I was hesitant about writing anything about the tragic events surrounding Hurricane Katrina because I wasn't sure I could be unbiased about it.

You haven't been unbiased about anything else–why start now?

          I was born in New Orleans, as were four out of five of my brothers and sisters, both of my parents, all four of my grandparents, and all of my aunts, uncles, and cousins.  One of my earliest memories was riding out Hurricane Betsy at my grandparent's house on my mother's side, because they lived in a part of New Orleans that was on slightly higher ground than us.  As a six year-old, I remember that it was a little exciting, a little scary, and really fun to have to do that.  When we returned to our home, we found that a giant tree had fallen in our back yard, but it had missed our house.  Other than the mess of tree limbs in our yard, we were spared any major damage.
          My mother's sister Dottie and my cousin Petey and his wife are my only close relatives left with houses in New Orleans.  They left the city by car at 2:30 in the morning right before Hurricane Katrina hit.  My aunt stayed for ten weeks at my parent's house in Dallas and my cousin went to his wife's relatives in Shreveport, Louisiana.  Neither of them had the slightest idea when they would be able to return to New Orleans, or what they would find when they got there.  In the event, my aunt lost her house and everything in it, while my cousin’s house was largely spared.  They left New Orleans with one suitcase apiece.  In many ways, though, they were fortunate–they had cash, credit cards, and a working car.  For many in New Orleans, those three things were the difference in leaving and living, or staying and dealing with the severe consequences.  Knowing a little about the geography of the city, I can speculate with reasonable accuracy that both the house that I grew up in and my grandparent's house on my father's side would have been under twenty feet of water.  My other grandparent's house, the one that we stayed at during Hurricane Betsy, might have done slightly better, because it was near St. Charles Avenue around the corner from Tulane University, but the pictures I saw of Tulane didn't look good, either.
          My father told me that he attended a lecture on the levees in New Orleans fifty years ago that closely predicted the conditions that we see today in the event of a hurricane of this magnitude.  This is just to say that there is probably more blame to go around than there are fingers with which to point.  New Orleans did not acquire its nickname "The Big Easy" because of its incorruptible standards of civil government.  The state of Louisiana has come in for more than its fair share of corruption charges as well over the last hundred years.  The city, already 12 to 24 feet under sea level, is sinking, along with its levees, due to fault lines that run underneath.  The levees were built to withstand a Category 3 hurricane, and Hurricane Katrina was a high 4 when it came ashore.
          There were nonetheless several striking things about this disaster that deserve mention.  The first thing is how absolutely partisan every single bit of news has become in this country.  One would think that a tragedy like this would unite the country in a way not unlike 9/11, but instead, it just brought to the surface all of the rage that the great class divide has wrought upon this nation.  The rank-and-file citizenry showed once again that we are a nation of good people.  The outpouring of money and help has been a beautiful and encouraging thing to see.  However, the underlying animus towards the Bush administration threatened to tear this country apart.  Katrina seemed to signal the ignominious end of the American people's trust with an ideological approach to government that never admitted the slightest error, believed in the smallest possible role for the federal government except when it came to its military adventures (who can forget this charming Grover Norquist quote: “My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub”), gave a tax cut to the wealthiest people in the country while maintaining record deficits, and appointed unqualified cronies to positions of major importance to the safety and security of this nation, all the while arrogantly failing to level with we the people about anything that they were doing.
           In order to have embarked on the extremely costly regime change/nation-building/spreading capitalism/opening-new-markets-for-our-goods imperial strategy of invading Iraq, we needed to come up with several hundred billion dollars (and counting).  This money, despite what many people think, doesn't fall from a tree.  Despite the soaring budget deficits in part due to the Bush tax cuts, the money still had to be appropriated from a finite source.  The bean counters in the administration knew that they couldn't just add $300 billion dollars to the budget–they have to try and cut a little bit from this program, a little more from that program, as in, "we don't need that food program for poor urban families," and "we can take some funds out the levee maintenance program–I mean, they've made it this long." It really makes one wonder what surprises are in store for us when we face the next disaster.
          Now, the cleanup and resettling of 600,000 people has cost the American people about another war's worth of money–and where has this come from, now that we've spent so much on Iraq?
          The spreading thin of our armed forces came back to haunt the Bush administration doubly when many National Guardsmen from the Gulf Coast states were unavailable to assist in hurricane recovery efforts due to being deployed in Iraq, thereby creating one of the factors in the delay of assistance.  So too did spreading thin of available funds put a crimp in the Bush war plans, resulting in a more conciliatory tone in the following months toward Iran, Syria, and even North Korea while the administration deals with the Katrina debacle.
          In an item that could have come out of The Onion, ousted FEMA director Michael "Heckuva job"Brown announced following his removal that he had started a Disaster Consultancy Firm. Brown was the face of the administration's non-response to Hurricane Katrina, and also represented the worst kind of unqualified patronage imaginable.
          As stated in the chapter on bias, the right wing has created such a cacophony of guttural hate in this country that it was only a matter of time before some people on the left sunk to this level in imitation.  I happen to think that this "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em!" mentality is wrong on so many fronts.
          The left has long prided itself on intellectual criticism.  One of the things that I have discovered in my research is that criticism from the left tends to be detailed, long-winded, and polemical; its critiques tend toward policies more than personalities.  Frankly, much of the left's material causes me to read and then re-read concepts that tend to go over my head on first reflection.  When highly critical, the left tends toward highbrow, rapier slicing of a concept or person, somewhat like the late William Buckley on the right.
