ESCAPE FROM NEW Orleans

First I want to say that I take no pleasure in other's misery and I work with someone whose hometown is mentioned above.

The news from the US south has been a rollercoster of emotion for anyone with any connection to New Orleans, or for that manner an ounce of human empathy.

First we're thinking:
'They're evacuating the city?!'
'170mph winds?!'

Next we're heaving a huge sigh of relief that the other half of the transatlantic jazz relationship that flourished in the first half of the twentieth century appears to have escaped the worst of a Hurricane named after who exactly? [dunno but it sounds Russian to me]... then things got really f**ked up.

Then they got a lot more f**ked up.

I put it down to hyperbole until I heard this interview this morning:
British Survivors in New Orleans.
Hope that's the right bit but basically I'm talkin about the interview with the father of the British guy in the Super Bowl(?Dome - whatever).

This really was fairly surreal - he's spoken to his son on a call patched through by a US army Colonel
...Basically the guys been in a football stadium run by armed gangs for two days and got no water apparently (they just never get this you scratch mine thing...)
... Anyway he's escaped, and he makes the call via the ARMY but he's told that he's got to go BACK IN or he can't be saved (sub-text they are on-site but not in control - they're like in play but not PLAYERS... I'm REALLY not making this up...)

Anyone remember Escape from New York (1981)
?
Know what I'm saying...

Now we are told that President Bush condemns Katrina aid effort - well he might, things were pretty bad before some nutjob who'd watched Black Hawk Down one time too many before he mislaid his Qaaludes started taking potshots at the rescue helicopters...

Is this life imitating art or what?
...Or what? We may well ask

Before the ink was dry on the imagined stoicism of the Wretched of the South the crazy loons are taking all that stuff about 'fighting' to 'save their city' a little too (il)literally...

...Did someone mention pressure cookers? (...'lid' anyone?)

As Questions grow over chaos and Refugees tell tales of horror Bush 'condemned the initial response to Hurricane Katrina as "not acceptable"' - apparently 'The president, who is expected to go on to visit Mississippi and Louisiana - but not New Orleans itself [I wonder why] - said: "We're going to get on top of this situation.' - now this is one of the things I love about the USA [in a kind of 'nice to see ya, wouldn't wanna be ya' kind of way] - its the arbitrary factor, the notional powerlessness of the state, the sense in which American civilization is an idea not a reality (calm, I'm not saying they're not civilised...) and state power has a habit of disappearing in a puff of smoke when the shit hits the fan.

Our own dear premier frequently tries this and it just doesn't wash - in Britain we hold politicians responsible - a fact he seems psychologically and ideologically incapable of understanding except when he has a sudden attack of telling us how to bring up our children while being curiously elusive about the choices he makes for his own.

In the US however one just throws up one's arms in disgust at any f**k up and blames some aspect of local government, ...or the mafia, ...or the intrinsic fallibility of humanity, or the devil... even if you're supposed to be the Mr Big who runs the whole show (and has the authority to quite literally send anyone in the nation to their deaths without so much as a by your leave from Congress) .... is this is a marvellous piece of totalitarian trickery or a tacit recognition that 'i got mine' (the power of the state in international affairs and the largest patronage budget this side of Beijing) and 'you got yours' (the right to carry a firearm and form an armed militia, and buy whatever you can afford).

Its too early to say what the fallout from this terrible natural disaster will be and its also too early to speculate about the human factors influencing its scope and progress; though it does call to mind a piece of graffitti on the Holloway Road which states 'Its Global Warming Stoopid' [- its been up there a while by the way gentle reader... ] one thing is for sure however, if it first seemed like an opportunity to re-focus things for President Bush he must be wishing the Louisiana reserve didn't have troops, you know where as In Iraq, Troops Watch and Fret About Home - Los Angeles Times

I'm not saying a huge flood of London wouldn't be bad but having seen how dangerous a rucksack on a crowded tube can be, never mind a denim jacket in south London, I'm just glad I'm not allowed to carry a gun, something tells me it wouldn't make me more responsible ALL the time... And, overall, I think this helps.

OK, OK, I do wish to avoid trying to making trivial points in the face of disaster, but I guess I'm just saying that this reinforces my feeling that the supposedly monolithic power of a superpower is rarely so super at home as it appears to be overseas when its turned on an inferior opponent - and there are few less inferior opponents than the elements. Equally there are some very particular aspects of the organisation of American society and government which I suspect anyone who has been outside the glass and steel metropoli housing the American business elite will have noticed and when the shit hits the fan some pretty crazy stuff sometimes leaks out of the cracks in the American Dream.

But hell I guess we're all only Human - born to make mistakes.