G
Gandalf Grey
Guest
Tomgram: Rebecca Solnit on Not Forgetting New Orleans
By Tom Engelhardt
Created Mar 16 2007 - 10:03am
- from Tomdispatch [1]
[Note to Tomdispatch readers: A small addition to my Tuesday post [2], "A
Journalist Writing Bloody Murder... And No One Notices": With a little help,
I finally came across a single newspaper editorial on Seymour Hersh's New
Yorker piece, "The Redirection." It appeared in Alabama's Decatur Daily
under the headline [3], "Unintended Consequence: U.S. Funding Radical
Islam." If anyone has seen a similar editorial anywhere, please write me. If
you feel in the mood to be grimly amused, check out a small piece I posted
[4] at the Nation Magazine's The Notion blog, "An Ambassador, An Iraqi, and
a Penguin."]
So Halliburton is leaving [5] the neighborhood. If I were you, I'd start
selling. It's a sign that property values are heading down in looted and
Katrina-tized America. With full protestations that it really isn't going
anywhere, Halliburton, with its $19 billion [6] in Pentagon contracts, with
its $2.7 billion [7] in estimated Iraq overcharges, is moving its
headquarters to Dubai [8], the Las Vegas of the Middle East where almost
anyone is welcome to plot almost anything on the indoor ski slopes [9] or
private mini-islands [10]. If I were the head of Halliburton, I'd be heading
for Dubai, too, or at least for parts unknown while the Bush administration
is still in office and I still had a roof over my head. Enron's Ken Lay
could have taken a tip or two from Halliburton Chief Executive David Lesar
on the subject. Far too late now, of course. And I wonder whether Al Neffgen
[11], the ex-Halliburton exec running the privatized company, IAP Worldwide
Services, that was put in charge of Walter Reed Army Medical Center in 2006
as part of the privatization of the military, might be considering a holiday
there as well. No mold, no rats (other than the human kind), just honest sun
and sand, surf and turf, oil money and. well, everything that goes with it.
We always knew that there was a link between Iraq, hit by a purely
human-made flood of catastrophe, and Katrina, which had a helping hand from
nature. Halliburton had a hand in both, of course, picking up some of the
earliest contracts for the "reconstruction" [12] of each -- the results of
which are now obvious to all (even undoubtedly from Dubai). The inability of
either the Bush administration or its chronically cost-overrun crony
corporations to genuinely reconstruct anything is now common knowledge. But
it's worth remembering that, though the disaster of Iraq's "reconstruction"
preceded it, Hurricane Katrina was the Brownie-heck-of-a-job moment that
revealed the reality of the Bush administration to most Americans.
The various privatization-style lootings and catastrophes since then have
all been clearer for that. Katrina, in fact, has become a catch-word for
them. So when the Bush administration's treatment of the wounded -- though
reported [13] well beforehand -- suddenly became the headline du jour, it
was also a Katrina-comparison scandal. ("Dems [14] Call Walter Reed Scandal
'Katrina of 2007";"The Katrina [15] of Veteran's Care"; "Like Brownie [16]
in Katrina, Rummy did 'a heckuva job.' So has Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley, Army
surgeon general, who commanded Walter Reed from 2002 to 2004.")
As Rebecca Solnit so eloquently reminds us below, however, Katrina isn't
simply some comparison point from the past, a piece of horrific history to
keep in mind; it's an on-going, never-ending demonstration that we have been
changed from a can-do to a can't-do society (except perhaps at the
neighborhood level). Katrina, the hurricane, was then; Katrina, the New
Orleans catastrophe, is right now and, given what we know about government
today, that "right now" is likely to stretch into the interminable future.
Solnit is Tomdispatch's ray [17] of hope (and the author of the remarkable
book Hope in the Dark [18]), but also the writer who deals with the largest
[19] of disasters. And here she is, as always not to be missed. -- Tom
Unstable Foundations: Letter from New Orleans
Rebecca Solnit
Riflemen and Rescuers
On March 5, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama went south to compete for the
limelight on the 42nd anniversary of "Bloody Sunday," the day in March 1965
when Alabama law enforcement drove Civil Rights demonstrators off the Edmund
Pettus Bridge and back into Selma. Somehow, the far larger and more
desperate attempt of a largely African-American population to march across a
bridge less than two years ago, during the days after Hurricane Katrina, and
the even more vicious response, has never quite entered the mainstream
imagination. Few outside New Orleans, therefore, understand that the city
became a prison in the days after 80% of it was flooded (nor has it fully
sunk in that the city was flooded not by a hurricane but by the failure of
levees inadequately built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers).
According to a little-noted Los Angeles Times report from that moment,
"Authorities in St. Bernard Parish, to the east, stacked cars to seal roads
from the Crescent City." Not only were relief supplies and rescuers kept out
of the city, but many who could have rescued themselves or reached outside
rescue efforts were forcibly kept in. The spectacle of the suffering and
squalor of crowds trapped without food, water, or sanitation in sweltering
heat that so transfixed the nation was not just the result of incompetence,
but of malice. While the media often tended to portray the victims as
largely criminals, government officials shifted the focus from rescue to the
protection of property and the policing of the public. There's no way to
count how many died as a result of all this.
