The Big Easy way out .. .
They don't call New Orleans the Big Easy for nothing. Corruption has been corroding the state's politics — and politicians — for much, if not most, of its history. When Robert Penn Warren wrote "Of Mice and Men" nearly 60 years ago, he based his main character, Willie Stark, on Huey Long, perhaps the most notoriously corrupt national figure in Louisiana — and American — politics in the past 100 years.
Long, a populist demagogue who aspired to national office — he was planning to run against FDR for president in 1936 — was assassinated in 1935 by a young physician whose father was being attacked politically by Long.
Not much has really changed in Louisiana politics since then, and the way the Katrina catastrophe has been mishandled by New Orleans politicians, before, during and after the hurricane swept ashore and drowned the city, is reflective of that corruption.
Where else but New Orleans would a city's leaders off-load their responsibilities, lack of preparedness and inability to act on any other political figure or bureaucrat in sight?
The city's mayor blamed George W. Bush and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Guard, the head of the Army Corps of Engineers ... everyone, of course, except himself and the other officials — including the state's governor — who failed to do their jobs in the face of the danger. We keep hearing about the 500 school buses that sat idle in the city when the mandatory evacuation was announced and 150,000 poor people had no way to obey the order to leave. Why? No one is saying, but no doubt we'll hear shortly that if the President had been doing his job, he'd have known about those buses and ordered them deployed as emergency transportation for the poor.
The Times-Picayune, New Orleans' — and Louisiana's — largest circulation daily paper, published an open letter to the President (online on the Internet because its presses are underwater) calling for the firing of FEMA personnel. "Every official at the Federal Emergency Management Agency should be fired, Director Michael Brown especially," the letter said. "No expense should have been spared. No excuses should have been voiced" about federal response to the hurricane.
But FEMA isn't where the fault lies; the fault lies within a corrupt bureaucracy and political machine that's dominated Louisiana and New Orleans government for 100 years, so used to taking the Big Easy way out that it was incapable of reacting responsibly and coherently to Katrina. Those who should be fired are the elected officials who run the state, by the voters at the ballot box, and their replacements should then start sending pink slips to the city and state bureaucracy who failed in the crisis.
Will that happen? Probably not. Louisiana and New Orleans voters will instead re-elect them in exchange for promises of jobs, largesse and political influence. The entrenched bureaucracy will remain so, and once the dikes are repaired, the water's pumped out, and the city begins rebuilding (imagine, if you will, what's going to happen to all that federal money when it begins flowing into the city to fund the reconstruction), the city's "culture" will return to its pre-hurricane state. That's not exactly cause for celebration, no matter who's blowing the trumpet.
Steve Williams
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