Over at the participatory culture foundation they have a link to a very arresting video montage of news coverage from the Gulf Coast.
I was out of the world when the shit hit the fan. We knew Sunday night that Katrina was headed directly for New Orleans, and everyone knew that meant things would get ugly. Hell, not six weeks ago I was standing on the levee myself. But Monday morning as we packed up to head out to Burning Man, the word was that things were alright, that the Mississippi remained contained, that there was a great deal of damage as you would expect from a hurricane, but that the worst case scenario had not come to pass.
It wasn't until Thursday night when I hitched a ride on a woman's tandem out in Black Rock City that I heard different. The lady who gave me a lift had been reading the news, told me the worst of it, the sensational stuff, the evil. It hung over things like a cloud. Red Cross donation barrels showed up, as well as a whole camp devoted to finding out what happened, where loved ones were, how to help, etc. But the bandwidth there is thin. It's hard to get much of a sense of what was actually happening other than that it was truly awful.
When I got back connected, it turned out that while really bad shit clearly went down, some of the horror stories (child rape, etc) may have been exaggerated rumors. That's a blessing. While the whole dimension of what's been going on is rather spiritually crushing, it's nice to know that some of the most vile tales may have been just tales. It's als nice to hear about acts of bravery and good that were not as widely published. It's nice to hear that for the sake of my faith in humanity.
I found this post from Billmon to be chock full of material:
What you will not see, but what we witnessed, were the real heroes and sheroes of the hurricane relief effort: the working class of New Orleans. The maintenance workers who used a fork lift to carry the sick and disabled. The engineers, who rigged, nurtured and kept the generators running. The electricians who improvised thick extension cords stretching over blocks to share the little electricity we had in order to free cars stuck on rooftop parking lots. Nurses who took over for mechanical ventilators and spent many hours on end manually forcing air into the lungs of unconscious patients to keep them alive. Doormen who rescued folks stuck in elevators. Refinery workers who broke into boat yards, "stealing" boats to rescue their neighbors clinging to their roofs in flood waters. Mechanics who helped hot-wire any car that could be found to ferry people out of the City. And the food service workers who scoured the commercial kitchens improvising communal meals for hundreds of those stranded.
Those are good things to hear. On the darker side, the Old South seems to have reared its ugly head. This catastrophe has inevitable racial overtones. My Aunt lives (lived) there, but she got out. She has a car. Those who were stuck were the poor, those without options. Many of the poor and option-less in New Orleans are black. Things got pretty fucked up when they tried to leave on foot. Also, some of the reporting on "looting" versus "scavenging" has been downright shameful. The Onion, sadly, captures the gist of it:
White Foragers Report Threat Of Black Looters
NEW ORLEANS—Throughout the Gulf Coast, Caucasian suburbanites attempting to gather food and drink in the shattered wreckage of shopping districts have reported seeing AfricanÂAmericans "looting snacks and beer from damaged businesses." "I was in the abandoned Wal-Mart gathering an air mattress so I could float out the potato chips, beef jerky, and Budweiser I'd managed to find," said white survivor Lars Wrightson, who had carefully selected foodstuffs whose salt and alcohol content provide protection against contamination. "Then I look up, and I see a whole family of [African-Americans] going straight for the booze. Hell, you could see they had already looted a fortune in diapers." Radio stations still in operation are advising store owners and white people in the affected areas to locate firearms in sporting-goods stores in order to protect themselves against marauding blacks looting gun shops.
However, a great deal of the reporting has been really amazing, especially by recent standards. I understand and believe in the essential need for a vibrant, free and inquisitive Press to make our country work. This has been uncomfortable position lately because the Press has really dropped the ball over the past several years, surrendering its role as independent fact-finder, trusted arbiter of public truth, and becoming more and more marginalized, a mealy-mouthed referee/participant in a series of "he said/she said" spinfeists. But the magnitude of the gap between reality and spin in the wake of Katrina seems to have delivered a bracing jolt to the infotainment industry. Brains have been zapped, spirits awakened. Seeing Shep Smith (who I've heretofore observed to be a smarmy jackass) talking back to Boss O'Reilly on FoxNews is really something. Rumor has it the specter of Real Journalism stalks the streets of America again.