The Mississippi-straddling Crescent City Connection Bridge was closed to
pedestrians by law enforcement from Gretna, the mostly white community
across the river. They fired their guns over the heads of women and children
seeking to flee the dire conditions of the Superdome and Convention Center,
as well as the heat and thirst of the devastated city, driving back
thousands attempting to escape their captivity in squalor. There have been
no consequences from any of these acts, though Congressional Representatives
Cynthia McKinney and John Conyers have denounced them as hate crimes and
called for investigations, and the Reverend Lennox Yearwood said, "Can you
imagine during 9/11, the thousands who fled on foot to the Brooklyn Bridge,
not because they wanted to go to Brooklyn, but because it was their only
option? What if they had been met by six or eight police cars blocking the
bridge, and cops fired warning shots to turn them back?"
During my trips to the still half-ruined city, some inhabitants have told me
that they, in turn, were told by white vigilantes of widespread murders of
black men in the chaos of the storm and flood. One local journalist assured
me that he tried to investigate the story, but found it impossible to crack.
Reporters, he said, were not allowed to inspect recovered bodies before they
were disposed of. These accounts suggest that, someday, an intrepid
investigative journalist may stand on its head the media hysteria of the
time (later quietly recanted) about African-American violence and menace in
flooded New Orleans. Certainly, the most brutal response to the catastrophe
was on the part of institutional authority at almost every level down to the
most local.
These stories are important, if only to understand what New Orleans is
recovering from -- not just physical devastation, but social fissures and
racial wounds in a situation that started as a somewhat natural disaster and
became a socially constructed catastrophe. Nothing quite like it has
happened in American history. It's important to note as well that many
racial divides were crossed that week and after -- by people who found
common cause inside the city -- by, for instance, the "Cajun Navy" of white
boat-owners who got into flooded areas to rescue scores of people.
Ex-Black Panther Malik Rahim says that he witnessed a race war beginning in
Algiers (next to Gretna) where he lived and that it was defused by the
young, white bicycle medics who came to minister to both communities; since
then the organization Rahim co-founded, Common Ground Collective [20], has
funneled more than 11,000 volunteers, mostly white, into New Orleans.
Parades and Patrols
New Orleans may have always been full of contradictions, but post-Katrina
they stand in high relief. For weeks in February, parades wound past rowdy
crowds in the uptown area as part of the long carnival season that leads up
to Mardi Gras. Since June, camouflage-clad, heavily armed National Guardsmen
have been patrolling other parts of the flood-ravaged city in military
vehicles, making the place feel as much like a war zone as a disaster
zone -- and perhaps it is. (On March 8, for instance, a Guardsman repeatedly
shot in the chest a 53-year-old African-American with mental problems. He
had brandished a BB gun at a patrol near his home, in which he had ridden
out Katrina, in the Upper Ninth Ward.) New Orleans' poverty was, and is,
constantly referenced in the national media; and the city did, and does,
have a lot of people without a lot of money, resources, health care,
education, and opportunity. But its people are peculiarly rich in networks,
roots, traditions, music, festive ritual, public life, and love of place, an
anomaly in an America where, generations ago, most of us lost what the
depleted population of New Orleans is trying to reclaim and rebuild.
I've long been interested in ruins, in cities and civil society in the wake
of disaster, and so I've been to New Orleans twice since Katrina hit and
I've tried to follow its post-catastrophe course from afar the rest of the
time. On this carnival-season visit, even my own response was contrary: I
wanted to move there and yet was appalled, even horrified, by tales of
institutional violence that people passed on to me as the unremarkable lore
of everyday life.
If New Orleans is coming back, it's because a lot of its citizens love it
passionately, from the affluent uptowners who formed Women of the Storm to
massage funding channels to the radical groups such as the People's
Hurricane Relief Fund [21] dealing with the most devastated zones.
Nationally, there have been many stories about people giving up and leaving
again because the reopened schools are still lousy and crime is soaring; the
way people are trickling back in has been far less covered.
Of a pre-storm white population of 124,000 more than 80,000 were back by
last fall, while about the same number of African-Americans had returned --
from a pre-storm population of 300,000. Though some have chosen not to
return, many are simply unable to, or are still organizing the means to do
so. Other roadblocks include the shuttering of all the housing projects in
the city, including some that sustained little or no damage in the floods. A
few have been occupied by former residents demanding the right of return.
It's little noted that not all those who are still in exile from the city
are there by choice. And while, once again, the mainstream media story of
exile has been grim -- that refugees from New Orleans have brought a crime
wave to Texas, for instance -- one longtime Austin resident assures me that
they've also brought a lot of music, public life, and good food.
I visited New Orleans 11 months ago, during Easter Week 2006, and it was
then a ghost town, spookily unpopulated, with few children among the
returnees; 10 months later, after more than 50 of its schools had reopened,
there were dozens of high-school marching bands in the pre-carnival parades.
But the bands were mostly monochromatic -- all white or all nonwhite - and
30 of the reopened schools are charter schools. Of course, in the slogan
"Bring Back New Orleans" lurks the question of how far back to bring it.
Once the wealthy banking powerhouse of the South, New Orleans had been
losing economic clout and population for decades before Katrina hit and
already seemed doomed to a slow decline.