          The right, on the other hand, intentionally goes straight into the gutter and right for the politics of personal destruction, all the while claiming that this is what the "other side" does.  This is not my opinion; there are many quotes from right-wing gatekeepers that spell this strategy out in detail, as they apparently don't have any qualms about this aspect of what they do.  I would urge you, as an experiment, to go into a local Borders and buy a copy of The Nation, a seminal left-wing weekly (you can probably get the bookseller to put it in a plain brown paper bag for you), and check out the tone.  It really surprised me, after all that I had heard (but never actually checked out for myself) about this "pinko paper." It is an extremely well written journal; you may very well disagree with much of the content, but you will see that the criticism is grounded in civility.
          Pick up almost any right-wing rag and you will find quite the opposite.  They are filled with rumor, unsubstantiated gossip, and biased opinion of the basest kind masquerading as "journalism." Once again, this is a calculated strategy.  If you read interviews with Rupert Murdoch, the owner of The New York Post, HarperCollins Publishers, TV Guide, and FOX News Channel, among others, or Sun Myung Moon, who owns The Washington Times and United Press International, or Canadian media mogul Conrad Black, until recently owner of more than half the daily newspapers in Canada, along with The Chicago Sun-Times, The London Daily Telegraph, and The Jerusalem Post, you will very easily find out for yourself that they have self-consciously set out to take objectivity out of their media.  None of them view their journals as anything less than a forum for their opinions, and any facts that get in the way of these opinions are quickly silenced.  Don't take my word for it; do your own research and find out for yourself.
           Until recently, the left held the higher ground in partisan criticism.  Then there emerged a mirror image of right-wing hate in the form of much that was heard on Air America radio.  The reason I bring this up is that Hurricane Katrina seems to have brought out the worst in this monkey-see monkey-do bashing, and not only was it counter-productive, it was entirely unnecessary.  The more intelligent members of the conservative press corps did the heavy lifting on this one, finally admitting that their fearless leaders went too far this time in their detachment from the reality that faces ordinary Americans.  In the meantime, the right-wing hate machine wildly and desperately searched for anything and anyone else to blame–the Clintons, sadly for them, seemed to be unavailable for crucifying on this one–and eventually were hung by their own petards.  It was not the time for the left to be copying the right's worst tendencies.
           For example, suggestions of racism that came predictably from the Jesse Jackson/Al Sharpton wing, but also were echoed on Air America with regularity, were off target.  To call it racism was to treat it way too simply; what we saw was the exposed underbelly of the class war that has been going on for around 35 years.  The lid was sheared off in Hurricane Katrina; you and I weren't supposed to see this, but fortunately or unfortunately, Nature had other ideas.  This little taste of "Third World in America" exposed in our country the very dark side of the capitalism-at-all-costs mentality that the rest of the world has been subjected to for the last 30-plus years.  The fact that around eighty percent of the people most affected by Hurricane Katrina's destruction were African-Americans was an economic condition, not an overtly racial one.  Now, the fact that it was African-Americans mostly in this pitiable condition was turned into a racial issue faster than you could say "George Wallace," but the point is, the relief was not held up because it was African-Americans who were suffering.  It is very important to get the criticism straight, and present it in a clear, civil manner.
          There were those in certain corners of the fundamentalist Christian world that proclaimed that the city of New Orleans had it coming, that it was somehow a wicked place and God had sent His judgment upon its people.  This was just bad theology.  Jesus said in response to a similar statement concerning the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices: "Do you suppose they were worse sinners than all others because they suffered such things? I tell you no; but unless you repent you will all likewise perish." –Luke 13:2-3
          President Bush delivered an address from the French Quarter that promised a virtual Marshall Plan for the Gulf Coast, a massive, federal government set of programs designed to completely rebuild the region.  I thought the speech was well done.  His problem came from the true conservatives in his own party, who viewed this gargantuan spending with great alarm.  The president seemed to have been painted into an uncomfortable corner by the initial non-response of his administration to this disaster, and his subsequent poll numbers reflect an all-time low for Mr. Bush.  The result of this was to have to produce over-the-top results in a Big Government way to prove that he really was the compassionate conservative that he claimed to be, and to regain a grip on the crisis leadership that was so much a part of his strength in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.  This represented a sea change in ideology, methodology, and strategy that was bound to have an enormous impact not only on President Bush's legacy, but the 2006 and 2008 elections as well.  By your deeds, Mr. President, by your deeds...
          The outpouring of help from people all over the country and indeed, the world, gave us something to cheer about.  It's as if people have this reservoir of giving and caring and compassion inside of them and they can't let it out within the confines of everyday life, but when there's a disaster, the top blows off and help flows like the rushing water through the broken levees.
          One church, Second Baptist Church in Houston, pastored by Ed Young, became the hub of an interfaith army of volunteers almost 5000 strong, Christians, Muslims, Jews, Baha'i's, and many others, putting aside all conflicts of dogma to work together as God would wish all of His people to do in a time like this.  There were hundreds of other, smaller stories of love and caring and of people of all faiths walking the walk and helping their fellow men and women in their time of need.  A hopeful sign in a sad, sad story.
          Meanwhile, the big three American oil behemoths announced record third quarter profits–this at a time when supposed shortages of oil and gas due to, among other things, the potent hurricane season, was allegedly supposed to be putting a real strain on their abilities to provide enough supply.  There was a contemporaneous commercial on the radio from Chevron, but it could have well been from any of the others.  It featured the CEO in a serious, "can we talk?" mode.  He somberly stated that the recent hurricanes Katrina and Rita had put such a strain on supplies, that, unfortunately, gas prices had to rise to unprecedented levels.  He then proceeded to implore motorists to "curtail unnecessary trips in the car," and, "drive 55 miles per hour rather than 65," and "to try not to accelerate too fast;" he then said something to the effect of "we're all in this together, and at Chevron, we're dedicated to do to everything blah blah blah...." Two days later record profits were announced.  I wanted to put my fist through the radio.