Posted on 09/07/2005 3:31:01 PM PDT by naturalman1975
IN assessing the US response to Hurricane Katrina, keep in mind its scale: it devastated an area the size of Britain. Tell me the country that would have responded with perfect efficiency. There's no doubt the President is responsible for whatever happens on his watch and the Government was slow to mobilise troops and humanitarian aid. This is partly because of the bureaucratic contradictions and competing jurisdictions that afflict the US system.
Most of the time, US localism - which is a kind of national ideology that local folks know best about local conditions - works well. Local, city and state authorities are the first responders to disaster, with whatever federal assistance is needed. That's what happened in New York on September 11 four years ago.
There are many restrictions on what the military can do inside the US, which is normally seen as a civil liberties guarantee. Nonetheless, a more alert administration in Washington would have sorted this out within hours, not days.
The worst mistakes were made by city authorities in New Orleans and state authorities in Louisiana. New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin didn't use transit and school buses in the evacuation and didn't even move the buses to higher ground, so they were flooded and couldn't be used later. Similarly it was his responsibility to provide in advance food, water, sanitation and security personnel for the Superdome, where he directed people for shelter, but it wasn't done.
The Governor of Louisiana did not activate emergency plans and refused to give Washington authority over the state's National Guard.
But this hardly proves that federalism is a disaster. I often reflect that it's a good thing the US is not socialist because big US government bureaucracies are among the most inflexible and irrational in the world, as anyone who has spent several hours trying to get through immigration at Los Angeles with any visa other than the most routine can attest.
But there are deeper lessons from Katrina. One is just how tight the drum of inner-city life and criminality is stretched in some of the biggest cities in the US, especially in their poorest neighbourhoods. New Orleans has one of the highest violent crime rates in the US, a murder rate 10 times the national average.
This year it would have had 350-odd murders without Katrina, compared with about 65 in Boston, a city of similar size.
Once in Los Angeles I got a brave cab driver to take me all around the South Central area, home to race riots in the mid-1960s and early '90s. Four things struck me: a brooding sense of menace, drug deals more or less out in the open, but also that the quality of housing was not too bad - absolute poverty was not the problem. And finally the paramilitary measures the police needed to maintain control. There was some street disturbance and instantly a police helicopter was hovering overhead and half a dozen squad cars had raced up, all with heavily armed officers.
As a deputy sheriff comments in Cormac McCarthy's mesmerising new novel, No Country for Old Men: "It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people can't be governed at all."
This is not a matter of race, though the majority of poor people, and of gangs, in New Orleans are African-American. It is primarily a question of class, of gangs, of messed-up families, low-achieving schools and a feeble police force. The ubiquity of guns is one of the great, tragic missteps the mighty US civilisation has taken. Guns vastly escalate the level of violence in any socially stressful situation. Take the police out of a gang-riddled inner city thrown into chaos and you get something very ugly, very fast.
Americans are more than a little ashamed about this, the violence and lawlessness that erupted in New Orleans. We think of Americans as can-do people, who in emergencies behave with great generosity and solidarity. Their response to the Asian tsunami, which involved a clean line of authority through Defence to the White House, was magnificent in its swiftness, effectiveness and compassion. Even in New Orleans there were extraordinary acts of solidarity: the women who drove from North Carolina to give their possessions to the needy, the men who motored their flat-bottom boats through the flooded streets to rescue the stranded. But the shootings, and the nightmare at the Superdome, were far more dramatic.
There was another paradox: public virtue was private disaster in this case.
The private citizens who were best prepared for Katrina were those who did much that responsible civic authorities would want them not to do. You were most likely to do well in this hurricane if you owned a big four-wheel-drive with a full tank of petrol and a spare tank hoarded in the garage.
If you decided to stay in New Orleans, you did best if you lived in a very solid, energy inefficient, two-storey house on high ground, with some hoarded food and bottled water, and if you owned a shotgun or two. The inner city renter who habitually took public transport and followed advice to move to the Superdome hit a horrible mess.
The underlying problems of gangs, violence and drugs that showed up so gruesomely in Katrina afflict most big Western cities in differing degrees. They are more intense in the US partly because it is such a big society. The French newspaper Le Monde gloated at the American discomfort, saying that the US discovered the Third World within its own borders. Although displaying a characteristic and contemptible European Schadenfreude at US misfortune, there is some truth in this, but it, too, is a double-edged sword.
There really is no other effective model for absorbing the vast immigration, much of it unskilled, which flows into the US every year.
This model combines an element of the Third World - as a temporary staging post - within its own society.
The deregulated labour market and limited social welfare net provide entry level jobs, albeit low paid, in huge numbers, which allow immigrants and others to climb the social ladder. If the minimum wage was $20 an hour and there were open-ended unemployment benefits at a living wage level, you couldn't possibly accommodate the tens of millions of immigrants who have succeeded in the US.
