Two years after the storm/flood/disaster began, Douglas Brinkley lambasts the Bush administration and City officials for speaking out of both sides of their mouths regarding the recovery of New Orleans. Brinkley speaks sense, but it is still too early in the game for this level of final analysis, or such a tone of finality, on New Orleans. This city has a serious repopulation Catch-22 and it’s really difficult to predict the future of an area in the nascence of its recovery. Yet, I agree with Brinkley in his assessment that “the Bush administration actually wants neighborhoods below sea level to die on the vine” and that decisions on Category 5 storm protection and economic recovery need to be made now before we lose the waiting game.
… The answer to New Orleans’s levee woes is painfully obvious: money and willpower. Common sense dictates that the endangered areas – if repopulated (and that is a big if) – demand levees that can sustain Category 5 storms. It’s a national obligation. Entire blocks are moldering away while the federal government lifts only a cursory hand to reverse the desultory trend.
To be fair, Bush’s apparent post-Katrina inaction policy makes some cold, pragmatic sense. If the U.S. government is not going to rebuild the levees to survive a Category 5 storm – to be finished at the earliest in 2015 and at an estimated cost of $40 billion, far eclipsing the extravagant bill for the entire Interstate Highway System – then options are limited.
But what makes the current inaction plan so infuriating is that it’s deceptive, offering up this open-armed spin to storm victims: “Come back to New Orleans.” Why can’t Bush look his fellow citizens in the eye and tell them what seems to be the ugly truth? That as long as he’s commander-in-chief, there won’t be an entirely reconstructed levee system.
… Right now New Orleans is having a hard time lobbying on its own behalf. Minnesota’s Twin Cities have about 20 Fortune 500 companies to draw in private-sector money to help rebuild the bridge that collapsed in Minneapolis. New Orleans has one, Entergy, which is verging on bankruptcy. So besides U.S. taxpayers and port fees, New Orleans must count on spiked-up tourist dollars to jumpstart the post-Katrina rebuild.
But this is where the bizarre paradox of living in a city of ruins comes into play. Out of one side of its mouth the New Orleans Chamber of Commerce says “Come on down, folks! We’re not underwater!” Yet these same civic boosters – viscerally aware that the Bush administration is treating the desperate plight of New Orleans in an out-of-sight, out-of-mind fashion – don’t want to bite the hand that feeds them large chunks of reconstruction cash. New Orleans is both bragging about normalcy and poor-mouthing itself, confusing Americans about what the real state of the city is.
When I read the article, I thought it was written at the first anniversary. While things definitely are not good, the situation on the ground is much better than the vision Brinkley presents. But then I don’t think he has spent much time around here lately. Of course, it is appalling that the point he is making is still out there now two years after Katrina.