Katrina, Aesop’s Fables and Zombie Movies

The demagogues quickly laid claim to Katrina. Tragedy has become an opportunity to make political points and blame the other side:
• Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.is busy blaming the Bush administration. Opposing the Kyoto Protocol, he claims, increased global warming which caused this disaster. Former GOP chair Haley Barbour is the particular target of this finger pointing exercise.
• Former Clinton Advisor Sidney Blumenthal is on higher ground, pointing at Bush administration failures to head a 2001 FEMA disaster study. More civil engineering and preparedness, he argues, could have prevented this.
• Conservatives, meanwhile, are busy denying the global warming connection and blaming environmentalists for regulations that inhibit governmental action.

This finger pointing accomplishes little – except to allow the demagogues to feel self-righteous, somewhat like the Shepherd's boy who might have said: “I told you that the wolf was coming.”

Two of Aesop’s fables shed light on societal failures to avoid this disaster:

• The Ants and the Grasshopper THE ANTS were spending a fine winter's day drying grain collected in the summertime. A Grasshopper, perishing with famine, passed by and earnestly begged for a little food. The Ants inquired of him, "Why did you not treasure up food during the summer?' He replied, "I had not leisure enough. I passed the days in singing." They then said in derision: "If you were foolish enough to sing all the summer, you must dance supperless to bed in the winter."

• The Shepherd's Boy and the Wolf A SHEPHERD-BOY, who watched a flock of sheep near a village, brought out the villagers three or four times by crying out, "Wolf! Wolf!" and when his neighbors came to help him, laughed at them for their pains. The Wolf, however, did truly come at last. The Shepherd-boy, now really alarmed, shouted in an agony of terror: "Pray, do come and help me; the Wolf is killing the sheep"; but no one paid any heed to his cries, nor rendered any assistance. The Wolf, having no cause of fear, at his leisure lacerated or destroyed the whole flock. There is no believing a liar, even when he speaks the truth.

An old Virginia proverb says: “Hindsight is better than foresight by a darn sight”

The people of New Orleans, state and federal governments, made a human error – the procrastinated one day at a time. New we will have to recover one day at a time. They knew – some of them knew – how bad it would be. Preventative action, spurred by foresight, would have been expensive and painful. They postponed it, hoping that the disaster would never come.

In this, they are not much different from the Grasshopper, the Villagers, or the rest of us. Ever since her friend’s house burned down Bonny and I have talked about photographing the contents of our house for insurance purposes. Being busy, we have postponed this task. In case of fire, I hope that I will at least have the foresight to grab my iPod - on which I have backed up my data.

Here is the tricky part. Denial is a useful psychological defense mechanism. Our daughter has kept Katrina off the television. Her three year old, unable to tell immanent disasters from TV news, would have nightmares. When she is a little older, she will be able to say “that’s bad but I don’t have to worry about it now.” Tragically, for New Orleans the “I won’t have to worry about it now” became a self-destructive defense mechanism.

Now, consider some historical and cinematic accounts of social consequence of disasters.

NYT columnist David Brooks writes about
• How the 1889 Johnstown, PA flood led to widespread prejudice against Hungarians. Public reaction set the stage for the progressive movement.
• In 1900 as storm in Galveston, TX unleashed widespread racial prejudice. Galveston lost out to Houston as a leading port.
• In 1927 a Mississippi flood led to the rise of Huey Long and set the stage for the New Deal.

Meanwhile, our media savvy son, David, sees Zombie movies as a description of societal breakdown.

Interestingly, there’s lots of stuff in Night of the Living Dead and its sequels about race. Black characters are heroes and white people get eaten. The smartest zombie movies have lots to say about how civilized society breaks down in crises. The horrifying thing is to me is that there are times, like now in New Orleans, where stuff like this actually happens. Turns out you don’t need a plague of undeath. Just lots of rain.

I hope that both Davids have some ideas as to what we can do about this – or maybe we can just procrastinate the problem away one day at a time.