A clip from the Salon interview below shows why you and I must read this book. It’s not because Eggers is a good writer who edits the most evocative, funny, often mind-blowing Best American Non-Required Reading series. He fully gets what happened to America in 2001 and 2005, how they are not disconnected and what it means for us in the aftermath.
… You know, there’s a new graphic novel called “A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge” by Josh Neufeld, and one of his protagonists is also Muslim-American. Their story, like that of the Vietnamese-American community in New Orleans, was a lot less told. And it’s a legacy of the war on terror, this mentality that an overwhelming military response was the solution to a humanitarian crisis. It just felt like a real manifestation of the Bush years. FEMA was folded into Homeland Security and that became a disaster. And then, because of the military response and the perception that law and order was the first order of business, you had the suspension of pretty much all rights. Martial law was more or less enacted in New Orleans, and then you have one man who is just caught between all these lines, all these lumbering forces.
Zeitoun was among thousands of people who were doing “Katrina time” after the storm. There was a complete suspension of all legal processes and there were no hearings, no courts for months and months and not enough folks in the judicial system really seemed all that concerned about it. Some human-rights activists and some attorneys, but otherwise it seemed to be the cost of doing business. It really could have only happened at that time; 2005 was just the exact meeting place of the Bush-era philosophy towards law enforcement and incarceration, their philosophy toward habeas corpus and their neglect and indifference to the plight of New Orleanians.
