facts.

Jim Lehrer Newshour. The columnists and the pundits, they are exerting a great effort to remain measured. Their sense of deep disturbance, fury, sorrow, butting their habitual impulse for on-camera professionalism. They are all so incredibly professional. I think they are operating under the assumption that expressing outrage on television robs you of credibility in the eyes of the American public. I am here numb in the straightback chair, desperately willing one of them to break down.
Tom Oliphant of the Boston Globe tells Jim, ” The government has failed here. Bush is emblematic of that failure.”
Jim wants to know, is there any chance for optimism in all of this?
David Brooks, of the New York Times, answers:
“Things are going to change now.”
Cut to commercial, on PBS channel Thirteen, in perfect synergy: an advertisement for a party thrown for Congress by the White House, filmed at some point previously and set to air next week. It is a televised gala starring special musical guest Shirley Jones; she is sparkling yet dressed down in white poly-cotton pantsuit, warbling through half a standard on the edit. I don’t recognize the song. Cut to the President and Laura. Sitting front row. Gazing up at Shirley, mute adoration. George’s mouth half-grinning. half-agape. Loving her like, oh, like, like, oh, I don’t know, like a fat kid loves cake. And looking a bit like one, too, stunned and empty, entertained, entertained, entertained. George is always so fucking entertained.
Cut to the President in New Orleans. “THIS IS A HUGE TASK THAT WE’RE DEALING WITH.” Hand pressed to his head. Vacation cut short.
The day before, C. Ray Nagin, Mayor of New Orleans and a beacon of anger and human engagement in a televised landscape of façade language, GWBushian “tough talk,” and emotional distance, told WWL-AM, “Someone needs to get their ass on a plane and get down here and figure it out.”
According to the National Journal‘s Alexis Simendinger, speaking on Washington Week, Al Gore, the man America elected president in 2000, attempted to send in his own private jet to rescue his friend, a surgeon, from a hospital where he worked, along with as many patients and staff who could fit. He spent his own money to do this. He arranged for it to occur in less than one day. The plane was already on the tarmac when FEMA called it off, because the patients Gore rescued would not have been catalogued and accounted for in the particular way mandated by FEMA’s system of cataloguing and accounting—a bureaucratic formality that certainly gave someone a lot of pleasure to draft, but ultimately may have resulted in the deaths of who knows how many frail and ill, at the least stranded them in water without supplies. FEMA’s rate of exchange: one stamp of approval = one human life. This occurred early in the week, days before the National Guard arrived; Al Gore, individual entity, better organized and prepared to save lives in a crisis than the entire sector of our government designated to do the same.
The day before the National Guard arrived in New Orleans—to convert an anarchic disaster into one ruled by martial law?— Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco announced their arrival on television and on radio; she told CNN that 300 soldiers were on their way to “deal” with “looters” or, in her own parlance, “hoodlums.” “Fresh back from Iraq,” she said. “[The troops] have M-16s, and they’re locked and loaded. I have one message for these hoodlums: These troops know how to shoot and kill, and they are more than willing to do so if necessary, and I expect they will.”
It was a formality, a performance for the American public, because as you know, those people seeking food and water from flooded houses—“hoodlums”—lacked electricity to hear her warning over television or radio, assuming these “hoodlums” had radio and television to begin with. “Looters” seeking food, water, homes, their families, their communities, dry clothing, diapers, showers, medicine, sleep. In a city where one third of its denizens were living below the poverty line the day of the hurricane. These people, Hillary Clinton noted, are “…children, elderly people without water, without food, without economic means of any sort. They are the most vulnerable and they are being left behind.”
***
Facts: Nearly 1900 Americans have been killed in Iraq since March of 2004. In June of 2004, Bush’s budget cut money for levees to less than 20% of what was needed, and diverted the money to funding America’s occupation of Iraq. The death toll in New Orleans is projected by some to top 10,000.
Tom Oliphant, of the Boston Globe, puts it to Jim Lehrer as follows: “Everything we’ve tried to absorb up to this point is about to greatly exceed what we’ve dealt with so far.”