This is important, I think. In addition to the reminders of racism and racial inequity, one of the things this disaster clearly showed was what happens when government prioritizes perception and public-relations over performance, when politics trumps governance. It leads to bad service, to needless death, and then it's met with ass-covering and "information management." As Josh Marshall put it:
Take a moment to note what's happening here: these are the marks of repressive government, which mixes inefficiency with authoritarianism. The crew that couldn't get key aid on the scene last week is coming in in force now and taking as one of its key missions cutting public information about what's happening in the city.
The lesson some others (e.g. Boss O'Reilly) draw from Katrina is that the Government is good for nothing. "It's every man for himself," in other words. This is their ideology, but it isn't true, or right, or even Christian for that matter. It's the kind of thinking that can only really survive in an ivory tower, television studio, gated community or other kind of vaccum. O'Reilly can rant about personal responsibility, but he looks like a mean, ugly, out of touch old man when the next cut goes to Geraldo (that perennial cowboy of our newsmedia) weeping openly and holding up a stranded child. What kind of monster would say such things. The gap between idea and reality reveals the naked lunch of smug conservative ideology, exposes the heartless nature of a mindset that evolves out of pronounced privilege but sees the world as an idealized "level playing field" without need of regulation, oversight or capital improvement.
While it's true that our government hasn't been good for very much lately other than keeping our civilization limping along, the fact is that it is good for something. At lot of things, really. Many of the problems we face as a generation, a nation, a species, can only be dealt with through massively conjoint action; a lot of people working together to make shit happen. That's what Government is supposed to be for, usually to facilitate but in some cases also to lead. The only way we know how to organize action among millions (even one day billions) of people with any kind of accountability is through some sort of Democratic State or another.
And that's really what it's all about, you know? It's a very tricky thing too, because massive collective action (war, constructing an interstate highway system, educating millions of children) creates innumerable positions of seductively corrupting power, from the Commander in Chief on down to local Hefes doling out contracts or setting curriculum on the ground. There are very pressing questions about how to keep the system honest.
Here in the US we have an oppositional solution to that question. It's a good idea on paper. Competition is a great driver for fitness. After all, it (evolution, natural selection) is how how we (human beings) got to be here; hard to knock that. The idea applied to government is to set things up to make use of competition between candidates and parties to drive the best ideas and individuals to the top, cut away what isn't working, and put the kibosh on what's hurting asap. Elections hold public officials accountable, but they are also meant to advance our understanding of ourselves, of our direction, of the shared aspects of our lives.
The problem is that we've evolved a political system in which the nature of this competition has very little to do with real-world performance in Governing. It's political maneuvering over public service. The competition is over money, political machines, media coverage. The fight produces the best of breed in messaging and spin, larger and larger fanatical "base" followings, fitness to mingle within the power elite. These are not good capacities to have evolved when disaster strikes. The skills are unuseful. Failure occurs. Death and chaos follow.
Will we learn and evolve as a nation? Maybe. The upside (and downside) of all this is that the power to discover and implement real solutions lies almost exclusively in the hands of we the people. The change we need and seek will not emerge from the establishment; not without significant pressure at the very least. Unfortunately, "we the people" aren't really much of anything at this point. We're not well organized. We don't have a good way of working together to figure things out. As we keep hearing, we're a divided nation. We're also fat on cheetos, sated with easy money at usurious interest rates, pacified and isolated by a culture of consumption and celebrity.
That's the downside. The upside is that we're slowly but surely making our way into a new era of social organization. And there's hope in that. The way in which information moves has always been at the heart of how a civilization operates, and in the next ten to twenty years we're likely to see some rather large changes in how American life works as our myriad organizations, economies, governments and communities assimilate the new possibilities and adapt to the new environment. Better times could be, but no one is going to do it for us.
Crises precipitate change. I had hoped for a great leap forward after witnessing 9/11 and the aftermath up close and personal. I saw it in New York City, a better possible future, but the national response (let by President Bush) quickly took that step forward and dragged it several paces back. Perhaps the Gulf Coast will be different. Things fell apart on the ground, but perhaps the nation will really rally. The magnitude of ineptness and death in this whole episode demand positive long-term outcomes. Time will tell, but there's a distinct possibility that the scale of both the devastation and dereliction of duty may refocus our national attention on things that matter, may actually lead through to some kind of change for the better. As regular citizens, each of us owe that to the dead and displaced. We owe it to our families and to our neighbors. We even owe it to ourselves.
