Is New Orleans The New Pompeii?

• Rebuild New Orleans For Next Disaster? For What?
• Mayor Roy Nagin Could Benefit From “Rudy Guliani Syndrome”
• Condi, Colin, Obama, Jesse, NAACP & CBC Come To Stage

by Kevin J. Walker

thewordnetpaper@excite.com; http://www.geocities.com/walkerworld_2000/politics

The news of the human, property, psychic and political damage of Hurricane Katerina is dominating all else, with other news vainly trying to bogart into the limelight.

The destruction of large swaths of the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, parts of Alabama and Florida, and the submergence of four fifths of the city of New Orleans is very much an Africans in America crisis.

The images are being beamed into every home and over much of the world of what used to be America’s second largest population group in a genuine crises of nature and compounded by the foibles of bureaucrats and the loss of civility of a severely stressed population.

The goings on and the 24 hour news cycle is feeding images that are beyond anything cooked up on reality TV, and the added appeal is that is really real. No electricity, so bank ATMs don’t work, even if people could swim down to them. Cities find their populations swelling as a steady stream of refugees/evacuees head Anywhere But Here.

Women’s rights as a concept is laughable, and the handicapped and those with medical conditions like diabetes or in need of dialysis realize that in a less technologically advanced and caring world they would as well be in the Middle Ages or in a jungle somewhere, where life is nasty, brutish and short.

For those of African Descent, they’re getting a small taste of what their ancestors must have gone through post Emancipation when they were turned out of the plantations and mansions. They were free, but free to do and be what?

Its like an episode of TVs “Lost” except its real, and new showings are everyday with an extended run that won’t be canceled anytime soon.

We see the images of the looters/borrowers/survivalists; and the affected and the disaffected who are predominately all low income people now, even if they weren’t before their city and coastline was covered with several feet of water brought inland from the Gulf of Mexico. DEFINITION OF TERMS - “REFUGEES” OR “EVACUEES?” We hear the nit-pikking over language, whether the traditional definition of “refugee” is used, or the United Nations and political version which apparently upsets some since they think it denies citizenship to those whom a semantics debate is the furthest thing from their shell-shocked and traumatized minds as they seek refuge from the elements and are evacuated by the authorities from a destroyed city and region.

But just for the record, here the terms are used interchangeably, although I prefer the passive term “evacuees,” which is certainly apt as the more than 1 million displaced from the region try and get their minds around whatever is to become of them as their world was turned upside down, blown aside and then drowned for good measure. I’ll bet they couldn’t possibly care less what they are called, just help them is all they want and need. Food, clothes, shelter, safety and security, and sleep.

They see the images of Roy Nagin, the Mayor of New Orleans, an unlikely leader even when the former cable company executive was surprisingly elected two years ago. He is in a position to become the same sort of political icon that New York Mayor Rudy Guliani did after September 11, when he took charge of a devastated city and a psychically scarred and scared population.

Now they’re talking of running Guliani as a GOP presidential candidate against New York Senator Hillary Clinton who is expected to make a run for the Presidency in 2008, if she can just get past Condoleeza Rice. (Keep reading, and remember: you didn’t hear any of this from me!).

MAYOR ROY NAGIN COULD RIDE THIS TO GREATER HEIGHTS

Nagin’s initial outbursts could be forgiven and may even be politically and personally beneficial. Such moral outrage at the sluggishness of rescue operations for his city, and his move Heaven-and-Earth attitude from an elected leader is something the American people could respond to.

In other words, Nagin could be in the position of being catapulted onto the national stage, which was something Philadelphia Mayor Nelson Goode was being groomed for when he dropped a deadly firebomb on his own city and people during the MOVE standoff in 1992. Vice presidential candidate at first, then upward from that was the plan.

Now, Goode is a shamed and virtually exiled figure because not even White people want someone who would show such reprehensible and spineless bad judgment, and the Democrats have been looking for a personable Black male proto-candidate ever since.

Sen. Barack Obama has been trying for some Post Katrina face time, but as an Illinois official three states away that would be difficult and a bit impolitic, and only shameless self promoters such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton even try and do things like that! (But you didn’t hear that from me!).

SEN. BARACK OBAMA COULD SEIZE STATESMAN ROLE

There is a possible opening for Sen. Obama. His fellow Illinois Congressman Rep. Dennis Hastert has said something that is on many thoughtful and forward looking minds: that New Orleans shouldn’t be rebuilt for human habitation at the bottom of a flood prone bowl caught between a 40 mile wide lake, an erratic Mississippi river, and the tides of the Gulf of Mexico, which just happens to be the world’s largest.