With Katrina, no one can say what the future holds. Many fear the city will
become just a tourist attraction or that it will simply go under in the next
major hurricane. The levees and floodwalls are being rebuilt, but not to
Category 5 hurricane levels, and the fate of the Mississippi River Gulf
Outlet, the shipping shortcut that funneled the storm's surge right into New
Orleans, is still being debated. The Associated Press just reported [22]
that more than thirty of the pumps installed last year by the U.S. Army
Corps of Engineers to drain floodwater are defective. (The manufacturer is a
crony of Jeb Bush's and, like so many looters of the rebuilding funds, a
large-scale donor to the Republican Party.)
The city's major paper, the Times-Picayune, recently revealed that the maps
people have been using to represent the amount of wetlands buffer south of
the city are 75 years out of date and there are only 10 years left to save
anything of this crucially protective marsh-scape, which erodes at the rate
of 32 football fields a day.
Signs of Life in the Lower Ninth
That doesn't mean people aren't trying all over the city. It's easier,
however, to get out the power tools than to untangle the red tape
surrounding all the programs that are supposed to fund rebuilding or get
governmental agencies at any level to act like they care or are capable of
accomplishing a thing.
"Are you trying to rebuild?" I asked the woman who'd come into NENA, the
Lower Ninth Ward Neighborhood Empowerment Network Association in the part of
New Orleans most soaked by the floods Katrina caused. She politely but
firmly corrected me, "I am going to rebuild."
I ran into this kind of steely will all through my eight days exploring the
city. NENA's office in a small stucco church building in the heart of the
Lower Ninth, the neighborhood of black homeowners that sustained several
feet of water for weeks after the storm, is full of maps and charts. The
most remarkable is a map of the neighborhood itself with every home being
rebuilt marked with a green pushpin. They are lightly scattered over the
map, but there are green dots on nearly every block and clusters of them in
places, about 150 in this small neighborhood that looked as dead as anyplace
imaginable not so very long ago.
When I visited the Lower Ninth six months after Katrina, the gaping hole
where a barge had disastrously bashed through the levee above the Industrial
Canal was still there, as were the cars that had been tossed like toys
through the neighborhood when the water rushed in so violently that it tore
houses into splinters and shoved them from their foundations. The Lower
Ninth was a spooky place -- with no services, no streetlights, no
inhabitants.
That nothing had been done for six months was appalling, but so was the
scale of reconstruction required to bring the place back to life. Throughout
New Orleans, even homes that have no structural damage but were in the
heavily flooded lowlands have severe water and mold damage. Along with the
Ninth Ward, many more middle-class neighborhoods near Lake Pontchartrain
also took several feet of water and they too are now but sketchily
inhabited. Even the tacky row of condos alongside the Southern Yacht Club on
Lake Pontchartrain are still mostly wrecked, though some are being rebuilt.
Sunken pleasure boats are still in the surrounding waters and one wrecked
boat remained on the street in a devastated middle-class neighborhood
nearby.
Across from NENA's headquarters was a FEMA trailer with a wheelchair ramp in
front of one house. In front of another, right next door, a sign
spray-painted on plywood read, "NO TRESPASSING NO DEMOLITION. WE ARE COMING
BACK." And printed signs, scattered among those for demolition and building
services, bore this message in red, "Come hell and high water! Restoration,
revitalization, preservation of the Ninth Ward! Now and forever!" These
signs mean something in a neighborhood so gutted and abandoned that many of
the street signs disappeared, some of which have since been replaced by
hand-painted versions.
That people are even making their own street signs is one sign of a city
that has gotten to its feet. Or of citizens who have anyway. Failed by every
level of government from the Bush administration and its still barely
functional FEMA to the Louisiana bureaucracy with its red-tape-strangled
Road Home program to the city government, people are doing it for
themselves. NENA was founded by Patricia Jones, an accountant and Lower
Ninth homeowner spurred into action by the dire situation, and it's
co-directed by Linda Jackson, a former laundromat owner from the
neighborhood. People are doing things they might never otherwise have done,
including organizing their communities. Civic involvement is intense -- but
individual volunteers, no matter how many, from outside and local passion
can't do it all. It's been said before that New Orleans represents what the
Republicans long promised us when they spoke of shrinking government down.
The returnees, Jackson told me, are mostly doing their own rebuilding -- but
sheet-rocking and plumbing are far easier to master than the intricate
bureaucracies applicants must fight their way through to get the funds that
are supposed to be available to them. Even those who are not among New
Orleans' large population of functional illiterates, or whose lack of
electricity and money means that sending off the sequences of faxes required
to set things in motion is arduous, or who lack the phones and money to make
the endless long-distance calls to faceless strangers shuffling or losing
their information have problems getting anything done -- other than by
themselves.
Louisiana's Road Home program, for instance, is such an impenetrable
labyrinth that the Times-Picayune recently reported, "Of 108,751
applications received by the Road Home contractor, ICF International, only
782 homeowners have received final payments." Rents have risen since the
storm and home insurance is beyond reach for many of the working-class
homeowners who are rebuilding. Others can't get the homeowner's insurance
they need to get the mortgages to rebuild. In February, State Farm Insurance
simply stopped issuing new policies altogether in neighboring and no less
devastated Mississippi.
