There are dead bodies floating in the streets of New Orleans. No one knows how many, or how long it will be before they are all recovered. The mayor of New Orleans says that hundreds are dead for sure, but that the body count will likely run into the thousands. The images of the devastation are horrifying, the aftermath of the destruction awesome. Suddenly we are forced to relearn the meaning of disaster and calamity -- not the high-production-value disaster that comes with a logo and theme music and a rapturous voice-over but the genuine disaster where the scale is worse than we could have imagined. We are not a worst-case-scenario kind of people. We are by turns optimistic or apathetic. Whether it is politics, war, or weather, we live lavishly on hope. After all, how bad can it really get?
Now we know: worse than we could have imagined. Ray Nagin, New Orleans' mayor, and Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, the governor of Louisiana, have called for a complete evacuation of the city. The battle of New Orleans has been lost.
Congress will return to Washington next week, eager to work on an aid package that will run into the billions. The Navy has sent a hospital ship to the Gulf of Mexico to bring aid, not to victims in some distant, far-off region but to New Orleans, Slidell, Biloxi, Gulfport, Waveland, Pass Christian, and Pearlington -- towns with American names laid waste in biblical fashion overrun with death and plague. Is this us? There is, in our stunned reaction to the tragedy, a sense that these things don't happen to us. But here we are with New Orleans under the rain of Neptune, the Mississippi Gulf Coast slammed back into the last century.
“A great American city is fighting for its life,” says former New Orleans Mayor Marc Morial. “We must rebuild New Orleans.”
That claim is going to be subject to a lot of hows, whys, and with whose money? But however those questions are answered, it'll be a long time before anything happens.
President Bush, so moved by the disaster, was able to put a time frame on how long it will take to reverse the damage. “Years,” he said. A despondent Nagin, meanwhile, was so pessimistic about a timetable for reoccupying the city, he made it sound like American troops could be home from Iraq before people could return to the French Quarter.
But what has been most shaken may be our sense of immunity from genuine disaster, the sense that allowed so many people not to flee in advance of the hurricane.
After all, how bad could it be?
My friend Larry Copeland is a reporter for USA Today and a longtime storm watcher who prides himself on picking the safest spot from which to work. My only communication from him since the storm came ashore was a text message that he had “barely” survived, and that he would tell me about it later.
On Sunday he was in Biloxi, Mississippi, watching Katrina heading toward New Orleans before she took a detour. The story he filed on Monday is an example of how extraordinary we think we are. It was all about Hurricane Camille, the Category 5 storm that killed more than 250 people, from Mississippi to Virginia, in 1969. Like this latest storm, Camille was headed for New Orleans.
“Many people did not take it seriously and failed to make vital preparations,” writes Copeland in a story datelined Gulfport. “At the last minute Camille wobbled east and came here.”
Katrina didn't wobble, but there were similarities, and there were enough warning signs to override our sense of immunity.
A carpenter named Jerry Lepoma told Copeland, “We didn't get much rain at all. It was nice and sunny. Then, about 11 o'clock at night, all hell broke loose.”
Gas is more than $4 a gallon in some places. The Census Bureau put out a report that shows poverty rising in the United States. The definition of victory in Iraq is constantly under review. And last week, Alan Greenspan, in his own opaque way, said that the housing bubble will burst, the deficit will begin to explode and drive up inflation in a few years, and the stock market may again be overvalued.
I feel like we're approaching 11 o'clock. But, really, how bad can it be?
There are dead bodies floating in the streets of New Orleans.
Terence Samuel is the chief congressional correspondent for U.S. News & World Report. His column about politics appears each week in the Prospect's online edition.