Sen. Barack Obama could act as the statesman and be the Good Cop, taking on his fellow stater and so elevate his profile. And if you don’t think this has occurred to he and his people, then you lack the cynicism and mistrust necessary to be a political analyst and commentator!

Mayor Nagin could be a future Congressman or even US Senatorial candidate with his now elevated profile. Since it will be months before New Orleans is ready for even the partial industrial rebuilding that some are starting to advocate instead of moving people back into a dangerous low-lying death trap, there will be many months and opportunities for the loquacious Mayor Nagin to remain on the national and media scene.

MISSISSIPPI GULF COAST REBUILDS WHILE LOUISIANA DEVOLVES

One thing that is also being seen is what is not happening: Black people not looting and acting crazy over in Mississippi and Alabama, which received the head-on 170 mile and hour winds and sea surge from Hurricane Katrina.

The differences between the two areas are stark. All things are equal -- most of the people involved are of African descent, but one city of the region is lawless and so self destructive and illogical they shoot at people who are coming to save them and their neighbors; the others are sensibly banding together to get their city and towns back on track and restore quality of life and much needed commerce.

In Gulf Port, Mississippi the lights are starting to come back on, and gasoline stations are opening up for business. The people of the area have rolled up their sleeves instead of collapsing into a self-destructive homicidal spiral that necessitated martial law.

New Orleans, however is depopulated, flooded, and covered with a sewage and corpse-strewn, West Nile carrying mosquito larvae, hungry alligators, and cotton mouth serpent-infested toxic soup that has rendered the city uninhabitable while the contractors and Army Corps of Engineers try and restore functionality to its infrastructure.

And snipers are shooting at the workers and rebuilders whenever they show up with their tools! Meanwhile, the pumps needed to remove the floodwaters are themselves unusable and underwater, and without electricity.

And when they are working they only dump the water right back into Lake Pontchartrain, which is what flooded New Orleans in the first place when it was filled past overflowing with the rains of Hurricane Katrina!

In other words, despite all that brave talk about the city rising again, bigger and better, blah blah, blah, New Orleans is pretty much screwed as a place of human habitation. (But you didn’t hear that from me!)

The unprecedented is now on the verge of becoming reality with the loss of a major American convention and tourist city, as well as a hub for train travel, a port city that delivers the Midwest’s agricultural and other goods up and down the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico.

The region is also the resource nexus of a region that provides a major portion of the nation’s energy supplies. Wisconsin is already hurting; our farmers have summer’s crops ready to move through its unusable ports, and we receive our fuel oil, gasoline and natural gas through Louisiana’s gulf pipelines.

EVACUEES NOT ALL ANGELS, SOME HAVE REAL ISSUES

The images of shooting and robbing in sunlit streets is enough to have people be cautioned about opening their homes to the affected from New Orleans, especially from the infamous lower Ninth Ward. Many of these people, although they have suffered mightily aren’t exactly the sharpest knives in the drawer, and have spent the major portions of their lives as victims of one or another condition or crisis.

And that’s why they ended up in the predicament they found themselves after ignoring repeated orders to get the hell out of town two days earlier, instead of trying to ride out a Force 4 hurricane that tossed oil platforms onto beaches and steel ships a mile inland like they were bathtub toys.

Also, many of those who intentionally stayed behind in a disaster-struck and deserted city are criminally prone, hoping to break without much challenge into the homes of an evacuated city. The die-hard, hard core of these are the very ones taking potshots at the US military and reconstruction forces who are trying to restore normalcy to New Orleans.

We’ll see for ourselves soon enough: Milwaukee is slated to receive a caravan of 1500 people from Louisiana in a day or two, as other states are urged to take some of the pressure off a beleaguered Texas, which has been guarding the highways into the state and turning away buses trucking in more refugees of which it has about a quarter million and counting.

“You’d better have those people screened” the open hearted families were told by those in the know, lest they have some of these anti-social elements with serious drug, attitudinal, sexual and behavioral issues in their homes, and import a heap’a trouble from Louisiana. (But: you didn’t hear that from me!).

