Discovering hot water

Fema Director recalled to DC... Good news, together with the rumors suggesting a number of casualties far smaller than what was feared. The more I read the more I'm convinced that huge societal fault was at the very core of this disaster, and by that I don't mean the federal government's only and by that I don't mean the Republicans' only. Mother Jones: "Louisiana's mostly Democratic congressional delegation funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to questionable Army Corps of Engineers projects, while important hurricane protection measures went unfunded". And I have issues also with the way Mayor Nagin has handled the situation (also, his resume is about as crystal clear as Brown's). Who should we believe, who should we trust? Nicholas Lemann's on The New Yorker, Sept 12 2005:

"When, after Katrina passed, the levees broke and the pumps failed, another essential part of at least this New Orleanian’s mind was activated: the part devoted to doubt about our competence to operate the purely human aspects of our society. New Orleans is, and for a long time has been, the opposite of a city that works. It perennially ranks near the bottom on practically every basic measure of civic health. It’s true that the Bush Administration has repeatedly proposed cutting the budget of the Army Corps of Engineers, and that for years there has been a list of widely agreed-upon hurricane-protection measures that the federal government has chosen not to fund, with now horrific consequences. But it’s also true that, after the levees broke, we watched every single system associated with the life of a city fail: the electric grid, the water system, the sewer system, the transportation system, the telephone system, the police force, the fire department, the hospitals, even the system for disposing of corpses. Perhaps it is all the fault of the force of the storm; I suspect that, as we move into the yearned-for realm of reliable information, we will find out that society and nature were co-conspirators in the tragedy. And the societal fault won’t all have been the federal government’s.

...

It seems like a million years ago that President Bush had admirers who saw in him a Churchillian ability to rally a nation in crisis; last week, as both the President and Michael Brown, the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, offered bland, undignified, and ill-timed restatements of the obvious about the direness of the situation, you could practically see them thinking, I’m not getting blamed for this! But they were positively helpful next to Louisiana’s governor, who cried and said that we should all pray, and New Orleans’ mayor, who told citizens they should evacuate but didn’t say how, predicted a second major flood, which didn’t materialize, sniped at the federal authorities, and kept reminding everyone that the situation was desperate".

Bottom line, the big guys sitting by Churchill lamps in leather armchairs - almost all of them - screwed up and the "poveri cristi" (the helpless derelicts) paid the price. Nice. I guess as we say in Italy, "I just discovered hot water" - that is, nothing new.