Comparing the United States to the Roman Empire is a popular pastime. Even more so this week: A writer for Italy's center-left La Repubblica says that Hurricane Katrina has made New Orleans look like the city of Pompeii, which was destroyed by a volcano in the year 79 A.D.
Europeans are appalled at the natural disaster and at George W. Bush, apparently in equal measure. A September 2 article for Belgium's major newspaper, Le Soir, says: "The richest country on the planet has left the destitute, poor, sick and old to fend for themselves in the face of a predictable and predicted disaster." And under the headline "The Americans stunned by the frailty of their power,” France's Le Monde quotes several U.S. news sources expressing their disbelief that this is really America they're seeing on TV, claiming that it looks more like the Third World.
They have also zeroed in on Bush's performance. A writer for the Spanish newspaper El Pais notes that "Bush seems mired in his own incompetence." The weekend edition of Britain's Financial Times follows suit, with its main headline: "'Fix this goddam crisis,' Bush told by New Orleans mayor." The Guardian also focuses on the president, with a September 2 headline that reads "Bush under fire over hurricane aid."
Many Europeans lamented the U.S. government's slow response to provide aid, with the British Daily Mail running a September 2 article headlined “The humbling of a Superpower.” "Here is a superpower that can crush at will a tinpot dictatorship -- but then becomes so bogged down in the grisly aftermath of war that it finds itself unable to respond anything like adequately to the plight of tens of thousands of its own citizens engulfed by a natural calamity,” writes a Daily Mail journalist.
El Pais, the Italian La Stampa, and the Spanish El Mundo, meanwhile, note that the U.S. National Guard, which would ordinarily be called to help with the relief effort, is busy in Iraq and thus unavailable to come to the aid of its own citizens.
The fact that most of the victims of the hurricane are black and poor is the main focus of the Financial Times' coverage, taking up the front, second, and third pages of that paper's weekend edition. The same theme is taken up by The Guardian, which also offered a longer critique of race as an issue in America. A recent article's subhead explains to Europeans, "In the US, white people can't imagine black people who are just like them." The same article mentions that the reconstruction of New Orleans may force President Bush to come up with a plan similar to the New Deal.
One of the stories in the Financial Times lists the countries offering aid to the United States, while taking care to mention president Bush's response -- that the United States can take care of itself. On September 3, Le Monde listed foreign countries offering aid under the headline, "After Katrina, the world offers a helping hand to a humbled America.”
Meanwhile, Fidel Castro announced a minute of silence in honor of "los desdichados de New Orleans" (the dispossessed of New Orleans), and offered to dispatch more than a thousand Cuban doctors, according to Le Monde.
On September 1, a report from the Bergen Times in Norway (where gas frequently costs more than $4 a gallon without natural disasters pushing the price up) comments that "neither hurricanes, gas shortages nor a 50% price increase the last days have pushed the average Southerner so far as to park their cars.”
On September 2, the Danish Berlingske Tidende picked up on the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency's past in horse-judging, writing that "Michael Brown is the head of FEMA not because he has experience dealing with emergency and disaster aid, but because he had the right political connections and therefore got the job."
In an article headlined "After the evacuation of New Orleans, the questions all of America is asking itself,” Le Monde on September 2 summed up the situation in five questions: "Was the disaster predictable? Why wasn't everyone evacuated? Why didn't anyone come to rescue the refugees at the Superdome? Is Louisiana paying a price because of Iraq?" And finally, "Where was President Bush?"
Julia Gronnevet is a Prospect intern and a graduate of The University of Bergen, Norway.