JESSE JACKSON FLIES IN, READY FOR HIS CLOSE-UP

Rev. BabyDaddy, I mean Jesse Jackson, has of course inserted himself into the fray, fighting the effects of jet lag from visiting with the president of Venezuela and mediating without being asked about the recent controversy concerning an utterance by the fellow Reverend Pat Robertson musing that it might be better for America to knock off the troublesome but freely elected South American president.

If there are TV cameras, media notepads and microphones around then you can bet Jackson will be winging his way there, using the personal jetliner he received from the Democratic party as a bribe so he wouldn’t run for president again, then not get the nomination and cause Black voters on which they depend to stay home and coast them another national election, meanwhile scaring off their needed White voters.

This is why there was the excellent quote by an astute African American observer of the Washington scene:

“Jesse Jackson is just like a Terrorist. All he wants is some money and a plane!” (But you didn’t hear that from me!)

GRADE = F: FEMA, HOMELAND SECURITY FLUNK REAL WORLD TEST

If the response to the near-miss of Hurricane Katrina and the destruction of a city was anything like the reaction to a perceived terrorist strike that many feel is likely to happen some day then America’s bureaucracy and infrastructure has failed the test miserably. The disruption of a region the size of the British Isles completely threw their scenarios planning into the trash heap.

Both FEMA and Homeland Security dropped the ball, and have shown any terrorists watching how easy it would be to disrupt America and how little prepared we really are for any coordinated attack.

Turning upon ourselves, bureaucratic inertia, finger-pointing, buck-passing and butte covering may show that more Americans were killed by government inaction on the city, state and federal levels than Hurricane Katrina did when it pushed the waters of the Gulf into the coast.

The notion is chilling of all those people down there slowly starving and expiring who are trapped in their hot attics, too weak to chop themselves out. Even if they could get out there were doubtless many who were scared to come out if they could, lest they be set upon by the marauders who were shooting at anything that looked official, even and especially rescuers it seemed, is something that many in America will have to deal even though they be thousands of miles away.

We think: just suppose that happened here? What would we do? Would I be a Looter, or having to barricade my house and ready to gun down would-be home invaders trying to get in at our food, shelter, my wife and daughter?

This is the real fascination of New Orleans. No reality TV could compete with this. There’s everything: tragedy of loss, sacrifice; uplifting stories of people coming together under adversity; families separated from one another; there are heroes and villains. The movie scriptwriters will be busy for a long time after this one.

LOOTING, LIES & VIDEOTAPE

The race factor, crime and punishment, and discussions of situational ethics are in the mix as well about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Peggy Noonan was the late President Ronald Reagan’s speech writer who is now a political commentator. Her column last week put the looting business into perspective.

To break into a place and get the items “for one’s survival isn’t looting, its sanity” she wrote, and was quoted by Charlie Sykes on his morning radio show at WTMJ-620 AM.

Sykes reiterated, saying it wasn’t a crime to take the items needed to survive from a store that was closed, with goods that were going to be ruined or spoiled, and where there were no clerks on duty at the checkout line.

“If the window was smashed, yeah, I’d go in there” the Conservative pundit said.

Sykes made a distinction between taking what a family needs to survive a crisis and looting items such as electronics, watches, jewelry, expensive team clothes and the like.

SO MUCH FOR GUN CONTROL!

Meanwhile, there are intimations that the nation was going to have to be prepared for the horrific sights and news of what are estimated to be at least 10,000 deaths in New Orleans alone.

The “Mad Max: Thunder Dome” Apocalyptic scenarios of a breakdown of society and a return to the Law Of The Jungle and Might Makes Right have been shocking and thought provoking to the American sensitivities, and shows how thin the veneer of civilization is where some people are concerned.

It has also driven another nail in the coffin into the drive for Gun Control.

Those who had the guns were the Bad Guys, and they used their looted weaponry, taken from the gun shoppes and departments of Wal-Marts and other discount stores to oppress everybody else, even the police whose frenzied calls to police dispatch were that they were pinned down in a running gun battle and “under fire and running out of ammunition,” as if it were a scene from a Hollywood action adventure movie like “Assault On Precinct 13.”

CONDI RICE ASSUMES LEADERSHIP ROLE IN DOMESTIC CRISIS

Condoleeza Rice, Secretary of State appeared on the syndicated Michael Reagan radio show out of southern California to talk about the federal efforts to repair the south central and Gulf Coast areas after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina a week before.

