At the Front of Nowhere at All
The Perfect Storm and the Feral City

By Tom Engelhardt Editor at larg

The headline was: "Direct hit in New Orleans could mean a modern Atlantis," and the first paragraph of the story read: "More than 1.2 million people in metropolitan New Orleans were warned to get out Tuesday as [the] 140-mph hurricane churned toward the Gulf Coast, threatening to submerge this below-sea-level city in what could be the most disastrous storm to hit in nearly 40 years." That was USA Today and the only catch was -- the piece had been written on September 14, 2004 as Hurricane Ivan seemed to be barreling toward New Orleans.

I commented at the time: "When ‘Ivan the Terrible' threatened New Orleans, correspondents there had a field day discussing whether the city might literally disappear beneath the waves -- this was referred to as the ‘Atlantis scenario.'" I was then trying to point out that we might indeed be entering a new, globally warmed world of Xtreme weather and no connections whatsoever were being made in the media. At the time, global warming, if discussed at all, was a captive of the far north (melting glaciers, unnerved Inuit, robins making miraculous appearances in Alaska), and "Atlantis scenarios" were the property of distant islands like the atolls that make up the tiny South Pacific nation of Tuvalu, threatened with abandonment due to rising ocean waters and ever fiercer, ever less seasonal storms And yet just short of a year ago, not only was it well known that New Orleans' levees weren't fit for a class 5 hurricane or that the Bush administration was slashing the budget of the Army Corps of Engineers, but the "Atlantis scenario" was already somewhere on the collective mind. Now, it has been upon us for almost a week. {mosgoogle right}

Much of New Orleans has become the Atlantis from hell, a toxic sludge pool of a looted former city, filled with dead bodies, burning in places, threatened with diseases like cholera and typhus that haven't visited the Big Easy since early in the last century, and with thousands upon thousands of the black poor and a few of the stranded better-to-do like doctors, nurses, and a few local officials left for days on end with next to no way out. It is, in short, the feral city that thirty years of science fiction films (and post-apocalyptic novels) have delivered to the American public as entertainment as well as prophesy. (Think, Escape from New York).

Now, try this passage: "The evacuation of New Orleans in the face of [the] hurricane... looked sinisterly like Strom Thurmond's version of the Rapture. Affluent white people fled the Big Easy in their SUVs, while the old and car-less -- mainly Black -- were left behind in their below-sea-level shotgun shacks and aging tenements to face the watery wrath." Admittedly a vivid description, but certainly commonplace enough at the moment -- except that it, too, was written back in September 2004 by Mike Davis, also for Tomdispatch, and prophetically labeled, "Poor, Black, and Left Behind." It, too, concerned not Katrina's but Ivan's approach to New Orleans. So there we are. It was possible to know then the fundaments of just about everything that's happened now -- and not just from Tomdispatch either.

In the last week, we've seen many of the black poor of New Orleans not only left behind in a new Atlantis, but thousands upon thousands of them -- those who didn't die in their wheelchairs, or on highway overpasses, or in the ill-fated convention center, or unattended and forgotten in their homes -- sent off on what looked very much like a new trail of tears. Right now, above all, New Orleans and the Mississippi coast, as so many reporters have observed with shock, are simply the Bangladesh of North America (after a disastrous set of monsoons), or a Kinshasa (without the resources). Soon, if Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert has anything to do with it, the city may simply be consigned to the slagheap of history or a lot of it, as he so delicately put it to a suburban weekly in Illinois (where a few farmers who need the crucial deep water port of New Orleans to send their upcoming crops onto the global market may take umbrage), perhaps "bulldozed." Someday, Katrina may be seen as the "perfect storm," the harbinger of a future for which we remain far more adamantly, obdurately unwilling to prepare than even the Bush administration was for this localized "Atlantis scenario."

Iraq in America: Parallels and Connections

New Orleans is not the only toxic sludge pool in sight. Let's not forget the toxic sludge pool of Bush administration policy which came so clearly into view as Katrina ripped the scrim off our society, revealing an Iraqi-style reality here at home. Unlike conquered and occupied Iraq, the strip-mining of this country in recent years has taken place largely out of sight. While Baghdad was turned into some kind of dead zone of insecurity, lack of electricity, lack of gas, lack of jobs, lack of just about everything a human being in a modern city has come to expect, American cities -- until last week -- stood seemingly untouched in what was still proudly called "the world's last superpower." But just out of sight, the coring, gutting, and dismantling of the civilian governmental support system of the United States, that famed "safety net," was well underway. Bush administration proponents and conservative ideologues had long talked about "starving the beast"; but, until Katrina hit, it remained for many Americans at best a kind of political figure of speech.

Now we know for real. The beast has been starved; or rather, the beasts have been fed and the much-maligned part of the state that protected its citizens with something other than guns has been starved. What Katrina's course through Mississippi and Louisiana revealed was the real meaning of starvation. It seems we no longer have the capacity for a full-scale civilian response to a major disaster. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), absorbed into the Department of Homeland Security and led by an incompetent who had been fired from his previous job as head of the International Arabian Horse Association, has had "its ties to state emergency programs… weakened, and… has reduced spending on disaster preparation." In the same way, we now know that the Army Corps of Engineers was financially reined in on crucial levee work in New Orleans. Much of this sort of thing was done under the guise of preparing for, or fighting, or funding the war on terror at home and abroad. Many pundits, for instance, have remarked on the obvious fact -- which had previously worried the governors of many states -- that significant chunks of the National Guard and, just as important for disaster relief, its heavy equipment are to be found in Iraq, not here to be called upon in an emergency. (And when the avian flu, or the next health disaster, suddenly hits our country, consider it a guarantee -- the media will again be filled with the same sort of shock about the civilian response to the crisis, because our public health system has also been gutted and de-funded under the guise of the war on terrorism.)

Over the last years, just about everything of a helping nature that is governmental, other than the military, has begun to be starved or stripped by the looters of this administration -- set loose in Washington rather than Baghdad or New Orleans. If you want a signal of this, we should all be wincing every time the President gets up, as he did the other day in the presence of his father and Bill Clinton, and shakes the tin cup, urging "the private sector" and generous citizens to fill in -- an impossibility -- for what his administration won't pony up.

The Bush people undoubtedly thought that they would be able to slip out of town in 2008 without paying the price. But when Katrina roared onto the vulnerable coasts of Mississippi and Louisiana, it swept all of the Bush administration's devastating policies -- environmental, fiscal, energy, and military, as well as its plans for the unraveling of the civilian infrastructure -- into a perfect storm of policy catastrophe that, ironically, may threaten the administration itself. By the time motorists in non-disaster states return from a Labor Day with $3-4 a gallon (or more) gas (and possibly long lines) to an ongoing catastrophe which will take months, if not our lifetime, to fully unfold, it's possible that the levees of the President's base of support -- that 40% which still approved of his administration in the latest Gallup Poll, conducted the week before Katrina hit -- will have been breached for the first time.

Think of our last two years in Iraq, which has left the world's most powerful military running on baling wire and duct tape, as a kind of coming attractions for Katrina. In fact, so many bizarre connections or parallels are suggested by the Bush administration's war in Iraq as to stagger the imagination. Here are just six of the parallels that immediately came to my mind: