Letter from Louisiana posted by China

I write from Baton Rouge, which, though only about 60 miles northwest of New Orleans, is right now like a different world from southeastern Louisiana and the Mississippi Gulf Coast (this disaster area is roughly equal in size to Britain). Life here in Baton Rouge is fairly normal, though the city is becoming somewhat crowded with the influx of refugees. The main difficulty in reporting on what’s happening is that the situation has been changing almost hourly—and, at least until Friday (2nd September), when some significant amount of aid finally arrived, entirely for the worse. The hurricane itself on Monday (August 29th) was certainly bad enough for New Orleans; but, the day after, when the rain stopped, two of the levees holding back the water of Lake Pontchartrain were breached, and 80% of the city was flooded. After that, the people stranded in New Orleans—overwhelmingly poor and mostly black—became increasingly desperate for food, water, sanitation facilities, medical attention, and the necessities of life generally. An index of the desperation is that motor vehicles in New Orleans—mainly ambulances and police cars—became targets for armed attack, presumably from those hoping to seize the vehicles in order to get out of town. The death toll can only be guessed at now, but it will certainly reach the thousands and possibly the tens of thousands. This is the worst disaster on American soil in at least 100 years.

The politics of the thing are complex, but one thing that seems clear is the criminal incompetence of the governmental authorities. New Orleans and state officials deserve a considerable share of the blame, mainly for the tardiness with which New Orleans was evacuated (while Mayor Kip Holden of Baton Rouge should be mentioned as an exception; for decades he has been perhaps the most progressive black Democrat in Louisiana politics, whose black political elites are in general nearly as venal and corrupt as its white political elites). But the feds—who alone have the resources really to deal with such a catastrophe—are by far the most culpable. Much of the neglect goes back years, as the Bush Administration downgraded preparations for natural disasters in order to concentrate on military adventures. But even last weekend, when every meteorologist was clearly explaining that a disaster for New Orleans was certain, the Bushies did nothing; indeed, even after the disaster struck, the White House response has been casual and slow.

One nice irony, by the way, is that nearly everyone who has had a close and wide look at the disaster area (something that for several days could be done only by helicopter) has reached for one version or another of the same metaphor: “It looks like a war zone.” But no mainstream commentator that I have heard or read about has yet connected this to the actual war zone that the Bushies have created in Iraq. Indeed, some of the parallels are almost eerie: the heat, the destroyed buildings, the lack of electricity, the squalor, the looting, the sniper fire, and so forth. Perhaps the Iraqis should consider themselves fortunate that it’s geologically impossible (or so I suppose) for their country to flood.

But the main connections to be made here relate to US domestic politics. All summer Bush’s popularity with American voters has been plunging toward near-Nixonian levels (as the mainstream media very quietly report but don’t seem to truly believe), mainly because of Iraq, and now he’s tumbling down further. One CNN correspondent asked viewers to send e-mails giving their opinions as to whether the Administration was doing a good job in the post-Katrina crisis; out of hundreds of responses, not one was positive. The Manchester Union-Leader of New Hampshire—generally considered the most right-wing Republican newspaper in the country with a major circulation—published a blistering editorial attacking Bush for a total failure of leadership. Pundits are now talking about the president’s political “vulnerability.” Bush may well feel that he has himself made some of the worst sacrifices, for instance being forced to give up almost a week of his five-week summer vacation.

Yet, in Louisiana and Mississippi, Bush increasingly seems just irrelevant. Especially in New Orleans itself, the big story is of course the way that the class and racial chasms that divide American society have been made visible with a clarity that not even the mainstream press has been able to ignore. Yesterday, on Friday, a black man at the Convention Center was frantically shouting at a camera crew, "Look! He's a Caucasian! A Caucasian!", as he pointed to a white man lying prostrate on the ground. He clearly knew that nothing would improve the chances of help like having some white faces seen among the victims. But class has probably been even more powerful in all this than race—so emphatically, indeed that the word "class," long such a near-absolute taboo, is actually being used, seriously, in the mainstream media, an astounding turn of events in itself.

But I don’t necessarily think that either the sudden rise in class consciousness nor the further discrediting of the Bush Administration will necessarily have any important salutary effects for American politics. For that, there would have to be some organized oppositional political structures, and it’s not clear now who or what that could be. Not, certainly, the Democratic Party, which has spent the summer sketching one of the most appalling profiles in cowardice in recent memory. As Cindy Sheehan—a woman without any money or political connections but clearly not without extraordinary courage and eloquence—single-handedly invigorated antiwar feeling among what now seems to be an actual majority of the American people, the Democrats did absolutely nothing. If they were serious about opposing Bush (even for the most cynical careerist reasons), a nationally prominent Democrat would have turned up at Camp Casey every day to stand with Casey’s mother. None did—not even, so far as I can tell, any of that handful of urban (and mostly though not exclusively black) Congressional Democrats, like John Conyers, Dennis Kucinich, and Jesse Jackson, Jr., who constitute the extreme left fringe of the party. So don’t expect the Dems to do any better with this latest crisis.

“Don’t mourn—organize!” as Joe Hill famously said shortly before being executed. But Walter Benjamin would have added that, important as organizing is, sometimes mourning is necessary too. Now is a good time to mourn the thousands of Americans killed not only by the natural forces of wind and water but also by the criminal negligence of the powers that be. It is also time to mourn the city of New Orleans. It was one of the world’s great cities, perhaps more distinctive, more unlike any place but itself, than any other city I know. It was the home of the best food ever cooked and the best music ever played in the western hemisphere. By traditional Southern standards it long had an impressive history of labor militancy and of humane and progressive attitudes concerning race. More recently, it was uniquely welcoming, among Southern places, to sexual minorities. It was, indeed, always a very sexy city. No other place in the US was ever so devoted to pleasure and so resistant to the puritan moralism that has always poisoned so much of American society (not excluding significant sections of the American left). Reactionaries have always hated New Orleans, as well they should have. The true accent of their hatred was heard again just a few days ago, when Dennis Hastert, the Speaker of the US House of Representatives, suggested that the city, or at least large parts of it, should be bulldozed rather than rebuilt.

But it will be rebuilt. I’ll end this gumbo of observation and analysis on a note not of Benjaminian mourning but of Gramscian optimism of the will, something that, of course, no Marxist revolutionary can be without. New Orleans is uninhabitable now and will be for at least several months. It will never be the same as it was before. But the people who have fled will come back (not all of them, but a good number), and they will again make the Big Easy one of the world’s greatest cities. You are welcome, as soon as possible, to meet me for a drink at one of the wonderfully seedy jazz bars on Bourbon Street.

--Carl Freedman
Baton Rouge
Saturday, September 3rd, 2005