Another three hours camped out in front of cable TV tonight and then another 45 minutes reading the blogs. Thank God for alternative media.
It’s almost impossible but things are worse tonight then they were yesterday. Journalists, social workers, and doctors in the trenches have stopped waiting for help and face the cameras with masks of exhaustion. Commentators have stopped pointing out that help isn’t there. Residents are giving up and dying on folding chairs in the street. The mayor isn’t bothering wait for the buses anymore; he’s going to march the people out of the city. This is where we are at — resignation and desperate measures.
And now the social order is unraveling. Police stations are setting themselves up to defend the stations tonight. Snipers are shooting at medivac helicopters. What the hell is going on?
They can’t find Fats Domino.
Links on Katrina
Andrew Sullivan — It seems to me inconceivable that we cannot impose basic law and order in a major American city five days after a hurricane has hit. This is a very basic governmental responsibility and all I can say is that I see no evidence of competence or effectiveness so far. FEMA had no solid evacuation plan? The feds had no plans to maintain order in such a situation? The explosion of complete lawlessness is beginning to make Haiti look like a pleasant place to live. This is America?
Glenn Reynolds has a pile of links to organizations. Megan McArdle has a post on one town’s need for help.
Ed Kilgore reports that Dennis Hastert told a suburban Chicago newspaper that spending billions of dollars to bring the city back “doesn’t make sense to me.”
Nicole Gelinas of City Journal has an excellent piece on New Orleans shaky infrastructure. (via Opinion Journal)
And the locals and outsiders who try to help New Orleans in the weeks and months to come will do so with no local institutional infrastructure to back them up. New Orleans has no real competent government or civil infrastructure—and no aggressive media or organized citizens’ groups to prod public officials in the right direction during what will be, in the best-case scenario, a painstaking path to normalcy.
The truth is that even on a normal day, New Orleans is a sad city. Sure, tourists think New Orleans is fun: you can drink and hop from strip club to strip club all night on Bourbon Street, and gamble all your money away at Harrah’s. But the city’s decline over the past three decades has left it impoverished and lacking the resources to build its economy from within. New Orleans can’t take care of itself even when it is not 80 percent underwater; what is it going to do now, as waters continue to cripple it, and thousands of looters systematically destroy what Katrina left unscathed?
Lots more links from Kieran Healy.
Apt. 11d 