It’s one year after Katrina slammed into Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama. A year ago I talked about the effects of the storm on my home in Jackson, and Professor Fury talked about his home of Baton Rouge. Prof. also grappled intelligently with the intense frustration so many of us felt afterwards, while I expressed it Kanye-stijl and was thankful that Alex Chilton was found alive. I did a small Polaroid essay on getting my power back, which was a bigger deal than I’d ever thought it could be.
And then I got on with my life. A lot of people can’t: after power was restored in Jackson and the gasoline shortage ended, things got back to normal here. They haven’t on the Coast, or in New Orleans—even months after the storm, when I last visited back in April, the devastation was immense. I still have friends without houses. In America in 2006.
I don’t really know what else to say about this. I promised myself that I wanted to just draw cartoons and tell small stories about the people I love and how we dealt with, and deal with, Katrina, and that I wouldn’t get political. But this is all so soaked in politics I don’t have any other way of expressing it. It is my firm belief that if we had anybody else running this country—Republican, Democratic, or otherwise—the response would have been better. People would have houses; people would have hospitals; people would be safe.
During World War II, we built entire cities dedicated to creating new sciences in Los Alamos and Oak Ridge. We had no copper to build the immense magnets needed for these new scientists, because we had to use copper for bullets: while we created these new sciences, we had hundreds of thousands of men and women fighting all over the globe. So instead of copper we used fifteen thousand tons of silver from the U.S. Treasury. Thirty million pounds of silver. We used that silver to shake loose the very building blocks of nature and then we encased that violence in steel and threw it at another city.
Have you ever seen a Mercury capsule up close? Tiny, terrifying mechanisms, stuffed full of machinery, barely room for a man. We put men in tiny coccoons of metal and stuck those on top of rockets that were stories high and shot them into the air. Americans climbed into these insane contraptions and then we got so good at it we shot one at the moon. We put men on the moon. The British did not: nor the Russians: nor even the Chinese. Americans walked on the moon. And then we brought them home safely.
We once could do absolutely anything we turned our attention to. We ripped our country loose from the greatest empire of all time; we split the atom; we conquered space.
The stumbling failures of George Walker Bush are not those of America, at least not the America I know: under no other American president of the last sixty years could this have happened. I deny his presidency; I deny that he is even an American, because I steadfastly refuse that such pathetic failures could occur on the watch of any American President, Democratic or Republican.
Beautifully said. Every day there’s new evidence that Bush is at best ignorant of and at worst hostile towards the legal and philosophical principles that have defined America. (Likely its some combination of the two: his ignorance makes him a good tool for those who are hostile, etc). I’ve never thought of his manifold failings in terms of how they run against the very grain of the American national character (if I’m still allowed to use such an old-fashioned term), though, and your analysis is spot-on. Anyone paying the slightest bit of attention can see right through Bush’s can-do cowboy demeanor to the spoiled, disinterested aristocrat that he really is.
On aristocracy:
More and more the classed nature of our society is changing the “grain of the American national character.” However, as the rich get richer, i.e. Bushes pass on huge amounts of capital to little bushes, the poor get poorer. The middle class defends this passing on of aristocracy-style wealth by tolerating it and voting for the candidates who support this in the foolish hope that somehow this has positive implications for most of them. It does not.
We should have the highest inheritance, death, estate tax ever known to mankind.
On Katrina:
If anyone on the local, state, or federal level had seen this as an opportunity rather than just a tragedy, there could have been much good come out of this affair. The entire country was ready to get on board to help the southern coast. Had they said tax, we would have said “Yes.” Had they said, everyone must go to the coast and volunteer for 2 weeks. We would have come. Instead, we got news coverage and no leadership.
That’s one of the best summaries of Katrina (and the current political situation) I have ever read. Well done.
“I deny his presidency.” That’s it exactly. I do not acknowledge him as the US president. I do not claim him as a fellow citizen. I do not recognize his administration as anything except fear and greed made flesh. I hope they’re gone soon.
Brilliant goddamn post.
probably one of the best things you’ve ever written about anything. certainly some of your best phrasing.