Emerging New Orleans Stories

The stories coming out of New Orleans this week are not encouraging. "Be careful what you wish for" - last week we were wondering where the feds were, where the military were - now - they're in New Orleans, but are acting, according to some reports, like an occupying army. Granted, much of this is anecdotal - but there is a lot of it, and so far, it's all fit with what was around last week.

This story has been getting a lot of play on the blogs. It's by two paramedics who were attending a conference, were trapped in New Orleans by the hurricane, and had the devil's time getting out. It confirms, of all things, Geraldo Rivera's hysterical bit about letting the people walk out of the city: the paramedics had been at a hotel - they left, passed the conference center and - having been told there were buses across the river, tried to cross the bridge to Gretna - and were turned back by police. Later (after the news of the people trying to cross the bridge got out?), the police dispersed the people waiting on the freeway. Digby has some comments - making the salient point that any effective attempt to cope with the catastophe has to start with meeting basic needs - water, food, some degree of security. Once that's there, people move on - cooperate, think about how to get out, etc. The excuse given for FEMA not letting the Red Cross into New Orleans is that "relief operations" might encourage people to stay in New Orleans - but it seems far more likely that getting food and water and whatever other relief the Red Cross could get to the city would have reassured the evacuees, cut down the desperation, fear, and so on, made the evacuation operation go much better.

Meanwhile - here is another eyewitness account, from a French tourist in the superdome - complete with stories of callousness from the National Guard. That - like the stories of rapes and murders in the superdome - sounds very likely to be fairly isolated and uncommon. But with 30,000 people crammed into a building, or being stuffed into buses outside, one or two incidents will be observed by a lot of people, and the stories will spread, and... I don't know that: but the stories coming out now tend to indicate that violence and evil were far less widespread than were reported in the media. (Here's a good story, from the Lenin's Tomb blog, summarizing and discussing these stories.) It's being noted that the stories about looting probably drove soe of the panicky decisions to keep rescuers out of New Orleans until security could be restored (when, of course, the easiest way to have restored security would have been to feed everyone and maybe give them a clean place to take a crap, and give them a straight answer on when they could get out.) Someone (I don't remember who - a peril of getting news from the internet) pointed out that the stories of violence and horror in the superdome were pushed to emphasize the importance of dealing with the problems there - and might have gotten the attention of the government, enough that, by the weekend at least, they seemed resigned to letting the people stuck in New Orleans live. But those stories also probably slowed down response, and are being used now to justify drastic security measures - the Red Cross may or may not b in New Orleans - the Hessians are there!

Another disturbing possibility is this - Josh Marshall has evidence that the government is cutting off press access to New Orleans. His evidence comes from wild-eyed radicals like Brian Williams - "the fact that the National Guard now bars entry (by journalists) to the very places where people last week were barred from LEAVING (The Convention Center and Superdome) is a kind of perverse and perfectly backward postscript to this awful chapter in American history". Now - since seeing that post, I have seen a few stories from other journalists and blogs that journalists have good access to the city still - it' hard to say what is going on. Obviously, it is crucial that the press have access to the city - it is bad enough that the press has been fairly well censored in Iraq - it would be a Very Bad Thing if the same standards were applied on American soil.

I don't know what kinds of conclusions I can draw from this. There is to much information to process, and it's all - almost every single bit of it - raw, limited, impressionistic - eyewitness accounts, specific news reports, etc. - it is almost impossible to put together a complete picture of what happened and what is happening.

One conclusion that suggests itself, though, is that the official response to this crisis is just as piecemeal, confused, uncoordinated as the news. Nothing at all has emerged indicating that FEMA has been able to mount any kind of coherent coordinated response to this crisis. The Respectful of Otters blog has a good post about the lack of coordination among what has been, in fact, a pretty damned impressive response to this crisis. It's been fun scoring theoretical political points in the wake of this crisis, but - there are some good ones to score. This is what governments are for. This is also, probably, an indication of both the limits of capitalism, and the reasons why capitalism itself requires a reliable government to work correctly. Capitalism - in the sense of individuals and organizations acting in their own interests - can get people to act, and has, in this instance. (And let me say this: anyone who thinks that it is not in their interests to help their fellow citizens in a time of need is a fool. The simplest reason is that the interests of the people directly affected by this hurricane are our interests - "they" are we. It is gratifying to see that this view is shared by a very large number of private citizens, cities and states, corporations, etc. Even if Sean Penn brings a crew of photographers along - he's there and he's helping people.) But for it to work, there has to be something guiding it - especially in a crisis of this magnitude. Someone has to be in charge. Someone has to be able to coordinate between the various kinds of rescue operations going on - between the local cops protecting their neighborhoods (to put the best possible spin on the bridge story) and the people trying to leave the city, between Walmart's donated water, Aaron Broussard, and whoever got that water instead of Broussard - and so on. That seems to be completely missing - no one seems to have been aware of everything going on - no one seems to have been trying to line up all the potential sources of aid - no one was making sure all the i's were dotted and t's were crossed to get government resources onto the scene - no one was assessing the aid that was coming in and making sure it was being used effectively (the story of the firemen being trained as leafletters has caused justifiable outrage)... No one was in charge.