Daniel Patrick Welch: Only in America

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Daniel Patrick Welch: Only in America
Monday, 5 September 2005, 12:18 pm
Opinion: Daniel Patrick Welch

Only in America

by Daniel Patrick Welch Synopsis: Even in America?! Bleat the politicians and the US media. Only in America! Responds Daniel Patrick Welch, with an eye on how the response to Hurricane Katrina lays bare the uncivil infrastructure beneath the US’ carefully maintained façade. Issues of class and race are nowhere more starkly on view than they are in the wake of this largely man-made disaster. The near total incompetence and callousness of the Bush administration has thankfully floated to the top of New Orleans’ rank floodwaters like so much rotting waste; and no amount of blame-the-victim spin and war-over-people rhetoric can put the genie back in the bottle.




"You know the year of 1900—that was 60 years ago
when death come howling on the ocean
death calls, you gotta go"
--Tom Rush, Wasn’t it a Mighty Storm"Galveston had a seawall, just to keep the waters down. But the high tide from the ocean spread the water over the town." The worst hurricane in US history saw almost 6000 people drowned in Galveston, Texas a little over a century ago, in a human tragedy immortalized by Tom Rush's mournful 1960 ballad. But it was an event not only remembered in folklore, but enshrined forever in the form of town and city charters across the country. It was, in its time, a wake up call for government, the very idea that mass organization might help in times of crisis. Government was not just there to grease the wheels of "progress" so that the Robber Barrons could continue to pick everyone's pockets. Government might actually be able to help the people.

Something went wrong, I guess. A hundred years of progress later, and the ballad still rings eerily true: "The trains at the station were loaded/ Full of people leaving town/ The trestle gave way with the water/ The trains they went on down." Juxtapose this lyric with the image of thousands of those stranded, with nowhere to go and no means to get there, waiting in the Superdome for salvation while the water rose around them, some of the old and infirm dying for lack of access to food, water, medical care and sanitation.


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http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0509/S00036.htm