President Bush travels to the Gulf Coast this week, ostensibly to mark the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Everyone knows his real mission: to try to make us forget the first anniversary of the downfall of his presidency.
As they used to say in the French Quarter, bonne chance! The ineptitude bared by the storm — no planning for a widely predicted catastrophe, no attempt to secure a city besieged by looting, no strategy for anything except spin — is indelible. New Orleans was Iraq redux with an all-American cast. The discrepancy between Mr. Bush’s “heckuva job” shtick and the reality on the ground induced a Cronkite-in-Vietnam epiphany for news anchors. At long last they and the country demanded answers to the questions about the administration’s competence that had been soft-pedaled two years earlier when the war first went south.
What’s amazing on Katrina’s first anniversary is how little Mr. Bush seems aware of this change in the political weather. He’s still in a bubble. At last week’s White House press conference, he sounded as petulant as Tom Cruise on the “Today” show when Matt Lauer challenged him about his boorish criticism of Brooke Shields. Asked what Iraq had to do with the attack on the World Trade Center, Mr. Bush testily responded, “Nothing,” adding that “nobody has ever suggested in this administration that Saddam Hussein ordered the attacks.” Like the emasculated movie star, the president is still so infatuated with his own myth that he believes the public will buy such nonsense.
As the rest of the world knows, the White House connived 24/7 to pound in the suggestion that Saddam ordered the attacks on 9/11. “The Bush administration had repeatedly tied the Iraq war to Sept. 11,” Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton write in “Without Precedent,” their new account of their stewardship of the 9/11 commission. The nonexistent Qaeda-Saddam tie-in was as much a selling point for the war as the nonexistent W.M.D. The salesmanship was so merciless that half the country was brainwashed into believing that the 9/11 hijackers had been Iraqis.
To achieve this feat, Dick Cheney spent two years publicly hyping a “pretty well confirmed” (translation: unconfirmed) pre-9/11 meeting in Prague between Mohamed Atta and a Saddam intelligence officer, continuing to do so long after this specious theory had been discredited. Mr. Bush’s strategy was to histrionically stir 9/11 and Iraq into the same sentence whenever possible, before the invasion and after. Typical was his May 1, 2003, oration declaring the end of “major combat operations.” After noting that “the battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September 11th, 2001,” he added: “With those attacks, the terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States. And war is what they got.” To paraphrase the former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, this was tantamount to saying that the Japanese attacked us on Dec. 7, 1941, and war with Mexico is what they got.
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How do you pretty up this picture? As an opening act, Mr. Bush met on Wednesday with Rockey Vaccarella, a Katrina survivor who with much publicity drove a “replica” of a FEMA trailer from New Orleans to Washington to seek an audience with the president. No Cindy Sheehan bum’s rush for him. Mr. Bush granted his wish and paraded him before the press. That was enough to distract the visitor from his professed message to dramatize the unfinished job on the Gulf. Instead Mr. Vaccarella effusively thanked the president for “the millions of FEMA trailers” complete with air-conditioning and TV. “You know, I wish you had another four years, man,” he said. “If we had this president for another four years, I think we’d be great.”
The CNN White House correspondent, Ed Henry, loved it. “Hollywood couldn’t have scripted this any better, a gritty guy named Rockey slugging it out, trying to realize his dream and getting that dream realized against all odds,” he said. He didn’t ask how this particular Rockey, a fast-food manager who lost everything a year ago, financed this mission or so effortlessly pulled it off. It was up to bloggers and Democrats to report shortly thereafter that Mr. Vaccarella had run as a Republican candidate for the St. Bernard Parish commission in 1999. It was up to Iris Hageney of Gretna, La., to complain on the Times-Picayune Web site that the episode was “a huge embarrassment” that would encourage Americans to “forget the numerous people who still don’t have trailers or at least one with electricity or water.”
That is certainly the White House game plan as it looks toward the president’s two-day return to the scene of the crime. Just as it brought huge generators to floodlight Mr. Bush’s prime-time recovery speech in Jackson Square a year ago — and then yanked the plug as soon as he was done — so it will stop at little to bathe this anniversary in the rosiest possible glow.
Douglas Brinkley, the Tulane University historian who wrote the best-selling account of Katrina, “The Great Deluge,” is worried that even now the White House is escaping questioning about what it is up to (and not) in the Gulf. “I don’t think anybody’s getting the Bush strategy,” he said when we talked last week. “The crucial point is that the inaction is deliberate — the inaction is the action.” As he sees it, the administration, tacitly abetted by New Orleans’s opportunistic mayor, Ray Nagin, is encouraging selective inertia, whether in the rebuilding of the levees (“Only Band-Aids have been put on them”), the rebuilding of the Lower Ninth Ward or the restoration of the wetlands. The destination: a smaller city, with a large portion of its former black population permanently dispersed. “Out of the Katrina debacle, Bush is making political gains,” Mr. Brinkley says incredulously. “The last blue state in the Old South is turning into a red state.”
