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Tomgram: Iraq in America, by Tom Engelhardt

Tomgram: Iraq in America

At the Front of Nowhere at All

The Perfect Storm and the Feral City

By Tom Engelhardt

The headline was: "Direct hit in New Orleans could mean a modern Atlantis," and the first paragraph of the story read: "More than 1.2 million people in metropolitan New Orleans were warned to get out Tuesday as [the] 140-mph hurricane churned toward the Gulf Coast, threatening to submerge this below-sea-level city in what could be the most disastrous storm to hit in nearly 40 years." That was USA Today and the only catch was -- the piece had been written on September 14, 2004 as Hurricane Ivan seemed to be barreling toward New Orleans.

I commented at the time: "When ‘Ivan the Terrible' threatened New Orleans, correspondents there had a field day discussing whether the city might literally disappear beneath the waves -- this was referred to as the ‘Atlantis scenario.'" I was then trying to point out that we might indeed be entering a new, globally warmed world of Xtreme weather and no connections whatsoever were being made in the media. At the time, global warming, if discussed at all, was a captive of the far north (melting glaciers, unnerved Inuit, robins making miraculous appearances in Alaska), and "Atlantis scenarios" were the property of distant islands like the atolls that make up the tiny South Pacific nation of Tuvalu, threatened with abandonment due to rising ocean waters and ever fiercer, ever less seasonal storms And yet just short of a year ago, not only! was it well known that New Orleans' levees weren't fit for a class 5 hurricane or that the Bush administration was slashing the budget of the Army Corps of Engineers, but the "Atlantis scenario" was already somewhere on the collective mind. Now, it has been upon us for almost a week.

Much of New Orleans has become the Atlantis from hell, a toxic sludge pool of a looted former city, filled with dead bodies, burning in places, threatened with diseases like cholera and typhus that haven't visited the Big Easy since early in the last century, and with thousands upon thousands of the black poor and a few of the stranded better-to-do like doctors, nurses, and a few local officials left for days on end with next to no way out. It is, in short, the feral city that thirty years of science fiction films (and post-apocalyptic novels) have delivered to the American public as entertainment as well as prophesy. (Think, Escape from New York).

Now, try this passage: "The evacuation of New Orleans in the face of [the] hurricane... looked sinisterly like Strom Thurmond's version of the Rapture. Affluent white people fled the Big Easy in their SUVs, while the old and car-less -- mainly Black -- were left behind in their below-sea-level shotgun shacks and aging tenements to face the watery wrath." Admittedly a vivid description, but certainly commonplace enough at the moment -- except that it, too, was written back in September 2004 by Mike Davis, also for Tomdispatch, and prophetically labeled, "Poor, Black, and Left Behind." It, too, concerned not Katrina's but Ivan's approach to New Orleans. So there we are. It was possible to know then the fundaments of just about everything that's happened now -- and not just from Tomdispatch either.

In the last week, we've seen many of the black poor of New Orleans not only left behind in a new Atlantis, but thousands upon thousands of them -- those who didn't die in their wheelchairs, or on highway overpasses, or in the ill-fated convention center, or unattended and forgotten in their homes -- sent off on what looked very much like a new trail of tears. Right now, above all, New Orleans and the Mississippi coast, as so many reporters have observed with shock, are simply the Bangladesh of North America (after a disastrous set of monsoons), or a Kinshasa (without the resources). Soon, if Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert has anything to do with it, the city may simply be consigned to the slagheap of history or a lot of it, as he so delicately put it to a suburban weekly in Illinois (where a few farmers who need the crucial deep water port of New Orleans to send their upcoming crops onto the global market may take umbrage), perhaps "bulldozed." Someday, Katrina may be seen as the "perfect storm," the harbinger of a future for which we remain far more adamantly, obdurately unwilling to prepare than even the Bush administration was for this localized "Atlantis scenario."

Iraq in America: Parallels and Connections

**Click here to read more of this dispatch.**

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Copyright 2005 Tom Engelhardt
(Reprinted in my posts with kind permission given by the author)

posted by Annamarie at 2:25 PM