Someone will make a quick fortune publishing a joke book about the Katrina disaster. It will have a name like “Easy Does It: Drowning in Incompetence in New Orleans.” Each page will be about a paragraph long. It’ll be a bathroom book, enjoyed wherever there are still functioning bathrooms, and it will give various nonentities the immortality that is now their due.
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They’ll remember New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin, who sent his cops off to Las Vegas for R & R while most of his city was still underwater. There’ll be a picture of the 255 submerged school buses that could have carried thousands of New Orleans residents to safety, and another of Alaska’s “bridge to nowhere” (from Ketchikan to an island 50 people live on), which was awarded almost five times as much money in the new federal budget as New Orleans’s levee system.
“Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.”
But there was also an air of vindication. Bush was getting what he deserved. Not because he’s been wrong about Iraq–Europeans see both sides of that war about as clearly as Americans do–but because he’s been wrong about government.
New Orleans was a disaster waiting to happen. But so are the cities sitting on fault lines along the west coast. So, thanks to terrorism, is every city everywhere. The media of America might want to let New Orleans inspire them to pose the question most papers have avoided: What if it happens here? In New Orleans, the various layers of government turned to blaming each other, not to mention the victims–whose supposed unique culture of violence made a descent into chaos swift and inevitable. Other cities are surely too civilized to behave so badly when everything falls apart. But for the sake of discussion their media need to entertain the possibility–what if they aren’t?
