When the Levees Broke

Just got finished watching the first two hours of Spike Lee's four hour documentary on Katrina and its aftermath. It's an impressive and wrenching film, one that every American should see.

After watching I feel compelled to state what New Orleanians know, but remains painfully outside of the American consciousness and unabsorbed by the media:

1. New Orleans was destroyed by the ineptness and corruption of the Army Corps of Engineers (ACE), not by Hurricane Katrina. New Orleans did, indeed, dodge the bullet of Katrina, but we couldn't outmaneuver the incompetence of the ACE. The greatest engineering disaster in the history of the earth needs to be accounted for. Read all about it at Levees.org.
2. George Bush, Dick Cheney, Michael Chertoff and Michael Brown, among others in the Bush administration, either didn't care about New Orleans or are imbeciles. Maybe both. I know Bush is just going to keep fucking things up for the rest of his term, but can he at least wipe that shit-eating grin off his face?
3. Rather than taking the opportunity of this tragedy to show off American mettle and know-how and rebuild New Orleans as a 21st-century city, New Orleans remains a example of American forgetfulness and federal indifference.

21 August 2006; 0 comments