Joe,

The reason the French Quarter got "rebuilt" so quickly is because a) it wasn't under water, and b) the people who owned things there came back. In the poorest areas, a lot of people who left or got evacuated just never came back. Even in the suburbs like Chalmette (where I spent spring break 2006 and 2007 working), where people were better off and had more resources, you could work all day gutting a house, then look around and see 30 or more than no one had even touched yet. I haven't seen the film and can't comment on what these people specifically experienced, but I can tell you that there are many, many more factors at play than simple white-on-black racism in why the city took so long to recover.

Also, Pres. Bush "shrugged off suggestions that [the National Guard] be brought home to help" because they already had their hands full fighting a war.

Thanks a lot for your comments. I would urge you to give the film a look sometime (I’d assume it’s getting a DVD release as well as the theatrical run).

I’m glad you offered your opinions and observations as someone who has been there, and your points have merit. But the people in the film did go through more than just those couple of things.

Another scene from the film that’s pretty telling: the naval base scene, where, with nowhere else to stay, after walking from their house, they’re turned away at gunpoint from a naval base (after being told by the army who skipped their street in searching for dead to go there). They know there are empty buildings there where they and their children could sleep (they say it’s one of the bases that were tapped to be shut down, and there are few people even on the base).

To me the big sticking point, though, was a scene a year later, when the Roberts are back in their neighborhood commemorating the anniversary of their surviving Katrina. A police car rolls up in the street, and the cops get out and really are treating them disrespectfully, talking rudely to them, ordering them around. For no reason other than they’re outside at night. Eventually they order them (they don’t ask nicely) to turn off their camera, which they did.

That sequence really got me thinking: what if I was shooting a documentary, an amateur film, or just a home movie in my neighborhood at night and a cop came up and told me to turn off my camera. First off, he wouldn’t, but if he did I’d have the total right to refuse, because I’m not breaking any laws.

My point is that it’s easy to see, after watching this film, told from their perspective, why many poor black people believe they’re being victimized (though my personal opinion regardless of this film is that they often are).

How is a working class or poor person who left a devestated area of New Orleans supposed to come back and rebuild things on their own? Were they supposed to reconnect themselves to the power grid somehow? Make sure their water was safe to drink on their own? Repair the damaged roads on their own? I don’t think so. And it’s in those areas that the government dragged its feet for one group of people and expedited things for another group. I would say it had as much to do with class as race, although the two notions tend to be intertwined in this country.

And, yes, George was busy utilizing our resources to kill people rather than save them. That’s pretty much the story of his presidency.

One last thing: I think it goes without saying, but regarding the comment about the National Guard fighting a war, my feeling is that maybe that particular war didn’t need to be happening in the first place, and this particular tragedy is something that was made much worse by us fighting an unjust war under false pretenses.

Even so, with the size of our military (including the National Guard), had any semblance of a decent plan of mobilization been in place, surely the Louisiana Guard could have been rotated out and another unit rolled in to come home to help, rather than let everyone bathe in the muck for 5 days while Bush, with the power and resources (and the obligation) to help, sat back and said “oh, we’re praying for them, so, you know, everything will be okay.” Meanwhile, that lady is IDing her dead friends and relatives.

Drinky: Of course they couldn’t rebuild by themselves; lots of church groups, charities and others were there to help with that. The point is that you can’t do jack to rebuild (or at least raze) a house if the owners are nowhere to be found.

Joe: Whether the war should have taken place isn’t the issue, in my opinion. It did take place, and we had to work with that reality. Again, I can’t comment specifically on the LANG’s situation, but are you really suggesting we should have sent an unrelated group into a war zone so the LANG could have gone home and done … what, specifically? It’s not like they could snap their fingers and be there overnight; it still would have taken days, and I doubt they would have made that much difference when they finally got there.

As for the naval base: Guarding a military installation is a deadly serious business. We don’t know their side of the story; we don’t know why they wouldn’t let them in. I have a very high suspicion it was a reason other than “keep the black folks out.” I’ve learned from experience to be cautious in ascribing motive to anyone, especially where racial issues are concerned.

One last thing: When the office of the president controls the weather, city government, public transportation, people’s individual actions (for good or ill), the ability to flood an entire city and the myriad other factors that went into this disaster, then you can lay this at Bush’s feet. Otherwise, he’s just another player in a larger game.

I don't think the church groups, etc. could really do much to repair the kind of damage I was talking about, either. Rebuilding decimated infrastructure is pretty much a government-only endeavor. They're the only entity with the resources, and, indeed, the legal authority to do that kind of rebuilding.

A lot of ambitious folks did come back to try to salvage their homes, and then they found themselves sitting around with no electricity in a barren wasteland. As I'm reading now in The Great Deluge, the percentage of home ownership in the Lower Ninth was actually among the highest in the city. People were proud of those shacks of theirs. It's part of the reason that so many didn't want to evacuate to begin with.

I wouldn't lay the blame entirely at Bush's feet. I'd actually start with Ray Nagin, a self-aggrandizing boob who stumbled at every step and issued the mandatory evacuation order way too late. You can then move up the ladder to Governor Blanco, who botched the request to the federal government for aid. And then you can go to Bush, but that's almost unfair. It's a bit much to expect that clueless yahoo to suddenly become competent when it's required of him. It was really a parade of stupid from start to finish, and there's endless blame to go around.

Okay…here are my points spelled out with answers to your questions and comments on your…comments.

1) The war shouldn’t have been taking place in the first place. It was started for unjust reasons, and Bush was misusing the nation’s military might (not to mention put our soldiers in danger) by fighting a war for largely personal reasons (under false pretenses as well, I might add).

2) The war was going on…so let’s move forward and talk about the handling of this particular disaster that happened unfortunately at an inconvenient time. The guard was out there, as were the National Guards of several other states, I’d assume. I admittedly can’t be positive about this, but my assumption is that the Louisiana Guard didn’t have any special skills or training that, say, the Mississippi, Kentucky, Indiana, or Wyoming National Guards did not have (nor do I specifically know what the La. Guard’s role was in the war…were they actively fighting? Were they on the front lines?). But would it have been a terrible misappropriation of troops to divert them back home to deal with this situation, help with the rescue of people who needed it? I’m guessing not.

3) Bush appointed someone to lead FEMA that was either woefully unprepared for the role, or did not have the appropriate resources to carry out his job. I don’t know…maybe he wasn’t properly trained, maybe he didn’t have the manpower, maybe his cell phone was broken. Whatever the reason, the relief efforts were woefully mismanaged, and I don’t think that’s up for debate. Whichever way it goes, Bush was in charge of it, he appointed a buddy of his to lead it, it got screwed up, that’s his blame as well (not to mention that they pinned it all on him when things went bad, as I recall).

And I’ll agree that there were other factors Bush didn’t/couldn’t control (and the mayor shares plenty of blame for the public transportation woes, etc.). But Bush still had a large amount of accountability in what happened there, and I don’t think it’s unfair to expect much more out of him than what the people of New Orleans received.

I’m not trying to suggest that there was some guy somewhere who was like “eh, those are black people…we don’t need to take care of them.” It’s probably more of a rich/poor thing, because the poor tend to go into, say,a government office (let’s say to get their FEMA check). When they’re told “sorry, you can’t have it yet,” what are they going to do? They’re going to go home and sit there and not eat, as the Roberts did in the film.

The point, finally, for me, is that this was one more screw-up of enormous proportions that happened under Bush’s watch. Funny that the comment of “You can’t blame Bush for…” has come up so often over the past 8 years. You’d think people would tire of it, or start to actually consider what the president’s job is.

It’s a rule of presidential politics: the president gets blamed for every single bad thing that happens during his/her term. On the upside, they get to take credit for every single good thing that happens during their term.

This rule holds true for everyone except those smart enough to realize that the person occupying the White House has very little ability to affect things on such a micro scale. There are about six of these people.