We Failed You? Try Again.
Anne Rice blames America, not local officials.



"To my country I want to say this: During this crisis
you failed us. You looked down on us; you dismissed
our victims; you dismissed us. You want our Jazz Fest,
you want our Mardi Gras, you want our cooking and our
music. Then when you saw us in real trouble, when you
saw a tiny minority preying on the weak among us, you
called us "Sin City," and turned your backs."

By Novelist and New Orleans resident Anne Rice

Let me get this straight:

Ms. Rice, you live in (what was) a very attractive
city which lies below sea level. On one side you have
a giant lake; on the other side you have the Gulf of
Mexico. Running through the middle is the Mississippi
River. All of which are above you.

Preventing those giant bodies of water from flooding
and drowning you are levees. These levees are
described as century-old. People have been warning
about the devastating effects of a direct hit from a
hurricane for decades.

I've heard a great deal of complaint in recent days
that the federal government may not have allocated
enough money to speed up the upgrades to those levees.
This does, however, raise the question of why city and
state residents were waiting around for the federal
government to send enough money to upgrade this,
instead of paying for it themselves. I mean, it was
only your homes, businesses, and lives at stake.
Perhaps these upgrades would have been expensive. If
only this city had some sort of events to attract
tourists, from which to collect taxes.

Anyway, your state and local officials decided to
spend your tax dollars on something else that they
(and presumably you) found more important, and then
they waited for the rest of the country to pay for
these life-preserving necessities.

Your beloved city and region has a colorful political
history, in which there is, oh, a wee bit of
corruption. I'm from New Jersey, so I cant throw
stones at that glass house. But you guys have managed
to pick leaders who give you the worst of both worlds they're scandal ridden and incompetent in a crisis.
Look, Rudy Giuliani might have run around with Judith
Nathan before his divorce, but he was a hell of a
leader in our darkest hours. You know the National
Review crowd isn't a fan of Pataki, but the man was a
rock after 9/11 compared to Governor Weepy
I'll-Evacuate-Eventually and Mayor
It's-Everybody's-Fault-Except-Mine. Nobody's throwing
around the adjective ,Churchillian, about any of your
officials these days. We didn't pick your local
officials; you guys did.

Rice asks, how many times did Gov. Kathleen Blanco
have to say that the situation was desperate? How many
times did Mayor Ray Nagin have to call for aid??

Ahem. What about those buses left unused, less than a
mile from the Superdome? JunkYardBlog notes that it's
written in the Southeast Louisiana Evacuation Plan
that buses are supposed to be used for evacuation of
those who don't have personal vehicles. As JYB
observes, there is something very peculiar about a
city and a state that have a plan on the books for
years that outlines what to do when a hurricane is
about to strike, yet when a hurricane comes roaring
in, the responsible officials just chuck the plan and
try winging it. Delaying and then winging it in the
face of a monstrous Cat 4/5 hurricane is never, ever a
good idea, especially for New Orleans. (See more
here.) Ironically, Nagin told CNN, I need buses,
man, when he had plenty sitting around unused before
the storm hit. Now they're flooded and useless.

But it's not like state and local officials could have
seen this coming. They have never had a hurricane
bearing down on them before and oh, wait, there was
Hurricane Ivan just last year. And after that dodged
bullet, Blanco and Nagin both acknowledged they needed
a better evacuation plan.

I would note that we've seen some pretty intense
disasters in other parts of the country, like planes
crashing into skyscrapers and subsequently collapsing,
earthquakes, tornadoes, blizzards, and yet somehow,
none of these disasters had the total breakdown of law
and order, civil society, etc. Jonah Goldberg's early
joke about a Mad-Max style post-apocalyptic tribal
anarchy may have been in poor taste, but it has turned
out to be nightmarishly prescient.

We failed you? No, oh brilliant creator of Exit to
Eden, you failed. You might not think of it this way,
but: Your leaders failed to upgrade the levees. You
elected a bunch of weepers and blame-shifters who lost
their head in a crisis.

Over the past decades, your elected officials have let
a criminal element incubate and grow until they ruled
the streets, instead of the forces of law and order.
In pop culture, a New Orleans thief is always a
charming rogue with a devilish smile. In reality,
they're a bunch of thugs.

If the number of residents who are looting thugs were
such a, tiny minority, we wouldn't have seen this
widespread, relentless anarchy. Madam, a noticeable
number of your neighbors saw this disaster as an
opportunity to smash a window and run away with a
television, an act that reveals much about the
inadequacies of the local school system, since that
thief won't be enjoying that television with any
electricity anytime soon.

I would also note that this is one hell of a police
force your local officials hired and that you and your
neighbors tolerated. 50 percent turned in their badges
during the crisis and quit. Your police superintendent
is conceding that some cops were looting. Just want to
refresh your memory --  four years ago, New York and
Washington, planes falling out of the sky, thousands
dead, no idea what the hell is coming next, and the
cops, among others, showed up to work.

To save you guys now, I  and a lot of other Americans
will pitch in. We are witnessing the biggest
mobilization of civilian and military rescue and
relief crews in history. But I have a sneaking
suspicion you're going to want the rest of us to pay
for the rebuilding of your city. (In the near future,
we're going to have to have a little chat about the
wisdom of building below sea level, directly next to
large bodies of water.) And if you're going to come to
the rest of us hat in hand, demanding the rest of us
clean up after your poor judgment, I'd appreciate a
little less "you failed us" and a little more "we've
learned our lesson."