a few nola - katrina updates
September 5th, 2005 by admin
I need to get off of this topic for a while, and I want to avoid turning this site into the soapbox and rantfest my last journal became, so let me just add a couple of quick updates to the notes below.
Earlier I linked to an article describing how volunteer boaters hoping to assist in rescue efforts were turned away by FEMA. There’s a video that goes with that story which I couldn’t find right off, but here it is now. Definitely worth viewing – it’s a firsthand look from an independent source.
Also I want to draw attention to a Washington Monthly link at the bottom of that article which I missed the first time around, in which Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu describes the cynical (and sickening) media manipulation that took place during Bush’s NOLA visit. “The President’s visit was a completely staged event,” says one Dutch blogger.
I also linked earlier to an article about the hellish conditions in the Superdome. This article is even worse.
In one of the few pieces of good news coming out of New Orleans, the AP (via NOLA.com) reports on a group of folks in the French Quarter who have banded together to keep themselves and their community alive.
One thing that I didn’t mention earlier, that I’m finding as heartbreaking as it is reassuring, is that the national media is losing their collective shit – and rightly so. This bit from Andersen Cooper of CNN is a good example. See also Jack Cafferty at CNN. (Both links are WMV, sorry Alex.) More discussion of the media reaction here, and all over Crooks and Liars (the source of the two clips linked above). The good news is, the mainstream media seems to finally be waking up from the toe-the-party-line stupor they’ve been in since 9/11. The bad news is it took a tragedy at least an order magnitude greater than 9/11 to bring them to their senses and back to their posts.
And finally, Coda over at MeFi has expressed pretty well what I’m feeling right now, and what I’m sure many, many more people will be feeling once the shock wears off, and once the true nature of what is happening is better understood around the country. It’s true that right now there are still lives on the line in the Gulf Coast, and the efforts of anyone with any means to help should be directed toward helping them. But at the end of the day, there is going to be a call for accountability, and if there’s any justice left in the world, a great steaming pile of that accountability, still dripping with blood and oil and raw sewage, will be laid squarely on the doorstep at 1600 Pennsylvania.