I wonder how quickly Hollywood and the publishing industry started scrambling for movie and book deals about Katrina’s swath of destruction. My guess is instantly. My hope is that many of these profiteering parasites will die in the next great West Coast earthquake so I can write a screenplay about their welcome loss.
My cynicism continues with what I think is this story’s moral: Fuck with nature (levees, pumps, dams and living in a potential toilet bowl of a city) and nature wins in the end. Wonks have known exactly what would happen to New Orleans in the event of a huge storm like Katrina for at least five years now. “The fact that New Orleans has not already sunk is a matter of luck,” as Popular Mechanics’ Jim Wilson wrote in an eerily prescient article in 2001. Hasn’t living in New Orleans all this time been a game of Russian roulette?
Amid startling visions of thousands crammed into dark stadiums, the desperate clustered on roofs and in attics, the dead floating, I await and dread the total number saved, the total lost, both figures wild guesses at present. Issues of race arising in the floods’ aftermath have been most disturbing to me, from the depiction of black “looters” and white “finders” to the alleged email from a rescue worker claiming, “The poorest 20% [...] of the city was left behind to drown. [....] The planners knew full well that the poor, who in New Orleans are overwhelmingly black, wouldn’t be able to get out. The resources—meaning, the political will—weren’t there to get them out.”