday and became increasingly more insistent.

Nagin and Blanco have both made notable mistakes since this crisis began, but it is dishonest and mean-spirited of Congress to suggest that mistakes made by either one makes them liable for nearly 1,100 lives.

Maybe a small percentage of those who perished would still be alive if Nagin and Blanco had worked together to provide transportation.

But if the federal government's floodwalls had held, it's doubtful anybody would have died at all.

Previous Comments

ID

134700

Comment

Get your own "Make Levees, Not War" t-shirt! from the Shreveport Times: On New Orleans' premier shopping street, Magazine, shoppers searched for scarce parking spots last weekend during a highly successful business promotion. Shop owners, worried about survival two months ago, reported brisk business and an optimism they were going to make it. Shoppers were snapping up everything that was New Orleans-specific, saying they were determined to buy locally, eschewing catalog or Net purchasing this year. The hottest selling T-shirt is a play on the 1960s anti-war mantra: "Make Levees, Not War." Close behind is a shirt on which there's a depiction of a junked refrigerator, representation of foul order creeping out. Written on the front: "Mr. Brown, your dinner is waiting." That's a reference to former Federal Emergency Management Agency director Michael Brown, the former horse show promoter whose dismal failure during the week of Katrina's aftermath caused him to be removed. There's a third shirt being promoted by Magazine Street shop owners, one put up by Desire New Orleans (www.desire-nola.org), a nonprofit dedicated to preserving New Orleans business and culture. It's a take-off on the "I (heart symbol) New York" T-shirt, but instead of the heart, there's a red fleur-de-lis. But the "Make Levees, Not War" T-shirt really says more about where New Orleanians' collective heads are these days. If the U.S. government can spend $300 billion a year in Iraq, why was it so hard to find $3 billion to repair and improve hurricane levees? Or spending $100 billion over years to improve hurricane levees all across vulnerable south Louisiana?

Author

DonnaLadd

Date

2005-12-19T14:17:45-06:00