Thanks to MHW for the tip on Paul Beston in the American Spectator, who also picks up on Dylan’s High Water (For Charley Patton) as an echo of what we’ve seen in the past week.

Another visitor takes issue with my directing blame in Mayor Nagin’s direction (and by the way, Nagin is the only major character in this play who has himself been directing blame – which should be quite telling for you psychologists out there).

The visitor’s email includes this:

If you want to blame someone, find the stooge who
didn’t plan on a levee break…find the people who didn’t have the money or
the means to leave the city…and BLAME the animals and criminals who looted
not for life’s necessities, but for guns, electronics, drugs and booze.

Out yourself in Nagin’s shoes and tell me what you would have done
differently. If people would have evacuated when he called for an
evacuation the story today would be the waterlogged buildings, not the
survival of the fittest jungle scenes that we have watched unfold.

Well, let’s see, who is the “stooge who didn’t plan on a levee break?” Who had the best reason to fear a levee break, had the highest responsibility to worry about one and was in a position to make a plan?

“If people would have evacuated when he called” for it, we wouldn’t have had a problem, apparently. Absurd. While some people made a choice to stay, clearly the choice wasn’t there to make for many others. Without cars, and without ready cash; the disabled, the sick, the elderly … these people should be blamed for becoming victims? Again, this storm was always going to happen some day. That there was no plan to deal with those unable to self-evacuate – other than stuffing some of them in the Superdome and other locations and leaving them there – is an indictment of all those New Orleans elected officials, right down through the years, who each hurricane season contemplated the likelihood of this event and made no plan. As I said in the post the other day, the blame does fall by extension on previous mayors and city officials generally. Their plan consisted of, “hope this doesn’t happen while I’m in office!” It’s Nagin’s bad luck that it did happen while he was in office. He, unlike the others however, at least had the opportunity to see the disaster’s imminent arrival some days in advance and make some last ditch plan (see the picture of the buses in the previous post for one example of something he could have done).

In a catastrophe of this magnitude, there will be plenty of ways to look back and say that this should have been done or that should have been done. However, it has to start with those in the best position to do something first – and therefore it has to start with Mayor Ray Nagin. The governor and Louisiana state authorities in general come next, because they should have been ready to pick up where the city authorities failed – and they should have known how likely it was that they would fail.

The Feds have surely made mistakes in this too – but know this: the biggest mistake that the Federal authorities made was their apparent assumption that the city of New Orleans had even remotely competent leadership.

Taking the lead of President Bush, the Feds are not going out there casting blame. They’re too busy trying to save people at this point. But you can read between the lines of something the director of FEMA, Michael Brown, said today, in pegging the problems with delivering emergency assistance on “the total lack of communications, the inability to hear and have good intelligence on the ground about what was actually occurring there.”

For “good intelligence on the ground,” read “anybody at the local level with the authority and competence to direct the rescue efforts.”

A mayor ranting and cursing and on a radio show doesn’t qualify as any of the above.

Related posts:

• If it keep on rainin’
• The Levee’s Gonna Break
• A day only the Lord could make

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