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Tomgram: Davis, 25 Questions about the Murder of New Orleans

Tomgram: Davis, 25 Questions about the Murder of New Orleans

Mike Davis (whose most recent book is Monster at our Door, The Global Threat of Avian Flu) and architect Anthony Fontenot have just returned from New Orleans. They rode out Rita in southern Louisiana and talked with numerous people involved in local Katrina rescue efforts. The city is now, Davis says, a huge crime scene that may never be properly investigated. After Hurricane Ivan turned away from the Big Easy in 2004, Davis wrote a singularly prophetic piece, Poor, Black and Left Behind, about the car-less, unevacuated poor of that city. The arrival of Hurricane Katrina, which did not spare New Orleans, essentially proved for the poor a horrifying replay of the previous year. Nothing had changed for the better. The main question Davis and Fontenot raise below -- for an investigative body that may never exist -- is just how deliberate, from top to bottom, the neglect of the obvious was in New Orleans.

Right now, we're watching the ridiculous spectacle of the woefully incompetent former FEMA head Michael Brown being thrown to the Republican wolves in the House of Representatives, while the two national figures most in charge of the Katrina debacle, Department of Homeland Security head Michael Chertoff and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, remain remarkably untouched by their acts. The man who couldn't wait to invade Iraq couldn't figure out how to get a soldier into New Orleans. It's a sorry record. Here, then, are some of the disturbing questions on the minds of those Davis and Fontenot met in New Orleans -- questions from the frontlines of an American shock-and-awe disaster of epic proportions. Tom


The Mysteries of New Orleans

Twenty-five Questions about the Murder of the Big Easy
By Mike Davis and Anthony Fontenot


We recently spent a week in New Orleans and Southern Louisiana interviewing relief workers, community activists, urban planners, artists, and neighborhood folks. Even as the latest flood waters from Hurricane Rita recede, the city remains submerged in anger and frustration.

Indeed, the most toxic debris in New Orleans isn't the sinister gray sludge that coats the streets of the historic Creole neighborhood of Treme or the Lower Ninth Ward, but all the unanswered questions that have accumulated in the wake of so much official betrayal and hypocrisy. Where outsiders see simple "incompetence" or "failure of leadership," locals are more inclined to discern deliberate design and planned neglect -- the murder, not the accidental death, of a great city.

In almost random order, here are twenty-five of the urgent questions that deeply trouble the local people we spoke with. Until a grand jury or congressional committee begins to uncover the answers, the moral (as opposed to simply physical) reconstruction of the New Orleans region will remain impossible.

1. Why did the floodwalls along the 17th Street Canal only break on the New Orleans (majority Black) side and not on the Metairie (largely white) side? Was this the result of neglect and poor maintenance by New Orleans authorities?

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** NOTE: This dispatch - as are all of the Tomgrams/Tomdispatches herein - is protected by copyright, and partially republished here with links to the original. Permission was obtained from Tom Engelhardt. To read more of his outstanding, penetrating dispatches, please go to: TomDispatch.com

posted by Annamarie at 11:15 PM