New Orleans dominates the news. What seems extraordinary is that the whole tragedy was so predictable, yet the city was so ill-prepared: a city situated in reclaimed swamp, below sea-level, in an area where hurricanes are regular events. At least if they didn’t strengthen the levees, why didn’t they have better evacuation procedures? Easy to ask these questions in hindsight, of course, but Bush doesn’t look like he’s going to come out of this too well, even if the nastiest smell comes from those who can’t help seeing this in quasi-religious terms, as just desserts:
[T]he intellectual looters have busied themselves with plundering half-truths and false analyses to advance one of their most precious agendas: global warming.
The German Environment Minister, Jurgen Trittin, was first, with a claim that this was a real-life version of the shock-flick, The Day After Tomorrow. Sir David King, Tony Blair’s chief scientific adviser, weighed in, saying global warming was increasing the risk from hurricanes. Robert F. Kennedy Jr, self-designated leader of the American environmentalist cause, said the US was reaping the failure to sign up to the Kyoto Protocol. And, of course, Cindy Sheehan, the bereaved mother of a US soldier who leads the antiwar campaign and any other left-wing cause that wants her, noted President Bush was “heading to Louisiana to see the devastation that his environmental policies and his killing policies have caused”.
Best of all, though, was the contribution of Jon Snow, enthroned as the objective voice of British media at Channel 4 News, who chortled: “How ironic that the world’s No 1 polluter is now reaping the ‘rewards’ that so many have warned would flow.”
That Islamists should claim Katrina as “one of the soldiers of Allah” is equally predictable.
No other city of comparable size can come close to New Orleans in terms of its cultural significance. Ben MacIntyre mourns:
New Orleans holds a unique place in the American imagination because, in truth, it is a place apart from America. In a country inclined to puritanism, the Big Easy is the almost Mediterranean enclave where America came to drink and eat too much, to stay up late and behave badly. No American city, with the exception of New York, has such a vivid mythology; no city, including New York, is more conscious of its own romance. The normal rules do not apply here. New Orleans is famed for its jazz and blues, but it also has what so many American cities lack: soul. Corrupt, voluptuous and profoundly literate, New Orleans marches to the beat of a different drummer….
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