Sorry Mr President,
Katrina Is Not 9/11
By Simon Schama
12 September, 2005
The
Guardian
Slipstreaming
behind the annual rituals of sorrow and reverence for 9/11, George W
Bush has decreed that, five days later, on the 16th, there is to be
a further day of solemnities on which the nation will pray for the unnumbered
victims of Hurricane Katrina. Prayers (like vacations) are the default
mode for this president who knows how to chuckle and bow the head in
the midst of disaster but not, when it counts, how to govern or to command.
If you feel the prickly heat of politics, summon a hymn to make it go
away; make accountability seem a blasphemy.
Thus has George
Bush become the Archbishop of Washington even as his aura as lord protector
slides into the putrid black lagoon, bobbing with cadavers and slick
with oil, that has swallowed New Orleans. No doubt the born-again president
is himself sincere about invoking the Almighty. But you can hear the
muttered advice in the White House: Mr President, we were in trouble
after 9/11; the unfortunate episode of the schoolroom, My Little Goat
and all that. But do what you did then; set yourself once more at the
centre of the nation; go to the epicentre of the horror and embrace
its heroes; make yourself the country's patriotic invigorator and all
may yet be well.
So this weekend it was predictable that the president would shamelessly
invoke the spirit of 9/11 to cover his shamefully exposed rear end -
"resolve of nation ... defend freedom ... rebuild wounded city
... care for our neighbours". But comparisons with 9/11 - the fourth
anniversary of which was marked in New York yesterday - will only serve
now to reinforce the differences between what the two calamities said
about America, and especially about those entrusted with its government.
The carnage of 9/11 generated an intense surge of patriotic solidarity,
even with America's Babylon, a city scandalously and notoriously indifferent
to Heartland values. This was because the mass murders had been committed
by people who defined foreignness: theocratic nihilists who equated
pluralist democracy with depravity. A hard-ass city supposedly abandoned
to the most brutal forms of aggressive individualism (a fiction it liked
to cultivate) showed instead the face of American mutualism as volunteers
poured into the smouldering toxic crater. Blood and food donations piled
up and a mayor disregarded his personal safety to be where he had to
be, in the thick of the inferno; his daily press conferences astoundingly
bullshit-free, unafraid of bearing bad news; treating his fellow-citizens,
mirabile dictu, like grown-ups.
The rest of the
country looked at Zoo York and, astoundingly, saw images and heard stories
that made themselves feel good about being American: the flag of defiance
flown by firemen amid the Gothic ruins; the countless tales of bravery
and sacrifice among those trapped inside the towers. For all the horror,
this could be made into a good epic of the American character. It was
this redeeming sense of national community that protected the president
from any kind of serious political scrutiny whenever he invoked 9/11
as the overwhelming reason for launching the invasion of Iraq. As John
Kerry found to his cost, unexamined passion triumphed over reasoned
argument. Bush won re-election simply by making debate a kind of treason;
an offence against the entombed.
Out of the genuinely
noble response to 9/11, then, came an unconscionable deceit. Out of
the ignoble response to Katrina will come a salutary truth. For along
with much of New Orleans, the hurricane has swept away, at last, the
shameful American era of the fearfully buttoned lip. Television networks
that have self-censored themselves into abject deference have not flinched
from their responsibility to show corpses drifting in the water; lines
of the forlorn and the abandoned sitting amid piles of garbage outside
the Convention Centre; patients from Charity Hospital waiting in the
broiling sun in vain for water and medical supplies; helicopters too
frightened of armed looters to actually land, but throwing bottles of
water down from their 20ft hover. Embarrassed by their ignorance of
the cesspool that was the Convention Centre, members of the government
protested that it was hard to know what was really going on "on
the ground". All they had to do was to turn on the TV to find out.
Millions of ordinary
Americans did. And what they saw, as so many of them have said, was
the brutality, destitution, desperation and chaos of the Third World.