The Black woman with the Homegirl first name who could end up being the first female elected to the Presidency of the United States has been prematurely but providentially thrust into the domestic arena. The offer from more than 40 nations to aid in the relief for Hurricane Katrina is within the purview of America’s Prime Minister, which is how the rest of the world views what we call our Secretary of State who deals with other countries.

Those who are looking forward to a matchup between New York Senator Hillary Clinton and Condoleeza Rice are slavering at the prospect, and this was a good test of Condi’s skills which brought her into a domestic crisis where ordinarily a Secretary of State wouldn’t even have a stateside part.

Michael Reagan: “You’re from Louisiana, aren’t you?”

Rice: “My father is from Louisiana. I am from Alabama, and its a part of the country that I know well,” said Rice.

Although known as a Californian, Condoleeza Rice is originally from Birmingham, Alabama, and knew the girls who were blown up in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, which was a local meeting place and beehive during the Civil Rights Era in the early 1960s when a White man, grinning and nodding and seemingly friendly to the trusting Black people and sympathetic to The Cause, placed a powerful bomb against the outside wall next to the area where the girls changed their clothes to sing in the choir.

Another famous Black woman noted as a Californian who has parallels with Condi Rice but went on a different track was Angela Davis, also from the city the locals at the time nicknamed “Bombingham” and who also knew the 4 little girls. Davis’ life and philosophy went on another way entirely, but this event had an effect on both women’s development.

This could make an interesting article itself one day about these two women from similar Black Middle Class backgrounds whose paths widely diverged. One working within the system and achieving positions of power and authority, becoming as much as a woman can become The Man. The other, an activist against the very system and at one time advocating its overthrow.

COLIN POWELL MAY RE-ASCEND STAGE AS ‘RECOVERY CZAR’

Colin Powell’s name has been floated as a person to head a cabinet level recovery department for the Gulf Coast region. Rice’s predecessor in the Secretary of state position is another person who could walk into the GOP presidential candidacy for the asking.

Powell’s stature remains strong; the former general and head of the Joint chiefs of Staff and commander of the Pentagon, was a reluctant but effective prosecutor of the first Iraq Gulf War. And it was he who cautioned Bush the Younger on getting involved in Iraq with his referencing of the Powell “Crate and Barrel Rule:” ”You Break It, You Bought It.” People can’t but be reminded daily of his foresight.

He discouraged a “Draft Colin Powell” movement for the job in 1992 and 1996 until he made it clear that he wasn’t interested, even though people tried to prevail on his sense of duty insisting that his country needed his services just this one last time. But even this old soldier can’t mollify his wife Alma who is reportedly fraught with the idea that he’d be assassinated if elected. Besides, he makes millions as a speaker and consultant. (But you didn’t hear that from me!).

As a former military man -- if there really is such a thing -- Powell could get things on and cracking down in Louisiana, since a military presence and frame of mind is what is needed on the ground. The process of delivery coordination of services and even fighting the local domestic version of the insurgents is something that calls for Powell’s particular skill set.

They wouldn’t last long, and people also remember what he said coldly about what he was going to do to Saddam’s army and vaunted Republican Guard: “First we’re going to cut it off, then we’re going to kill it.” Don’t play with that man!

COMING TO A THEATRE TO YOU?

Powell’s participation also would go a long ways toward integrating a multi-city response to something like another September 11th terrorist strike, which this natural disaster exposed has severe shortcomings. On 9-11 police and firefighter radio frequencies didn’t match, so they couldn’t even communicate and coordinate with each other.

Within a few months there will be real movies of the disaster of Hurricane Katrina, with the villains being the bureaucratic bungling. They’ll be churned out first out of the chute by television and cable who have faster production times, then later big-budget extravaganzas with Hollywood name actors at theatres.

People will think they learned something from this drawn out disaster and the resultant controversy. Just like they did after the Branch Davidians and the siege at Waco, the jetliner bombings of September 11, the Challenger and Columbia Space Shuttle disasters, and the Rev. Jim Jones Cult mass killings in the Central American jungle of Guyana.

If some of these past disasters that took up so much TV time and ink take a moment to recall, that is the point exactly. Just at one time the Tsunami of December 26 that killed nearly a quarter million people once consumed our attention, then we move on until the next crisis. --kjw

by Kevin J. Walker,

thewordnetpaper@excite.com, p.o. box 1324-53201 milwaukee wis usa 53201 http://www.geocities.com/walkerworld_2000/politics