As to the long-term political results of Katrina, these are hard to judge.
It damages Bush in the short-term.
It also shows what a mess the Department of Homeland Security is (and why we shouldn't have one), and what a price you pay for massive bureaucratic disruption. Many of the institutional reforms following September 11 had little rationale beyond being seen to do something.
They disrupted much of the delicate connectivity that had grown up between well established agencies by throwing them into one department involving extensive reorganisation. The Department of Homeland Security having just been established, there are now calls for it to be broken up.
My guess is that after a slow and messy initial reaction, there will be an outpouring of generosity, compassion and money for the affected areas.
There are a few things the hurricane definitely does not show: that the response was affected by the race of the victims or that resources were tied up in Iraq that should have been used at home.
That's just anti-American nonsense, as will be much of the inevitable, strident Bush-bashing.
This was one of the worst natural disasters in human history and it was handled clumsily for the first few days. But the record is of astounding US regenerative power, not least in devastated cities.
Just watch the US rebound.
Wow ... he gets it, he really gets it. What an excellent find.
ping to an excellent foreign perspective
Apart from this highly debatable point, a good essay.
It's an Australian newspaper article - the 'we' refers to Australia.
Of course we will. The world would be foolish to doubt it.
Drudge has a great photo of the New Orleans skyline taken last night with the downtown area all lit up. I think the world will be shocked at how quickly we recover.
It also shows what a mess the Department of Homeland Security is (and why we shouldn't have one), and what a price you pay for massive bureaucratic disruption. Many of the institutional reforms following September 11 had little rationale beyond being seen to do something.
Give this man a cigar--he get's it.
In other news....Hillary introduces a bill to seperate FEMA from Homeland Security....even though it was her and the Democrats wanted FEMA in Homeland to begin with....
"There was another paradox"
Only paradoxical if one accepts the notion that individual responsibility should be discouraged and subsumed to the state.
A standard liberal irrational response, that, unfortunately, was embraced by many conservatives at the time.
He's wrong on the gun issue (and even contradicts himself later on the issue), but other than that, he has a fair grasp on our culture. Much more so than most Australian journalists.
Yes, but...
If you decided to stay in New Orleans, you did best if you lived in a very solid, energy inefficient, two-storey house on high ground, with some hoarded food and bottled water, and if you owned a shotgun or two.
The truth is that guns were NOT ubiquitous in NO; in fact, in the worst places, the Superdome, the Convention Center, only the criminals had them. Where honest people had them the crooks didn't go.
Guns [correction: criminal elements prone to misuse guns]vastly escalate the level of violence in any socially stressful situation.
"He's wrong on the gun issue"
Check out the use of the word "hoarded," too. There was no shortage of fuel prior to the storm, nor was there anything other than the normal run on staples that anyone who has ever been through a hurricane, ice storm or blizzard has experienced.
It's hardly "hoarding" to stock up for the known, coming problem in advance. It's called preparation, and is a good thing.
Yes, I guess it does.
We don't, but the opposition Labor Party have said they would like to create one if they are ever elected, so it is a debate that is going on here. They even have a 'Shadow Minister for Homeland Security' and it's moderately unusual to have a Shadow Minister when there is no Minister.
The author, in my estimation, makes a valid point in questioning whether the added layer of bureaucracy represented by the Department of Homeland Security tended to diffuse responsibility. However, what is becoming increasingly obvious is that Demonrat attempts to pin all response tardiness on the Bush Administration won't fly.
Arab/Islamic sources are seizing on the Katrina experience as proof that the US is an inept paper tiger not to be feared or respected."Ripe for the picking," one supposes?
At the suggestion of writer Michelle Malkin last Friday, I have cobbled together a blogsite called Texas Clearinghouse for Katrina Aid to serve as a clearinghouse for refugee efforts in Texas.
Texas is getting more refugees than any other state -- that's fine, we'll take them all -- but we need help providing them with food, clothing, and shelter.
If you are a refugee, you can information that will help you find relief. If you want to donate or volunteer, you can find someone who needs you.
Right now the site mostly covers Houston, San Antonio, and Dallas but I will add various churches, schools, and other charities in Lubbock and Austin tonight. My wife was down at Reunion Arena in Dallas yesterday handing out care packages and spiritually ministering to the refugees as a representative of her employer. She says that the situation is tragic and that there's a lot of work to be done. There are so many children who don't know where their parents are or even if their parents are still alive.
There are a lot of churches and other organizations in Texas that need help in dealing with the problem and I would appreciate it if you would get the word out.
Many thanks,
Michael McCullough
Stingray blogsite
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