Perhaps. But with no plan for salvaging either of the catastrophes on his watch, this president can no sooner recover his credibility by putting on an elaborate show of sermonizing and spin this week than Mr. Cruise could levitate his image by jumping up and down on Oprah’s couch. While the White House’s latest screenplay may have been conceived as “Mission Accomplished II,” what we’re likely to see play out in New Orleans won’t even be a patch on “Mission: Impossible III.”
When it was fresh, the epic wreckage of Hurricane Katrina inspired rallying cries of "We will rebuild!" But a year after the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history, vast stretches of this city and the Gulf Coast are still largely abandoned, and many here wonder whether the destruction may be more permanent than anyone could at first conceive.
Tallies of electric bills and school enrollment figures show that less than half of New Orleans's pre-storm population of 455,000 has returned. The population of adjacent St. Bernard Parish has shrunk from 65,000 to less than 20,000. In small towns along the Mississippi Coast from Bay St. Louis to Biloxi, fewer than 5 percent of destroyed homes are being rebuilt.
Exactly how long the damaged areas will take to recover -- if they recover -- has been a matter of intense speculation ever since the waters receded. But with each passing day, more of the displaced are buying houses or signing leases in faraway cities, and the weeds in the abandoned yards grow higher.
By one measure, this "ghost town" effect may be long-lasting. On one typical middle-class New Orleans street that was flooded, 10 of 15 families surveyed by The Washington Post said they have no plans to return this year, if ever. Only one family of the 15 has gone back so far.
"Don't assume those people who've left the city are just waiting to come back -- they're not," said Rob Couhig, a New Orleans businessman who chairs a mayoral panel to kick-start the recovery. "Katrina has fundamentally changed the population of this city."
The prolonged absence of people -- tens of thousands of them -- is perplexing officials all along the 80-mile stretch of the Gulf Coast whacked by Katrina, from New Orleans to Biloxi.
"We thought there'd be a lot more people pulling building permits by now," said Jerry Creel, Biloxi's community development director. "We're not sure where they are."
Money is one problem. The billions in federal relief funds for homeowners began to flow just a few weeks ago. Some insurance settlements have been contentious and slow.
Some people have stayed away out of fear -- no one knows what the next hurricane might do because the levees are not guaranteed to protect in a major hurricane.
And as the economy has shriveled along with the population, jobs have disappeared. Employment in the sprawling New Orleans region has shrunk to 437,000 jobs, off about 30 percent from pre-storm levels, and within the city, the percentage is considerably higher.
Newspaper readers around the country this month opened their comics sections to see a character preaching the Gospel.I'm not sure the author meant to call his strip "simplistic," which means shallow and devoid of meaning... unless he thinks the audience he's writing for can't grasp something as deep and personal as spirituality unless it's done in a simplistic way.
“The Bible tells us that we have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God,” the character says, shouting into a cellphone in a crowded place. “But the good news is that the free gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ His son!”
His friend looks at him. “That’s not even a working phone, is it?” he says.
“No,” the talker admits, “but it’s a great way to share my faith!”
The strip, called “Heaven’s Love Thrift Shop,” made its debut in 15 American newspapers this month, with quotations from Scripture and characters talking about their faith. Though other comics occasionally address religious themes, mainstream newspapers and syndicates have largely avoided strips that make religion so central.
“Religion has always been a bit of a taboo subject, because you’re writing a strip for the largest mass audience,” said Brian Walker, a cartoonist who has also written several books about the history of comics. “In a conventional strip, you’re afraid that if you even mention a Christian holiday, people are going to complain that you don’t mention Muslim holidays.”
Because of the religious content in “Heaven’s Love Thrift Shop,” several papers have run it in the news pages rather than with other comics.
Kevin Frank, the strip’s author, said his goal was “very simplistic, to remind people that there is a God and God loves them.” To this end, he said, he planned to avoid “hot-button political issues, because even among people of faith those are divisive.”
Mr. Frank may think he's treading on dangerous ground here by injecting religion into a comic strip and delicately trying to avoiding politics. His caution has precedence; a lot of people object to Doonesbury because of its sharp political jabs to the degree where a lot of papers have put it on the editorial pages. What they forget is that comic strips had their origin in political commentary, and some of the most erudite and complex issues were dealt with in four panels and bubbles by the likes of Walt Kelly (Pogo), Johnny Hart (B.C.), and Al Capp (Li'l Abner). And let's not forget that the most popular strip of all time, Peanuts, regularly delved into religious issues through Linus, Snoopy, and Charlie Brown.
My one test of a comic strip: is it funny?
And speaking of Doonesbury, today History comes calling.
