We Failed You? Try Again.

Jim Geraghty - National Review

New Orleans novelist, Anne Rice, blames America, not local
officials..

"To my country I want to say this: During this crisis you failed us.
Youlooked down on us; you dismissed our victims; you dismissed us. You
want our Jazz Fest, you want our Mardi Gras, you want our cooking and
our music. Then when you saw us in real trouble, when you saw a tiny
minority preying on the weak among us, you called us "Sin City," and
turned your backs." - novelist and New Orleans resident Anne Rice

Let me get this straight.

Ms. Rice, you live in (what was) a very attractive city which lies
below sea level. On one side you have a giant lake; on the other side
you have the Gulf of Mexico. Running through the middle is the
Mississippi River. All of which are above you.

Preventing those giant bodies of water from flooding and drowning you
are levees. These levees are described as "century-old." People have
been warning about the devastating effects of a direct hit from a
hurricane for decades.

I've heard a great deal of complaint in recent days that the federal
government may not ha! ve allocated enough money to speed up the
upgrades to those levees. This does, however, raise the question of why
city and state residents were waiting around for the federal
government to send enough money to upgrade this, instead of paying for
it themselves. I mean, it was only your homes, businesses, and lives at
stake. Perhaps these upgrades would have been expensive. If only this
city had some sort of events to attract tourists, from which to collect
taxes!

Anyway, your state and local officials decided to spend your tax
dollars on something else that they (and presumably you) found more
important, and then they waited for the rest of the country to pay for
these life-preserving necessities.

Your beloved city and region has a colorful political history, in
which there is, oh, a wee bit of corruption. I'm from New Jersey, so
can't throw stones at that glass house. But you guys have managed to
pick leaders who give you the worst of both worlds - they're scandal
ridden and incompetent in a crisis. Look, Rudy Giuliani might have run
around with Judith Nathan before his divorce, but he was a hell of a
leader in our darkest hours. You know the National Review crowd isn't a
fan of Pataki, but the man was a rock after 9/11 compared to Governor
Weepy I'll-Evacuate-Eventually and Mayor
It's-Everybody's-Fault-Except-Mine.
Nobody's throwing around the adjective "Churchillian" about any of
your officials these days. We didn't pick your local officials; you
guys did.

Rice asks, "how many times did Gov. Kathleen Blanco have to say that
the situation was desperate? How many times did Mayor Ray Nagin have to
call for aid?"

Ahem. What about those buses left unused, less than a mile from the
Superdome? JunkYardBlog notes that it's written in the Southeast
Louisiana Evacuation Plan that buses are supposed to be used for
evacuation of those who don't have personal vehicles. As JYB observes,
"there is something very peculiar about a city and a state that have a
plan on the books for years that outlines what to do when a hurricane
is about to strike, yet when a hurricane comes roaring in, the
responsible officials just chuck the plan and try winging it. Delaying
and then winging it in the face of a monstrous Cat 4/5 hurricane is
never, ever a good idea, especially for New Orleans." (See more here.)
Ironically, Nagin told CNN, "I need buses, man," when he had plenty
sitting around unused before the storm hit. Now they're floo! ded and
useless. But it's not like state and local officials could have seen
this coming.
They have never had a hurricane bearing down on them before and oh,
wait, there was Hurricane Ivan just last year. And after that dodged
bullet, Blanco and Nagin both acknowledged they needed a better
evacuation plan.

I would note that we've seen some pretty intense disasters in other
parts of the country, like planes crashing into skyscrapers and
subsequently collapsing, earthquakes, tornadoes, blizzards, and yet
somehow, none of these disasters had the total breakdown of law and
order, civil society, etc. Jonah Goldberg's early joke about a Mad-Max
style post-apocalyptic tribal anarchy may have been in poor taste, but
it has turned out to be nightmarishly prescient.

We failed you? No, oh brilliant creator of Exit to Eden, you failed.
You might not think of it this way, but: Your leaders failed to upgrade
the levees. You elected a bunch of weepers and blame-shifters who lost
their head in a crisis.

Over the past decades, your elected officials have let a criminal
element incubate and grow until they ruled the streets, instead of
the forces of law and order. In pop culture, a New Orleans thief is
always a charming rogue with a devilish smile. In reality, they're a
bunch of thugs.

If the number of residents who are looting thugs were such a "tiny
minority," we wouldn't have seen this widespread, relentless anarchy.
Madam, a noticeable number of your neighbors saw this disaster as an
opportunity to smash a window and run away with a television, an act
that reveals much about the inadequacies of the local school system,
since that thief won't be enjoying that television with any electricity
anytime soon.

I would also note that this is one hell of a police force your local
officials hired and that you and your neighbors tolerated. 50 percent
turned in their badges during the crisis and quit. Your police
superintendent is conceding that some cops were looting. Just want to
refresh your memory - four years ago, New York and Washington, planes
falling out of the sky, thousands dead, no idea what the hell is
coming next and the cops, among others, showed up to work.

To save you guys now, I - and a lot of other Americans - will pitch
in. We are witnessing the biggest mobilization of civilian and military
rescue and relief crews in history. But I have a sneaking suspicion
you're going to want the rest of us to pay for the rebuilding of your
city. (In the near future, we're going to have to have a little chat
about the wisdom of building below sea level, directly next to large
bodies of water.) And if you're going to come to the rest of us hat in
hand, demanding the rest of us clean up after your poor judgment, I'd
appreciate a little less "you failed us" and a little more "we've
learned our lesson."