The disaster that was Katrina is often regarded as a storm, or a storm and a
flood, but in New Orelans it was a storm, a flood, and an urban crisis that
has stalled the lives of many to this day. Katrina is not even half over.
The Great Flood and the Great Divide
Volunteers have been flooding into New Orleans since shortly after the
hurricane, and they continue to come. Church youth groups arriving to do
demolition work were a staple for a while. This time around, I ran across a
big group of Mennonite carpenters, some from Canada, doing rebuilding
gratis.
Many young people -- often just out of college and more excited, as several
of them said to me, by "making a difference" than by looking for an
entry-level job -- have come to the city and many of them appear to be
staying. Some have compared the thousands of volunteers to Freedom Summer,
the 1964 African-American voter-registration drive in the South staffed in
part by college students from the North. Most of the volunteers in New
Orleans are white, and one concern I heard repeatedly is that they may
inadvertently contribute to the gentrification of traditionally black
neighborhoods such as the Upper Ninth Ward. Others see the outreach of white
activists as balm on the wounds inflicted by the racism apparent in the
media coverage of, and the militarized response to, Katrina.
The Ninth Ward symbolizes the abandonment of African-Americans by the
government in a time of dire need, and bringing it back is a way of
redressing that national shame and the racial divide that went with it. But
if it does come back, it will be residents and outside volunteers who do it.
The government is still largely missing in action -- except for the heavily
armed soldiers on patrol and the labyrinthine bureaucracies few can
navigate.
To rebuild your home, you need a neighborhood. To have a neighborhood, you
need a city. For a viable city, you need some degree of a safe environment.
For a safe environment, you need responsibility on the scale of the nation;
so, every house in New Orleans, ruined or rebuilding, poses a question about
the state of the nation. So many pieces need to be put in place: What will
climate change -- both increasingly intense hurricanes and rising seas -- do
to New Orleans? Will its economy continue to fade away? Will the individuals
who are bravely rebuilding in the most devastated areas have enough
neighbors join them to make viable neighborhoods again? Will the city
government improve itself enough to make a better place or will incompetence
continue to waltz with corruption through the years? Will the nation revise
its sense of what we owe our most significant cities (before my own city,
San Francisco, undergoes the big one) or recognize what they give us? Will
the solidarity of many anti-racist whites across the country outweigh the
racism that surfaced in Katrina and still lurks not far from the surface?
Despite its decline, New Orleans remains a port city and a major tourist
destination. But it also matters because it's beautiful, with its houses --
from shacks to mansions -- adorned with feminine, lacy-black ironwork or
white, gingerbread wood trim, with its colossal, spreading oaks and the most
poetic street names imaginable; because the city and the surrounding delta
are the great font from which so much of our popular music flows; because
people there still have a deep sense of connection and memory largely wiped
away in so many other places; because it is a capital city for black
culture, including traditions that flowed straight from Africa; because, in
some strange way, it holds the memory of what life was like before
capitalism and may yet be able to teach the rest of us something about what
life could be like after capitalism.
One of my friends in New Orleans was telling me recently about the
generosity of the city; the ways that churches and charities kept the poor
going so that poverty wasn't quite the abandoned thing it too often is
elsewhere; the way that people will cook up a feast for a whole
neighborhood; the ways the city never fully embraced the holy trinity of the
convenient, efficient, and profitable that produce such diminished versions
of what life can hold. The throws -- glittery beads, cups, toys -- from the
carnival floats are a little piece of this. Life in New Orleans is grim in
so many ways now, and all the beauty with which I end this letter coexists
with the viciousness I began with. But the recovery of the city from this
one mega-disaster could do much for the longer disaster that has so long now
been part of our national lives -- the social Darwinism, social atomization,
the shrinking of the New Deal and the Great Society and the attacks on the
very principle that we are all woven together in the fabric we call society.
If New Orleans doesn't recover, we aren't likely to either.
We all owe New Orleans and those who suffered most in Katrina a huge debt.
Their visible suffering and the visibly stupid, soulless, and selfish
response of the federal government brought an end to the unquestionable
dominance of the Bush administration in the nearly four years between New
York's great disaster and this catastrophe. In China, great earthquakes were
once thought to be signs that the mandate of heaven has been withdrawn from
the ruling dynasty. Similarly, the deluges of Katrina washed away the
mandate of the administration and made it possible, even necessary, for
those who had been blind or fearful before to criticize and oppose
afterwards.
One hundred and one years after my city was nearly destroyed by the
incompetent response of the authorities to a major earthquake, we are still
sifting out what really happened. In a hundred years, we may see Katrina as
a crisis for the belief that the civil rights movement had moved us past the
debacle on the Edmund Pettus Bridge -- and as a crisis of legitimacy for a
federal government that had done nothing but destroy for five years.
Rebecca Solnit's essay for Harper's Magazine on disaster and civil society
went to press the day Katrina struck New Orleans. She recently trained to
join San Francisco's Neighborhood Emergency Response Teams in the next big
earthquake and hopes to return to New Orleans for a more extended stay in a
few months. She is the author of Hope in the Dark [23], among other books.
Copyright 2007 Rebecca Solnit
--
NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not
always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material
available to advance understanding of
political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. I
believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright
Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107
"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson
By Tom Engelhardt
Created Mar 16 2007 - 10:03am
- from Tomdispatch [1]
[Note to Tomdispatch readers: A small addition to my Tuesday post [2], "A
Journalist Writing Bloody Murder... And No One Notices": With a little help,
I finally came across a single newspaper editorial on Seymour Hersh's New
Yorker piece, "The Redirection." It appeared in Alabama's Decatur Daily
under the headline [3], "Unintended Consequence: U.S. Funding Radical
Islam." If anyone has seen a similar editorial anywhere, please write me. If
you feel in the mood to be grimly amused, check out a small piece I posted
[4] at the Nation Magazine's The Notion blog, "An Ambassador, An Iraqi, and
a Penguin."]
So Halliburton is leaving [5] the neighborhood. If I were you, I'd start
selling. It's a sign that property values are heading down in looted and
Katrina-tized America. With full protestations that it really isn't going
anywhere, Halliburton, with its $19 billion [6] in Pentagon contracts, with
its $2.7 billion [7] in estimated Iraq overcharges, is moving its
headquarters to Dubai [8], the Las Vegas of the Middle East where almost
anyone is welcome to plot almost anything on the indoor ski slopes [9] or
private mini-islands [10]. If I were the head of Halliburton, I'd be heading
for Dubai, too, or at least for parts unknown while the Bush administration
is still in office and I still had a roof over my head. Enron's Ken Lay
could have taken a tip or two from Halliburton Chief Executive David Lesar
on the subject. Far too late now, of course. And I wonder whether Al Neffgen
[11], the ex-Halliburton exec running the privatized company, IAP Worldwide
Services, that was put in charge of Walter Reed Army Medical Center in 2006
as part of the privatization of the military, might be considering a holiday
there as well. No mold, no rats (other than the human kind), just honest sun
and sand, surf and turf, oil money and. well, everything that goes with it.
We always knew that there was a link between Iraq, hit by a purely
human-made flood of catastrophe, and Katrina, which had a helping hand from
nature. Halliburton had a hand in both, of course, picking up some of the
earliest contracts for the "reconstruction" [12] of each -- the results of
which are now obvious to all (even undoubtedly from Dubai). The inability of
either the Bush administration or its chronically cost-overrun crony
corporations to genuinely reconstruct anything is now common knowledge. But
it's worth remembering that, though the disaster of Iraq's "reconstruction"
preceded it, Hurricane Katrina was the Brownie-heck-of-a-job moment that
revealed the reality of the Bush administration to most Americans.
The various privatization-style lootings and catastrophes since then have
all been clearer for that. Katrina, in fact, has become a catch-word for
them. So when the Bush administration's treatment of the wounded -- though
reported [13] well beforehand -- suddenly became the headline du jour, it
was also a Katrina-comparison scandal. ("Dems [14] Call Walter Reed Scandal
'Katrina of 2007";"The Katrina [15] of Veteran's Care"; "Like Brownie [16]
in Katrina, Rummy did 'a heckuva job.' So has Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley, Army
surgeon general, who commanded Walter Reed from 2002 to 2004.")
As Rebecca Solnit so eloquently reminds us below, however, Katrina isn't
simply some comparison point from the past, a piece of horrific history to
keep in mind; it's an on-going, never-ending demonstration that we have been
changed from a can-do to a can't-do society (except perhaps at the
neighborhood level). Katrina, the hurricane, was then; Katrina, the New
Orleans catastrophe, is right now and, given what we know about government
today, that "right now" is likely to stretch into the interminable future.
Solnit is Tomdispatch's ray [17] of hope (and the author of the remarkable
book Hope in the Dark [18]), but also the writer who deals with the largest
[19] of disasters. And here she is, as always not to be missed. -- Tom
Unstable Foundations: Letter from New Orleans
Rebecca Solnit
Riflemen and Rescuers
On March 5, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama went south to compete for the
limelight on the 42nd anniversary of "Bloody Sunday," the day in March 1965
when Alabama law enforcement drove Civil Rights demonstrators off the Edmund
Pettus Bridge and back into Selma. Somehow, the far larger and more
desperate attempt of a largely African-American population to march across a
bridge less than two years ago, during the days after Hurricane Katrina, and
the even more vicious response, has never quite entered the mainstream
imagination. Few outside New Orleans, therefore, understand that the city
became a prison in the days after 80% of it was flooded (nor has it fully
sunk in that the city was flooded not by a hurricane but by the failure of
levees inadequately built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers).
According to a little-noted Los Angeles Times report from that moment,
"Authorities in St. Bernard Parish, to the east, stacked cars to seal roads
from the Crescent City." Not only were relief supplies and rescuers kept out
of the city, but many who could have rescued themselves or reached outside
rescue efforts were forcibly kept in. The spectacle of the suffering and
squalor of crowds trapped without food, water, or sanitation in sweltering
heat that so transfixed the nation was not just the result of incompetence,
but of malice. While the media often tended to portray the victims as
largely criminals, government officials shifted the focus from rescue to the
protection of property and the policing of the public. There's no way to
count how many died as a result of all this.
