The New Super Dome of New Atlantis ©2005 UrbisMedia
God and Allah seem to have shown their wrath on the same day. Was God smiting that notorious “Sodom” on the Bayou for its licentious “Storyville” or all that bare-breasted revelry at Mardi Gras? Maybe, we’ll have to consult His local oracles Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, who provided us with a divine motivation for 9-11. But what was Allah up to when He decided to let a panic happen on an incredibly crowded bridge during a religious observance in His honor? As if the poor people of Baghdad (mostly from the Sadr City slum) have not endured enough torment with being collaterals for the insurgents and the Americans, He had to let over 1,000 of them be crushed and drowned. At least God was an equal opportunity angry deity and flattened some expensive homes and cars, and some casinos. Is this what those Muslims get for praying five times a day, or those Red State Fundamentalist Christians get for putting the Ten Commandments in public buildings? The Lord and Allah work their wonders in mysterious ways.
Maybe I should leave divine interpretations to the credulous. But I am just as mystified at human behavior at such times. For all those who do not have their head in the sand, or are residing in a Red State, the new millennium is producing enough scientific evidence that such catastrophes that , if they are not caused by human behavior, they are at least abetted by it. You have to be the kind of useful idiot that believes the earth was created in six days to trust George Bush’s denial of global warming and the exacerbating policies that flow from his administration. Three years ago Scientific American, which is not written in chapter and verse, published a prescient article predicting just what happened the past couple of days in New Orleans. A public television documentary aired a few months ago, in which several public officials from that city were on camera worrying over just such a level of hurricane, showed computer simulations of what happened the past couple of days.
It is rather cliché now to say “disasters bring out the best and the worst in people.” I can understand some of the looting, especially if it’s of food, water, diapers, and other necessities of life (like DVD players and Rolex watches?) After all, it’s not really “stealing” if insurance is going to have to pay for it anyway. A lot of guns were apparently stolen as well, so that real idiots could fire at local rescue workers and personnel would have top be diverted from rescue work to dealing with them. Wouldn’t it be nice for the NRA to issue a public announcement asking these new gun owners to hold off a bit before going on a shooting rampage. (Not a chance)
And there must be one hell of a lot of guns down there, or perhaps some “insurgents” from Iraq have made their way over to Loosianna and Misssippi, because there are now large numbers of National Guardsmen from several states there or on the way. One wonders what good are they going to do when the news reported that a couple of sniper shots forced them to stop removing sick from a hospital for the day.
Chicken George wasn’t much faster out of the blocks on this one that he was on 9-11. I guess he was finished reading The Hungry Caterpillar, but was still busy hiding from Cindy Sheehan. After his “fly by,” if you happened to see his Rose Garden pep talk, one could not help notice the same ouch-my-hemorrhoids-are-acting-up-face and the sort of “everything’s gonna be just fine” blather he tells his screened audiences about Iraq. Meanwhile people are dying. Where are the air drops of food and water, like we did in Afghanistan, where are the SEAL teams to take out those snipers, where the use of communications systems that the military uses? Where is the technological ingenuity for the world’s most bloated defense budget? Bush fiddles while the Gulf Coast drowns.
We can’t pin this one on AQ or the Muslim extremists. But if they needed a lesson in how we behave when we are confronted with a situation that creates panic in an entire city we sure have given them a lesson in civic ineptitude. 9-11 happened fast and was so confined in its targets that our response was perhaps as good as it could be. But if an enemy is able to create a situation anything similar to what Katrina created—a biological or chemical, or a dirty bomb—we don’t inspire much confidence in our ability to respond effectively, or sufficiently, and especially to control the sort of anarchy that results if that control is not brought to bear efficaciously. They will certainly know what it takes to get Americans robbing and shooting one another.
Homeland Security is a joke. Nobody seemed to be in charge, or wanted to assume leadership. If it weren’t so tragic it would have seemed like a re-run of the Keystone Cops. This was perhaps to be expected after Bush first appointed a Texas buddy as head of FEMA, then a estate planning lawyer, neither with any disaster experience, then took it out of a cabinet-level position and folded it into Homeland Security(?). During the same time Mr. Bush was raiding the funds that were earmarked for improvement of the levees in New Orleans. Just wait for the Scott McClellan spin ‘n grin on that one.
All in all, Katrina not only is a national tragedy that might have been a lot less tragic but for the failure of government at several levels, but Bush’s behavior and the ineptitude of his administration have made it an international embarrassment to add to the international opprobrium it has earned America for its bungled war in Iraq. The USA, the country that is always touting itself as the “richest, most powerful country in the world,” looks like a clumsy, racist, tragic-comic bunch of fools in front of the whole world. Now, other countries are beginning to offer us aid, noteworthy among them, Venezuela, whose president Pat Robertson has placed a Christian fatwa upon, and who this administration tried to unseat. President Chavez is offering us some free oil, and Fidel Castro is offering doctors and medical supplies!
Speaking if aid. Where does Bush get off preying on the good will of most Americans to cough up charity (“The ‘private sector’ must do its part . . .”) when he has squandered tens of billions, much of it into the accounts of Halliburton and the other big Republican donors feeding off the Iraq war, of the taxes we have paid? This jerk has run this country (which he inherited from Bill Clinton with a $296 billion surplus ) so far into the red our great-grandchildren will be paying it off, and it is us, not his corporate cronies who are apparently not “the private sector.” Anyway, isn’t it Bush’s policies that have encouraged the rest of us to go out and buy our SUVs, RV’s, trucks and muscle cars? At $4 or $5 bucks a gallon we’re going to need some assistance in filling our tanks. Still, Americans will come through for their fellow citizens; unfortunately, they will be helping to bail out the Bush administration’s ineptitude and insensitivity.
The only thing that smells worse than a corpse floating in the filthy streets of America’s New Atlantis is the administration in Washington, D.C.
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©2005, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 9.2.2005)