New Orleans 2005: microcosm of modern America

Hurricane Katrina hit the US Gulf Coast on Monday. As it did, twenty thousand-odd people huddled in New Orleans’s sports stadium, the Superdome. Over the succeeding days they lost air-conditioning, food and water. Lawlessness took over. Hygiene disappeared. While there was a suitable similar facility to house the refugees just one state over – the ‘Astrodome’ in Houston, Texas – this was only grasped days after the event, when the Governor of Texas announced it could be used. It’s an episode indicative of government handling of the disaster.

Three pieces appeared in Saturday’s Age on Katrina. All focus on what is emerging as a central issue – the clear, damning, failure of the United States government.

Paul Krugman: ‘It was already clear by last Friday that Katrina could do immense damage along the Gulf Coast. Yet the response you’d expect from an advanced country never happened…the evidence points, above all, to a stunning lack of preparation and urgency in the Federal Government’s response.

Gerard Wright: ‘Beyond the destruction of houses, lives and infrastructure, something disturbing has been revealed about the United States and its various levels of government…unable to take care of their own, unwilling to make even the most elementary preparations to protect a historic and beloved city’

It was an incompetent short-term response, but one grounded in long-term American belief, and it has brought to the surface shameful problems with America that that belief doesn’t deem to try and fix. 2005 New Orleans, more than 2001 New York, is the defining symbol of modern America.

There’s a simple narrative of breathtaking incompetence here. Thousands of the poor, elderly and sick were left in their slums, retirement homes and hospitals. Nobody from the government sent buses to help them get out, either before or immediately after. It was days before even close to adequate amounts of troops, food, water and medicine started to trickle into the city. Jesse Jackson commented that the response to the Asian tsunami was superior to America’s response to Katrina. But we have to interpret ‘federal government failure’ more broadly. The short-term response of the authorities to Hurricane Katrina is symptomatic of bigger problems, as Krugman seized on:

‘at a fundamental level, our leaders just aren’t serious about some of the essential functions of government.’

We can link the non-activist response from the Bush Administration to its broader ideology about government. The Bush administration’s failure to deal adequately with Katrina isn’t limited to being slow off the mark in the last few days. For years they have, through doctrinaire (albeit massively selective) ideas on the role of government*, been hampering the nation’s ability to respond to a major disaster. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA, has been starved of funds and purged of quality officials in the post-Clinton years. The Army Corps of Engineers, too, has been badly compromised: its use compromised in terms of troops and equipment for the war in Iraq. Repeated warnings that authorities were unprepared for a major hurricane on New Orleans, and that the government should do something about it, were, like the warnings of a terrorist attack pre-9/11, ignored. The Bush administration views government’s task as being entrenching tax cuts and doling out pork at home, and periodic wars abroad. For these objectives the basic business of governing within America has been neglected.

We can see the lack of, and need for, American activist government not simply in the response to New Orleans, but also in the disaster itself: the stories and photos coming from the city have brought to the surface continuous deep-set problems in American society and culture. The simple presence of people in New Orleans after a mandatory evacuation order shows the huge problem of income inequality and poverty in America: these people simply couldn’t afford to get away. That those in poverty and abandoned are almost universally black highlights America’s problem of race inequality. The sick retirees that waited for days in a retirement home, the hospitals floundering under colossal demand, the fact that infectious disease may spread due to widespread lack of immunization, all highlight America’s astonishing lack of national interest in health-care: most of the faces on TV have no public health insurance. The stories of guns and ammunition being taken from Wal-Mart stores in New Orleans and used to take pot-shots at police officers and murder fellow citizens highlights the – incomprehensible to the rest of the Western world – gun control problem in America: what are guns doing in a Wal-Mart? If that isn’t an issue that needs government attention, what is?

The prism of New Orleans – problems unsolved and government slow to get its hands dirty – conforms to the prevailing view throughout American history of the role of government, from the American Revolution, at a basic level about getting government out of people’s everyday lives, to Ronald Reagan’s message of government being the problem, not the solution, backed up by colossal tax cuts and slashed funding for most government programs. We can see it in the anti-government militants from the heartland in the 1990s: the Unabomber, Timothy McVeigh, David Koresh and the Waco siege. We can see it in many people of the rural South, even those now affected by the hurricane, who grumble about the ‘feds’ and Washington intervening in their affairs, as they grumbled about during Civil Rights; as they fought over in the Civil War.