The Mississippi-straddling Crescent City Connection Bridge was closed to
pedestrians by law enforcement from Gretna, the mostly white community
across the river. They fired their guns over the heads of women and children
seeking to flee the dire conditions of the Superdome and Convention Center,
as well as the heat and thirst of the devastated city, driving back
thousands attempting to escape their captivity in squalor. There have been
no consequences from any of these acts, though Congressional Representatives
Cynthia McKinney and John Conyers have denounced them as hate crimes and
called for investigations, and the Reverend Lennox Yearwood said, "Can you
imagine during 9/11, the thousands who fled on foot to the Brooklyn Bridge,
not because they wanted to go to Brooklyn, but because it was their only
option? What if they had been met by six or eight police cars blocking the
bridge, and cops fired warning shots to turn them back?"
During my trips to the still half-ruined city, some inhabitants have told me
that they, in turn, were told by white vigilantes of widespread murders of
black men in the chaos of the storm and flood. One local journalist assured
me that he tried to investigate the story, but found it impossible to crack.
Reporters, he said, were not allowed to inspect recovered bodies before they
were disposed of. These accounts suggest that, someday, an intrepid
investigative journalist may stand on its head the media hysteria of the
time (later quietly recanted) about African-American violence and menace in
flooded New Orleans. Certainly, the most brutal response to the catastrophe
was on the part of institutional authority at almost every level down to the
most local.
These stories are important, if only to understand what New Orleans is
recovering from -- not just physical devastation, but social fissures and
racial wounds in a situation that started as a somewhat natural disaster and
became a socially constructed catastrophe. Nothing quite like it has
happened in American history. It's important to note as well that many
racial divides were crossed that week and after -- by people who found
common cause inside the city -- by, for instance, the "Cajun Navy" of white
boat-owners who got into flooded areas to rescue scores of people.
Ex-Black Panther Malik Rahim says that he witnessed a race war beginning in
Algiers (next to Gretna) where he lived and that it was defused by the
young, white bicycle medics who came to minister to both communities; since
then the organization Rahim co-founded, Common Ground Collective [20], has
funneled more than 11,000 volunteers, mostly white, into New Orleans.
Parades and Patrols
New Orleans may have always been full of contradictions, but post-Katrina
they stand in high relief. For weeks in February, parades wound past rowdy
crowds in the uptown area as part of the long carnival season that leads up
to Mardi Gras. Since June, camouflage-clad, heavily armed National Guardsmen
have been patrolling other parts of the flood-ravaged city in military
vehicles, making the place feel as much like a war zone as a disaster
zone -- and perhaps it is. (On March 8, for instance, a Guardsman repeatedly
shot in the chest a 53-year-old African-American with mental problems. He
had brandished a BB gun at a patrol near his home, in which he had ridden
out Katrina, in the Upper Ninth Ward.) New Orleans' poverty was, and is,
constantly referenced in the national media; and the city did, and does,
have a lot of people without a lot of money, resources, health care,
education, and opportunity. But its people are peculiarly rich in networks,
roots, traditions, music, festive ritual, public life, and love of place, an
anomaly in an America where, generations ago, most of us lost what the
depleted population of New Orleans is trying to reclaim and rebuild.
I've long been interested in ruins, in cities and civil society in the wake
of disaster, and so I've been to New Orleans twice since Katrina hit and
I've tried to follow its post-catastrophe course from afar the rest of the
time. On this carnival-season visit, even my own response was contrary: I
wanted to move there and yet was appalled, even horrified, by tales of
institutional violence that people passed on to me as the unremarkable lore
of everyday life.
If New Orleans is coming back, it's because a lot of its citizens love it
passionately, from the affluent uptowners who formed Women of the Storm to
massage funding channels to the radical groups such as the People's
Hurricane Relief Fund [21] dealing with the most devastated zones.
Nationally, there have been many stories about people giving up and leaving
again because the reopened schools are still lousy and crime is soaring; the
way people are trickling back in has been far less covered.
Of a pre-storm white population of 124,000 more than 80,000 were back by
last fall, while about the same number of African-Americans had returned --
from a pre-storm population of 300,000. Though some have chosen not to
return, many are simply unable to, or are still organizing the means to do
so. Other roadblocks include the shuttering of all the housing projects in
the city, including some that sustained little or no damage in the floods. A
few have been occupied by former residents demanding the right of return.
It's little noted that not all those who are still in exile from the city
are there by choice. And while, once again, the mainstream media story of
exile has been grim -- that refugees from New Orleans have brought a crime
wave to Texas, for instance -- one longtime Austin resident assures me that
they've also brought a lot of music, public life, and good food.
I visited New Orleans 11 months ago, during Easter Week 2006, and it was
then a ghost town, spookily unpopulated, with few children among the
returnees; 10 months later, after more than 50 of its schools had reopened,
there were dozens of high-school marching bands in the pre-carnival parades.
But the bands were mostly monochromatic -- all white or all nonwhite - and
30 of the reopened schools are charter schools. Of course, in the slogan
"Bring Back New Orleans" lurks the question of how far back to bring it.
Once the wealthy banking powerhouse of the South, New Orleans had been
losing economic clout and population for decades before Katrina hit and
already seemed doomed to a slow decline.
