When we were leaving for Lassen last week, one of the last news items I noticed
\nwas that the levees keeping water out of New Orleans were starting to give way.
\nWhile we were camping the city of New Orleans filled up with water, turning something
\nnasty but containable into a certified national disaster the likes of which the
\ncountry has never seen, not even on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.<\/p>\n
As the Led Zeppelin song went, “when the levee breaks, got noplace to stay.”<\/p>\n
Or hide, in the case of the Bush administration, which is looking like the
\ngang that couldn’t shoot straight. But you know what? The Bush gang did a fine
\njob of cleaning up Florida — you know, that key state full of swing voters
\n— in an election year when three hurricanes struck in a single summer.<\/p>\n
But no levees gave way, leaving, say, Miami or Tampa under water.<\/p>\n
Since Bush is the boss of the whole country, he’s got to take his lumps on
\nthis one. Disaster happens on your watch, the response is a national shame,
\nyou have to face up.<\/p>\n
Truth is, though, that the your everyday cynical political calculation is the
\nreal culprit here. What happened last week was that Bush & Co. knew from the
\nget-go that they had few friends in a 60-percent-black city like New Orleans.
\nThey were in no hurry to help because they had no votes to gain, and they gambled
\nthat Katrina would be a three-day story that disappeared once the waters began
\nto recede.<\/p>\n
Only the waters didn’t recede after three days. They kept rising. Once the
\nBush gang knew they had a genuine 9\/11-style catastrophe on their hands, they
\nhad to do something<\/i> about it. But by then the city and all its infrastructure
\nwas ruined. So it took a few more days to get military boots on the ground to
\nrestore order and usher in relief supplies. Add it up and you’ve got thousands
\nof people suffering for a week with no electricity, no fresh water and only
\nwhatever food they could scrounge or steal.<\/p>\n
The Bush people made a similar calculation during the California energy crisis
\nof a few years ago. Nothing was done to intervene when canny energy speculators
\nwere manipulating the state’s energy market and costing its taxpayers billions
\nof dollars and forcing rolling blackouts during the hottest days of the summer.<\/p>\n
Why didn’t Bush act? Because he had nothing to gain in helping a state that
\ndidn’t help him get elected. If the California equivalent of the levees giving
\nway — a devastating earthquake — had happened during the electricity crisis,
\nBush would’ve been in the same jam he’s in today. He and his people rolled the
\ndice and lucked out. And guess what: California voted for a Democrat in the
\nnext election, just as his people predicted.<\/p>\n
You hate to think of politicians making these “what’s-in-it-for-me” calculations
\nwhen thousands of lives are at stake, when a jewel of a city has been turned
\ninto a steaming toilet bowl. You hate to see people pointing fingers when they
\noughta be lending a hand.<\/p>\n
But this is how the world works and, I suspect, always has.<\/p>\n
And with that thought, I’m leaving for Yosemite National Park, to walk in the
\nwoods and gawk at big trees and amazing rocks, which always seem to avoid getting
\nthemselves into these predicaments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When we were leaving for Lassen last week, one of the last news items I noticed was that the levees keeping water out of New Orleans were starting to give way. While we were camping the city of New Orleans…<\/p>\n