The great paradox is these are all deeply patriotic Americans. The obvious question for an outsider to ask is: why can’t the American Dream be pursued, and American values entrenched, through government and not just individuals?

America has had its periods in which people and politicians viewed government as a tool to help improve society, an instrument to make people’s lives better. The most spectacular abandonment of the ‘small government’ ethos came with Franklin Roosevelt and the height of the Great Depression: the bleak times led people to a fundamental redrawing of federal government responsibility.

The most recent truly ‘activist’ American President leads me back to the Houston Astrodome example. Post-Katrina America will do well to remember another Texas President, Lyndon B. Johnson. LBJ would be flabbergasted at the idea that a fellow Lone Star President, let alone not being driven to sleepless overdrive by the plight of thousands of Americans, didn’t even comprehend that his home state’s resources could be used to help a neighbouring state. Growing up around extreme poverty in Depression-era Texas led Johnson to spend his political career and presidency attempting to put the federal government’s resources to work curing national ills: fixing poverty, enhancing the prospects of African-Americans, improving justice’s relationship with law and order, instituting health-care and welfare for the lower-classes. Bush and those around him, in contrast, have no interest in using government to address fundamental problems with society. The current White House prefers tax cuts, pork, and war.

New Orleans raises an important issue, for all of us but particularly Americans: what is the role of, use for, government? Surely it is to, even in minor ways, manage and regulate society? Katrina makes obvious a minimum role for government. It should organise buses for starving, dying people to be transported out of a disaster zone. It should marshal what resources it can to prevent levees bursting. It should keep order in the streets and prevent or punish theft, murder and rape. It should preserve cities and human lives. It should join the dots between states and regions of the country, dots so simple as shifting people from a sports stadium in a disaster zone to a sports stadium away from one.

The question then is, will Americans ‘join the dots’ between the chaos in the Gulf and the ideological attitude in Washington? It’s a question writers in The Age focused on too:

Krugman: ‘after 9/11, hard questions were deferred in the name of national unity, then buried under a thick coat of whitewash. This time, we need accountability’

Howell Raimes: ‘the sacrifices of New Orleans need a kind of national reckoning that would enable our people to see the President Who Forgot to Care for what he is’

Krugman: ‘America, once famous for its can-do attitude, now has a can’t-do Government that makes excuses instead of doing its job. And while it makes those excuses, Americans are dying.’

Pretty strong stuff, even for the decidedly anti-Bush New York Times. It’s been suggested elsewhere that this may be the beginning of the end for Bush’s popularity and prospects.

Let’s return once more to LBJ. Americans initially embraced his initiatives. They were persuaded in large part of the need to reform their society in the wake of another national tragedy, the Kennedy assassination. What sunk him was domestic overstretch, coupled with Vietnam and a failing economy. What that proves is American’s attitude to government fluctuates. They have, on multiple occasions, been convinced of the need for an active role for the federal government. Perhaps the post-Katrina period will mark a return to ideas of, if not big government, at least bigger government than currently, with a more proactive focus, that sees problems coming and tackles them. Prospective Democratic Presidents looking to 2008 may do well to launch their campaign in, and frame their liberal politics around, New Orleans.

This was originally posted on my blog, davidfettlingbycharlesdickens.blogspot.com, where I expect to pen some more thoughts on Katrina and America that the PIS will be spared.


* It must be said that considerable evidence paints Bush as diverting somewhat from this path. ‘Compassionate conservatism’ was about utilising government resources to drive the conservative agenda. Bush is the highest Presidential spender in forty years, funneling money into various departments, some noble, like education, and some dubiously ‘porky’, like prescription drug benefits. His central constituency of religious conservatives sometimes leads him to get government on to people’s backs, e.g. gay marriage and, possibly, abortion. In major respects, however, Bush very much subscribes to the minimal government mantra. The Bush tax cuts are infused with ideology; so too his Social Security reforms are grounded in a belief in weaning people off state dependence. The term that I’ve heard that best sums Bush up is ‘contradictory conservative’.