An event that just gets bigger and bigger, the disaster in New Orleans I don’t know exactly what to say or write; it seems too sad, too bizarre, too surreal, and too wrong. Bush’s response was way off; the evacuation was useless (leave in your car? Boy does the authorities in NOLA and the US need to learn more about public transport, especially as a lot of this calamity could have been avoided without the troops and money wasted by the US going to war for oil). At first I though after Cindy Sheehan and the bad polls due to the anti-war effort that again George Bush escapes, miraculously 9-11 style via an act of god or terrorism, but amazingly rather than doing the hand-wringing Giullani/Livingstone act he manages to totally fuck this one up too. Maybe in his Xtian nuttiness he and his government thinks they deserve to die?
At the end it all seems to come down to race and economic status – my immediate thought was that the response was slow because they were poor and black and ‘who cares?’. It makes me so angry, and it makes Kanye West angry too because on the NBC fundraiser he said live ‘ George Bush doesn’t care about black people!’ and told it like it is – you can see a clip here. It’s gone from a natural disaster, to a social and political one within 6 days. The media coverage is so flawed – people have spotted differences between how white and black survivors are treated (white people find things, black people loot) which reminds me of the old ‘Israelis are murdered, Palestinian are accidental victims of cross-fire’ language used in the UK media about people killed in the Palestine/Israeli dispute at least upto a couple of years ago. Interestingly Yahoo and AFP have noticed this and taken the comments down…media rewrites history once again.
Sadly the US now has with the looting and killing a taste of what life has been like in Iraq – and as with there, it’s always the poor people who lose. And I do find it ironic that the storm took out a large percentage of the US production of oil in the Gulf; so while they were trying to steal Iraq’s oil and make gibes at Venezuela, they lose out at home. One step forward, one step back.
Perhaps their god is telling them something?
