Happy anniversary. Or something.
I put this video together for the same reason I wrote the song, the same reason I wrote the diary the song's based on, the same reason I constantly direct people to the research that led to the diary:
The wrong story is being told.
What happened 'round my town in August of 2005 wasn't a natural disaster, it was a failure of manmade structures, a failure that was not only predictable and preventable, but actually predicted, in detail, by precisely those people who are paid our tax dollars to make such predictions.
And those calm forecasts, later agitated shouts, went unheeded. Because the resources it would have taken to respond were slated for burning in a war that never needed fighting.
I'm putting this out a week before the anniversary itself, and preparing to spamblast a number of media outlets with it, in hopes that the real story of what happened in New Orleans gets reported, by someone, this August 29th. Any help by members of this community in spreading that message is deeply appreciated, as well as suggestions for persons/programs/journals to send it to.
A note on images:
The landscape of the visual history of Katrina has undergone massive change in the last six years. Many images that were on the shadowy edge of public domain then have now been collected into pay sites. In addition, entire photo galleries on federal sites (Helloooo, Corps of Engineers!) are truncated neatly at 2006.
Same with images of the war in Iraq, which is also central to this story. Much of the worst have been expunged or gone underground into black internet sites. The Department of Defense has done a very thorough job of making the worst of both "theaters" disappear and the best face the only face seen.
One extremely odd disappearance was that of Al Naomi, once head of the Corps of Engineers SELA levee system protecting New Orleans and South Louisiana, whose warnings on the fragile state of the structures protecting New Orleans were ignored by those with other priorities. Not too long ago, one could find photos and TV footage aplenty of Mr. Naomi, including his lengthy interview on FOX's Hannity and Colmes on Sept. 12, 2005. In researching this vid, I have been unable to find a single image of him. I assume he has disappeared down Winston Smith's memory hole.
Still, there is a wealth of visual history, for those who wish to mine it. Many private photographers have donated their images to Wikimedia Commons. Special mention should be made of the work of the Wiki contributor Infrogmation, whose numerous photos of the city after the flood comprise an invaluable record.
Acknowledgement is also due the Federal Emergency Management Agency, whose on-site personnel, in particular Jocelyn Augustino, compiled a brutally exhaustive record of the aftermath. This was done, I have come to believe, in an effort to convince higher-ups in the government that Shit is Really Fucked Up Down Here. (One photo of the 17th Street Canal levee was originally captioned, "Levee Destroyed," as if the field personnel were afraid the pictures alone wouldn't convince their superiors.) Over time, I have come to have much greater appreciation of FEMA's reaction team, up to and including Mr. Brown, whose picture I declined to use in the video, despite the cheap applause it may have gotten. Overall, the Agency may be the best repository of contemporary images, and it is to be commended for leaving this record, warts and all, online for all to explore.
I am extremely grateful to those executive departments and uniformed services that have maintained their image archives from the time. There is no way this could have been made without them.
Some personal notes:
Making this was exhausting.
Telling the stories, writing the tales, isn't so hard. But seeing the images, particularly those I shot myself, is another story. The visual immediacy takes one instantly back to the time and place and mental state. And it was a very, very strange state, both manic and deeply depressed. At the time, the forward motion blotted out a lot of the emotion. Gotta get some groceries. Gotta get the genny going and the house locked down before curfew. Gotta, gotta, gotta and, thankfully, the gottas drown out the other things you know.
But staring at these pictures, these years later, it's all there. Look, there's Gloria's house, abandoned in the moonlight. Where Marcial will never return. There's the post office, the last place I saw Stevenson. There's. . .
There's us. Those here and gone. And what happended.
Still, all in all, it's not big a deal to go through this again, if I can get the message across to someone: this wasn't nature; this was the result of decisions made by people, who felt it was more important to prosecute a needless war than to fire up some yellow steel and plug a few holes.
(Note-within-note: To be completely clear, GF and I were not in the city when the levees broke. We had evacuated Sunday and did not return until around the beginning of October. The images I contributed to this video were all shot after October 1, 2005.)
There is one other lesson I would have my countrymen take from what happened here, though I have no hope that the media will convey it: if you are in trouble, if the fertilizer has really hit the ventilator, it is likely you will not get the help you need from the leaders of your community and country.
If those leaders have R's behind their names, that is more than likely; it is certain. They will let you die like a god-damned dog in the street.
For those who take that last sentence as hyperbole, slip this image out of the quick cuts and tuck it away.
You might want to pull it out and contemplate it from time to time. Especially, it is my hope, at election time.
Thank you for watching and sharing.
And remembering.