Spike Lee and Hurricane Katrina
Tonight I watched the first half of Spike Lee's stunning HBO documentary about New Orleans and the Hurricane Katrina cataclysm, "When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts." He has done many things with this film, but topping them all is restoring humanity to the black victims of the storm and the criminally negligent way they were treated by the Bush Administration and their own city government. White victims are treated fairly and honestly, but this is a film primarily about the African-American experience in Katrina. They tell their stories with no voiceover, in classic documentary style, and become real people once again.
And what stories they are. Lee and his assistants have sorted through the endless feet of video footage shot by professionals and amateurs during the storm and manage to show both the natural fury of the hurricane as it advances on the city and the political fury that swirled in the rest of the country as Americans watched the tragedy playing out on TV and in their newspapers. At the center of the latter is President George W. Bush and his minions, who played air guitar on TV (Bush) or went luxury shoe shopping in Manhattan (Condoleeza Rice) while the storm destroyed a major American city and its people. We are reminded, if anyone really forgot, of the President's infamous line, "Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job" about the incompetent former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Katrina became the human disaster it did for a number of reasons having nothing to do with the storm itself. Too many U.S. Army and National Guard units were deployed in Iraq, leaving few to send to a city that desperately needed a firm, outside hand to take control. The President's tax cuts for the wealthy early in his first term and the great costs of the needless Iraq War had depleted the Federal government of the resources it needed at a time like this. Bush was a also slave to the doctrine of "states' rights," which calls for a weak Federal government that lets states do pretty much what they want, for better or worse. It is a uniquely Southern philosophy, spawned by lingering antagonism about the Civil War and the Northern effort to end slavery in the 19th century. That's at the heart of it, folks, like it or not.
Lee gives respectful treatment to the widely-held belief among New Orleans blacks that someone dynamited the levees protecting their homes in the Lower 9th Ward to save white areas of New Orleans, especially the French Quarter. That did happen in previous major hurricanes--he even finds archival footage of it. One of my neighbors did a volunteer stint as a nurse in New Orleans after Katrina and told me that belief was widespread. But no credible evidence so far has surfaced that blasting was done during Katrina.
As a two-time flooding victim, though one not nearly as bad off as the ones portrayed in this film, I give thanks to the fact that our most recent Shipoke flood, in September 2004, occurred during the heart of the Presidential campaign in a state that was most definitely up for grabs between Bush and Sen. John Kerry. We were showered with Federal aid, and it arrived quickly. Shipoke benefited from having a city mayor who knew how to handle flooding and getting aid, but I suspect that had it not been a Presidential election autumn, FEMA would have been far less generous in many ways.
Part 2 of "When the Levees Broke" runs tonight on HBO from 9-11 p.m. HBO repeats specials like this ad infinitem, so if you missed it this time, you'll get another chance.