With Katrina, no one can say what the future holds. Many fear the city will
become just a tourist attraction or that it will simply go under in the next
major hurricane. The levees and floodwalls are being rebuilt, but not to
Category 5 hurricane levels, and the fate of the Mississippi River Gulf
Outlet, the shipping shortcut that funneled the storm's surge right into New
Orleans, is still being debated. The Associated Press just reported [22]
that more than thirty of the pumps installed last year by the U.S. Army
Corps of Engineers to drain floodwater are defective. (The manufacturer is a
crony of Jeb Bush's and, like so many looters of the rebuilding funds, a
large-scale donor to the Republican Party.)
The city's major paper, the Times-Picayune, recently revealed that the maps
people have been using to represent the amount of wetlands buffer south of
the city are 75 years out of date and there are only 10 years left to save
anything of this crucially protective marsh-scape, which erodes at the rate
of 32 football fields a day.
Signs of Life in the Lower Ninth
That doesn't mean people aren't trying all over the city. It's easier,
however, to get out the power tools than to untangle the red tape
surrounding all the programs that are supposed to fund rebuilding or get
governmental agencies at any level to act like they care or are capable of
accomplishing a thing.
"Are you trying to rebuild?" I asked the woman who'd come into NENA, the
Lower Ninth Ward Neighborhood Empowerment Network Association in the part of
New Orleans most soaked by the floods Katrina caused. She politely but
firmly corrected me, "I am going to rebuild."
I ran into this kind of steely will all through my eight days exploring the
city. NENA's office in a small stucco church building in the heart of the
Lower Ninth, the neighborhood of black homeowners that sustained several
feet of water for weeks after the storm, is full of maps and charts. The
most remarkable is a map of the neighborhood itself with every home being
rebuilt marked with a green pushpin. They are lightly scattered over the
map, but there are green dots on nearly every block and clusters of them in
places, about 150 in this small neighborhood that looked as dead as anyplace
imaginable not so very long ago.
When I visited the Lower Ninth six months after Katrina, the gaping hole
where a barge had disastrously bashed through the levee above the Industrial
Canal was still there, as were the cars that had been tossed like toys
through the neighborhood when the water rushed in so violently that it tore
houses into splinters and shoved them from their foundations. The Lower
Ninth was a spooky place -- with no services, no streetlights, no
inhabitants.
That nothing had been done for six months was appalling, but so was the
scale of reconstruction required to bring the place back to life. Throughout
New Orleans, even homes that have no structural damage but were in the
heavily flooded lowlands have severe water and mold damage. Along with the
Ninth Ward, many more middle-class neighborhoods near Lake Pontchartrain
also took several feet of water and they too are now but sketchily
inhabited. Even the tacky row of condos alongside the Southern Yacht Club on
Lake Pontchartrain are still mostly wrecked, though some are being rebuilt.
Sunken pleasure boats are still in the surrounding waters and one wrecked
boat remained on the street in a devastated middle-class neighborhood
nearby.
Across from NENA's headquarters was a FEMA trailer with a wheelchair ramp in
front of one house. In front of another, right next door, a sign
spray-painted on plywood read, "NO TRESPASSING NO DEMOLITION. WE ARE COMING
BACK." And printed signs, scattered among those for demolition and building
services, bore this message in red, "Come hell and high water! Restoration,
revitalization, preservation of the Ninth Ward! Now and forever!" These
signs mean something in a neighborhood so gutted and abandoned that many of
the street signs disappeared, some of which have since been replaced by
hand-painted versions.
That people are even making their own street signs is one sign of a city
that has gotten to its feet. Or of citizens who have anyway. Failed by every
level of government from the Bush administration and its still barely
functional FEMA to the Louisiana bureaucracy with its red-tape-strangled
Road Home program to the city government, people are doing it for
themselves. NENA was founded by Patricia Jones, an accountant and Lower
Ninth homeowner spurred into action by the dire situation, and it's
co-directed by Linda Jackson, a former laundromat owner from the
neighborhood. People are doing things they might never otherwise have done,
including organizing their communities. Civic involvement is intense -- but
individual volunteers, no matter how many, from outside and local passion
can't do it all. It's been said before that New Orleans represents what the
Republicans long promised us when they spoke of shrinking government down.
The returnees, Jackson told me, are mostly doing their own rebuilding -- but
sheet-rocking and plumbing are far easier to master than the intricate
bureaucracies applicants must fight their way through to get the funds that
are supposed to be available to them. Even those who are not among New
Orleans' large population of functional illiterates, or whose lack of
electricity and money means that sending off the sequences of faxes required
to set things in motion is arduous, or who lack the phones and money to make
the endless long-distance calls to faceless strangers shuffling or losing
their information have problems getting anything done -- other than by
themselves.
Louisiana's Road Home program, for instance, is such an impenetrable
labyrinth that the Times-Picayune recently reported, "Of 108,751
applications received by the Road Home contractor, ICF International, only
782 homeowners have received final payments." Rents have risen since the
storm and home insurance is beyond reach for many of the working-class
homeowners who are rebuilding. Others can't get the homeowner's insurance
they need to get the mortgages to rebuild. In February, State Farm Insurance
simply stopped issuing new policies altogether in neighboring and no less
devastated Mississippi.