Instead of instinctive solidarity and compassion, they have witnessed
a descent into a Hobbesian state of nature; with Leviathan offering
fly-by compassion, 30,000ft up, and then, once returned to the White
House, broadcasting a defensive laundry list of deliveries, few of which
showed up when and where they were needed. Instead of acts of mutual
succour, there was the police force of Gretna, south of New Orleans,
sealing off a bridge against incoming evacuees, and turning them back
under threats of gunfire. Instead of a ubiquitous mayor with his finger
on the pulse, and the guts to tell the truth, enter Michael Brown, a
pathetically inadequate director of the Federal Emergency Management
Agency, Fema, hounded from his 11-year tenure as supervisor of commissioners
and stewards of the International Arabian Horse Association by legal
proceedings. Instead of summarily firing "Brownie", the president
ostentatiously congratulated him on camera for doing "a heck of
a job".
Only on Friday,
in an attempt at damage control, was the hapless Brown "recalled"
to Washington, his position as Fema director intact.
And instead of an
urban community of every conceivable race, religion and even class brought
together by trauma, another kind of city, startlingly divided by race
and fortune, has symbolised everything about America that makes its
people uneasy, ashamed and, finally, perhaps lethally for the conservative
ascendancy and its myths, angry. A faint but detectable whiff of mortality
is steaming up, not just from the Louisiana mire, but from this Republican
administration. Call me a cynic but is it entirely a coincidence that
suddenly the great black hope of moderate Republicanism, Colin Powell,
is everywhere, publicly repenting of his speech to the UN (and by implication
damning those who supplied him with unreliable intelligence), and offering,
unbidden, his own lament for the institutional meltdown that followed
the breach of the levee. The administration is already thought of as
a turkey and the turkey vultures are starting to wheel.
Historians ought
not to be in the prophecy business but I'll venture this one: Katrina
will be seen as a watershed in the public and political life of the
US, because it has put back into play the profound question of American
government. Ever since Ronald Reagan proclaimed that government was
not the answer but the problem, conservatism has stigmatised public
service as parasitically unpatriotic, an anomaly in the robust self-sufficiency
of American life. For the most part, Democrats have been too supine,
too embarrassed and too inarticulate to fight back with a coherent defence
of the legitimacy of democratic government. Now, if ever, is their moment;
not to revive the New Deal or the Great Society (though unapologetically
preserving social security might be a start) but to stake a claim to
being the party that delivers competent, humane, responsive government,
the party of public trust.
For the most shocking
difference between 9/11 and Katrina was in what might have been expected
in the aftermath of disaster. For all the intelligence soundings, it
was impossible to predict the ferocity, much less the timing, of the
9/11 attacks. But Katrina was the most anticipated catastrophe in modern
American history. Perhaps the lowest point in Bush's abject performance
last week was when he claimed that no one could have predicted the breach
in the New Orleans levees, when report after report commissioned by
him, not to mention a simulation just last year, had done precisely
that. But he had cut the budget appropriation for maintaining flood
defences by nearly 50%, so that for the first time in 37 years Louisiana
was unable to supply the protection it knew it would need in the event
of catastrophe. Likewise Fema, which under Bill Clinton had been a cabinet
level agency reporting directly to the president, had under his successor
been turned into a hiring opportunity for political hacks and cronies
and disappeared into the lumbering behemoth of Homeland Security. It
was Fema that failed the Gulf; Fema which failed to secure the delivery
of food, water, ice and medical supplies desperately asked for by the
Mayor of New Orleans; and it was the president and his government-averse
administration that had made Fema a bad joke.
In the last election
campaign George W Bush asked Americans to vote for him as the man who
would best fulfil the most essential obligation of government: the impartial
and vigilant protection of its citizens. Now the fraudulence of the
claim has come back to haunt him, not in Baghdad but in the drowned
counties of Louisiana. In the recoil, disgust and fury felt by millions
of Americans at this abdication of responsibility, the president - notwithstanding
his comically self-serving promise to lead an inquiry into the fiasco
- will assuredly reap the whirlwind.