The disaster that was Katrina is often regarded as a storm, or a storm and a
flood, but in New Orelans it was a storm, a flood, and an urban crisis that
has stalled the lives of many to this day. Katrina is not even half over.
The Great Flood and the Great Divide
Volunteers have been flooding into New Orleans since shortly after the
hurricane, and they continue to come. Church youth groups arriving to do
demolition work were a staple for a while. This time around, I ran across a
big group of Mennonite carpenters, some from Canada, doing rebuilding
gratis.
Many young people -- often just out of college and more excited, as several
of them said to me, by "making a difference" than by looking for an
entry-level job -- have come to the city and many of them appear to be
staying. Some have compared the thousands of volunteers to Freedom Summer,
the 1964 African-American voter-registration drive in the South staffed in
part by college students from the North. Most of the volunteers in New
Orleans are white, and one concern I heard repeatedly is that they may
inadvertently contribute to the gentrification of traditionally black
neighborhoods such as the Upper Ninth Ward. Others see the outreach of white
activists as balm on the wounds inflicted by the racism apparent in the
media coverage of, and the militarized response to, Katrina.
The Ninth Ward symbolizes the abandonment of African-Americans by the
government in a time of dire need, and bringing it back is a way of
redressing that national shame and the racial divide that went with it. But
if it does come back, it will be residents and outside volunteers who do it.
The government is still largely missing in action -- except for the heavily
armed soldiers on patrol and the labyrinthine bureaucracies few can
navigate.
To rebuild your home, you need a neighborhood. To have a neighborhood, you
need a city. For a viable city, you need some degree of a safe environment.
For a safe environment, you need responsibility on the scale of the nation;
so, every house in New Orleans, ruined or rebuilding, poses a question about
the state of the nation. So many pieces need to be put in place: What will
climate change -- both increasingly intense hurricanes and rising seas -- do
to New Orleans? Will its economy continue to fade away? Will the individuals
who are bravely rebuilding in the most devastated areas have enough
neighbors join them to make viable neighborhoods again? Will the city
government improve itself enough to make a better place or will incompetence
continue to waltz with corruption through the years? Will the nation revise
its sense of what we owe our most significant cities (before my own city,
San Francisco, undergoes the big one) or recognize what they give us? Will
the solidarity of many anti-racist whites across the country outweigh the
racism that surfaced in Katrina and still lurks not far from the surface?
Despite its decline, New Orleans remains a port city and a major tourist
destination. But it also matters because it's beautiful, with its houses --
from shacks to mansions -- adorned with feminine, lacy-black ironwork or
white, gingerbread wood trim, with its colossal, spreading oaks and the most
poetic street names imaginable; because the city and the surrounding delta
are the great font from which so much of our popular music flows; because
people there still have a deep sense of connection and memory largely wiped
away in so many other places; because it is a capital city for black
culture, including traditions that flowed straight from Africa; because, in
some strange way, it holds the memory of what life was like before
capitalism and may yet be able to teach the rest of us something about what
life could be like after capitalism.
One of my friends in New Orleans was telling me recently about the
generosity of the city; the ways that churches and charities kept the poor
going so that poverty wasn't quite the abandoned thing it too often is
elsewhere; the way that people will cook up a feast for a whole
neighborhood; the ways the city never fully embraced the holy trinity of the
convenient, efficient, and profitable that produce such diminished versions
of what life can hold. The throws -- glittery beads, cups, toys -- from the
carnival floats are a little piece of this. Life in New Orleans is grim in
so many ways now, and all the beauty with which I end this letter coexists
with the viciousness I began with. But the recovery of the city from this
one mega-disaster could do much for the longer disaster that has so long now
been part of our national lives -- the social Darwinism, social atomization,
the shrinking of the New Deal and the Great Society and the attacks on the
very principle that we are all woven together in the fabric we call society.
If New Orleans doesn't recover, we aren't likely to either.
We all owe New Orleans and those who suffered most in Katrina a huge debt.
Their visible suffering and the visibly stupid, soulless, and selfish
response of the federal government brought an end to the unquestionable
dominance of the Bush administration in the nearly four years between New
York's great disaster and this catastrophe. In China, great earthquakes were
once thought to be signs that the mandate of heaven has been withdrawn from
the ruling dynasty. Similarly, the deluges of Katrina washed away the
mandate of the administration and made it possible, even necessary, for
those who had been blind or fearful before to criticize and oppose
afterwards.
One hundred and one years after my city was nearly destroyed by the
incompetent response of the authorities to a major earthquake, we are still
sifting out what really happened. In a hundred years, we may see Katrina as
a crisis for the belief that the civil rights movement had moved us past the
debacle on the Edmund Pettus Bridge -- and as a crisis of legitimacy for a
federal government that had done nothing but destroy for five years.
Rebecca Solnit's essay for Harper's Magazine on disaster and civil society
went to press the day Katrina struck New Orleans. She recently trained to
join San Francisco's Neighborhood Emergency Response Teams in the next big
earthquake and hopes to return to New Orleans for a more extended stay in a
few months. She is the author of Hope in the Dark [23], among other books.
Copyright 2007 Rebecca Solnit
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Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107
"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson
