Katrina and Cindy Are One

"No Iraqis Left Me on a Roof to Die"Katrina and Cindy Blow into TownBy Tom Engelhardt
George was out of town, of course, in the "battle cab" at the U.S. Northern Command's headquarters in Colorado Springs, checking out the latest in homeland-security technology and picking up photo ops; while White House aides, as the Washington Post wrote that morning, were attempting "to reestablish Bush's swagger." The Democrats had largely fled town as well, leaving hardly a trace behind. Another hurricane was blasting into Texas and the media was preoccupied, but nothing, it seemed, mattered. Americans turned out in poll-like numbers for the Saturday antiwar demonstration in Washington and I was among them. So many of us were there, in fact, that my wife (with friends at the back of the march) spent over two hours as it officially "began," moving next to nowhere at all
This was, you might say, the "connection demonstration." In the previous month, two hurricanes, one of them human, had blown through American life; and between them, they had, for many people, linked the previously unconnected -- Bush administration policies and the war in Iraq to their own lives. So, in a sense, this might be thought of as the demonstration created by Hurricanes Cindy Sheehan and Katrina. It was, finally, a protest that, not just in its staggering turnout but in its make-up, reflected the changing opinion-polling figures in this country. This was a majority demonstration and the commonest statement I heard in the six hours I spent talking to as many protesters as I could was: "This is my first demonstration."
In addition, there were sizeable contingents of military veterans and of the families of soldiers in Iraq, or of those who were killed in Iraq. No less important, scattered through the crowd were many, as I would discover, whose lives had been affected deeply by George Bush's wars.
This was an America on very determined parade. Even though the march, while loud and energetic, had an air of relaxed calmness to it, the words that seemed to come most quickly to people's lips were: infuriated, enraged, outraged, had it, had enough, fed up. In every sense, in fact, this was a demonstration of words. I have never seen such a sea of words -- of signs, almost invariably handmade along with individually printed posters, T-shirts, labels, stickers. It often seemed that, other than myself, there wasn't an individual in the crowd without a sign and that no two of them were quite the same.
The White House, which the massed protesters marched past, was in every sense the traffic accident of this event. The crowds gridlocked there; the noise rose to a roar; the signs waved, a veritable sea of them, and they all, essentially said, "No more, not me!"
Here's just a modest sample of those that caught my eye, reflecting as they did humor, determination, and more than anything else, outrage: "Yeeha is not a foreign policy"; "Making a killing"; "Ex-Republican. Ask me why"; "Blind Faith in Bad Leadership is not Patriotism"; "Bush is a disaster!" (with the President's face in the eye of a hurricane); "He's a sick nut my Grandma says" (with a photo of an old woman in blue with halo-like rays emanating from her); "Osama bin Forgotten"; "Cindy speaks for me"; "Make levees not war"; "W's the Devil, One Degree of Separation"; "Dick Cheney Eats Kittens" (with a photo of five kittens); "Bush busy creating business for morticians worldwide"; "Liar, born liar, born-again liar"; "Dude -- There's a War Criminal in My White House!!!"; "Motivated moderates against Bush"; "Bored with Empire"; "Pro Whose Life?"; "War is Terrorism with a Bigger Budget."
Because just about everybody had the urge to express him or herself, I largely followed the signs to my interviewees. People were unfailingly willing to talk (and no less unfailingly polite as I desperately tried to scribble down their words). The meetings were brief and, for me, remarkably moving, not least because Americans regularly turn out to be so articulate, even eloquent, and because so many people are thinking so hard about the complex political fix we find ourselves in today. I've done my level best to catch (sometimes in slightly telescoped form and hopefully without too many errors) just what people had to say and how open they were -- the first-timers and the veterans of former demonstrations alike.
A day of walking and intensive talking still gave me only the smallest sampling of such a demonstration. To my amazement, on my way to the Metro heading back to New York at about 5:30 (almost seven hours after I first set out for the Mall), I was still passing people marching. So I can't claim that what follows are the voices of the Washington demonstration, just that they're the voices of my demonstration, some of the thirty-odd people to whom I managed to talk in the course of those hours. They are but a drop in the ocean of people who turned out in Washington, while the President was in absentia and the Democrats nowhere to be seen, to express in the most personal and yet collective way possible their upset over the path America has taken in the world. As far as I'm concerned, we seldom hear the voices of Americans in our media society very clearly. So I turn the rest of this dispatch over to those voices. Dip in wherever you want -- as if you were at the march too.
Angry Graphic Designer: On the corner by the Metro, we meet Bill Cutter and a friend. Cutter is carrying a sign with a Bush image and enough words to drown a city. We stop to copy it down. It has a headline that asks, "What did you do on your summer vacation?" Inside a bubble is the President's reply: "Well, I rode my bike, killed some troops, killed even more Iraqis, raised lots of money for my friends, ignored a grieving mom and, for extra credit, I destroyed an American city!" Cutter, a forty-five year old Washingtonian with a tiny goatee, says simply enough, "I'm just an angry graphic designer with a printer." The previous day he made his sign and his friend's (an image of Bush over the question, "Intelligent design?"-- and, on the back, Dick Cheney with quiz-like, check-off boxes that say, "Evil, Crazy, or Just Plain Mean, Pick any three!" We're all looking for the demonstration's initial gathering place, and so we fall in step and begin to chat. A sign-maker will prove an omen for this day -- the march will be a Katrina, a cacophony, of handmade signs, waves and waves of them, expressing every bit of upset and pent-up frustration that the polls tell us a majority of Americans feel.
Cutter explains his presence this way: "I figure that if we live here and don't do something, it's ridiculous. Cindy Sheehan's sacrifice is so much huger than anything anyone has done, so how could we not?"
On what is to be done in Iraq itself, he first says, "It's a tough one" -- a comment I will hear again and again, even from those intent on seeing American troops withdraw immediately. On this day, you would be hard pressed not to come away with a sense of Americans in protest over Bush's war and the mess he's brought to our very doorstep, and yet deeply puzzled by what is now to be done and how exactly to do it. "We've gotten ourselves down a rat hole," he continues. "I don't know what to do. Ultimately, I think it's going to end up as a civil war there and we'll have caused it. I only wish the Democratic Party had the balls and would seize the moment. It's like they're practicing the politics of safety. Do what's safe, not what's right." He pauses. "It's the politics of expediency," he adds with disgust just as we arrive at a plaza filled with a sea of pink balloons -- a sign that the antiwar women's group Code Pink is gathering here. We part at this point with him saying brightly, "I'm not sure ‘enjoy yourself' is quite the right thing to say... but enjoy yourself!"
Disabled (Peacetime) Vet: On the plaza we run into 48 year-old Steve Hausheer ("How-ser," he says, "but if you look at the spelling, you'll never pronounce it right.") -- or rather he rolls past us at quite a clip in his wheelchair. He's dressed severely in black, but has a kindly, open face. When I stop him, he swivels around, removes his black-leather wheeling globes ("my hands are a mess...") and shakes firmly. "I'm disabled," he says, "but I was in the peacetime military. I'm a peacetime vet. Seventy-six, seventy-seven. I just missed the Vietnam War." He's unsure about giving an interview. "I get really excited. I'm impassioned about this cause, but then everything just flies out of my head!" He's from New York, he tells me, and adds, excitement in his voice, "I've looked forward to doing something more than just talk to my friends and donate. I'm just so tired of seeing this country head in the wrong direction. It's time to get proactive!
"We need to support the troops," he insists with feeling and then, after a pause, "by bringing them home. We're stuck now. We've torn Iraq apart and there are going to be no easy answers. George Bush has taken us so far down the wrong road that it's going to be very difficult to find our way back. My wish is that the people speak up until Congress and the other forty percent of America that still thinks he's doing a good job change their mind.
"The men we're trying to bring home are true heroes and we need to treat them as such. It isn't bad enough that he put them in harm's way through a lie, now he's working to treat them as anything but heroes. Can you believe it? He wants to cut their disability payments!"
I thank him, we shake hands, he begins to don his gloves and then, at the last second, he calls me back. "One more thing," he says and begins to give me this final comment in a slow, measured way as you might dictate to a stenographer: "I want to put this country back into the hands of men and women who are dedicated to serving the American people instead of themselves and their cronies." He stops, satisfied, and then adds, "This would be my quote, if you have to pick one."
Ms. Statue of Liberty: Just down the plaza near a Montana Women For Peace sign, a group of women of all ages are scurrying to get their Styrofoam green Statue-of-Liberty crowns and green robes in place. A welcoming, white-haired Norma Buchanan is among them. "I am fifty-six years old. I have never been in a peace march in my life. I just snapped and I had to be here. Enough is enough. This war, the leadership, is against the law. What I hope is that, at a grassroots level, we're going to wake up the forty percent of Americans who are still asleep at the wheel. I hope we're going to stop worrying about what kind of dog Paris Hilton is carrying around or who's divorcing whom, and pay some attention to what matters!"
Suddenly a cry goes up, "The march is starting!" It's true. Hundreds of pink balloons, all attached to Code Pink women, are slowing beginning to bob out of the plaza heading for the gathering area near the Washington Monument where Cindy Sheehan is to speak and the official march is to begin. So Norma Buchanan excuses herself, picks up her placard, and a bevy of Montana-style Lady Liberties, hoisting aloft a cumulative painting of a Western mountain scene, head off to join what will soon be an ocean of protesting humanity, much of it, like Buchanan, at such an event for the first time.
Vietnam Nurse: In a jaunty pink beret and a white "Stop the War" T-shirt ("My daughter made this for me!"), Peggy Akers is carrying a colorful hand-lettered sign that says, "Another Veteran for Peace." She's 58, cheery, has flown in from Portland, Maine and is marching in the Code Pink contingent with her daughter and sister. She's active in Veterans for Peace and promptly tells me, "I was a nurse in Vietnam." If I want to get a sense of her sentiments about her Vietnam experience, she suggests, I should check out the Commondreams website which has posted a poem of hers on the subject, Dear America. ("I hear a helicopter coming in -- I smell the burning of human flesh. It's Thomas, America, the young Black kid from Atlanta, my patient, burned by an exploding gas tank... And Pham. He was only eight, America, and you sprayed him with napalm and his skin fell off in my hands and he screamed as I tried to comfort him... America, we have sent another generation of children to see life through an M-16 and death through the darkness of a body bag.")
"I just feel it's so important for people like myself to speak out about what I saw and did in Vietnam. I'm part of the conscience of this country. If people like myself don't speak about what war does, it'll never end. The images of war are not being shown to Americans. Not really. No one here knows what it's like to see a young soldier, eighteen or nineteen years old, in a body bag, or an Iraqi mother who has lost her son. If Americans really saw that, this couldn't go on.
"If it wasn't for people marching like today, if they hadn't done that during Vietnam, that Wall [the Vietnam Wall honoring America's war dead] would be wrapped around this city ten times over.
"You know," she says with excitement, "we met so many people coming in who had never marched before. From Utah, from the Midwest, from everywhere. I think we should bring our troops home and instead send in a Peace Corps -- plumbers, electricians, carpenters -- to help rebuilt that country; whatever the Iraqi people want from us, not what we want from them."
Republican for Impeachment: Approaching the rally, we notice Cathy Hickling, a financial consultant from Maryland, standing on the curb in a bright red T-shirt holding a "Republicans for impeachment" sign on a pole and can't resist a stop. "My odyssey," she says, "simply is: I've been a registered Republican for in excess of thirty years and I think the Party's been hijacked by the policies of George Bush! I think a president should be smarter than I am.
"This is my first demonstration. I felt strongly enough to come. What I hope will happen is that the Democrats and Republicans with a mindset similar to mine get people to change their minds about the direction this country is taking. Remember, Clinton was impeached for a lot less. I saw a sign that said, ‘Clinton lied, no one died,' and that just about sums it up.
"This is an antiwar protest, but I'm not here to support the idea that we should be leaving Iraq immediately. Now that we're there, we need to finish the job, but it's folly to think that the people who got us there can get us out."
"Right on!" says a woman who happens to be standing next to her.
And after just a moment's hesitation, she says it too: "Right on."
Sign of the Times: As we head into the rally, I run into Susan, a social worker from the New York area, and ask her to stop so I can copy down her sign. Its front says: "What if they gave a war and nobody came?" The back reads: "What if they had a hurricane and nobody came because... They were all at War!!" She insists I get front and back in the right order. "See, the front is that old Sixties slogan and on the back it's been adapted to the present. A teacher I work with made it. She's more artistic than I am. I was absolutely infuriated after the hurricane. All our resources were at war. There was nothing to help our people here. I was infuriated and, after thinking about it, wanted to be here with this."
The Man from Alabama: He's white-haired, wears a striped oxford shirt, and carries an "Alabama has lost too many young people to this war" sign. He's with a small group of fellow Alabamans. When I introduce myself and mention the Tomdispatch website, he responds, "Do I know it! I send it to my lists, maybe 100 people. I can't believe I'm actually meeting you here." He introduces himself as Wythe ("Get Wythe it!") Holt. I ask -- as I do of many people -- "What do you do in real life?"
"Protest," he says definitively. And then he chuckles. "But in the business world, I'm a retired professor of law at the University of Alabama. What I really do now is work for democracy, which means protesting, which is, of course, what democracy's all about. Even those nitwits who are protesting on the other side are exercising their democratic rights.
"Alabama has lost a lot of children to this war. It's making its mark on the state. The Tuscaloosa News is beginning to come out and question what's going on. So the truth is filtering through to Alabama. There are, at this moment, big demonstrations in Birmingham and in a little while we're going to be in communication with our colleagues there. We belong to Tuscaloosa People for Peace. We meet 2 or 3 times a month for discussions. We read books together. We go to protests.
"I was against Vietnam in 1971. Then, we had two busloads of people driving up here. Now we have one SUV.
"I agree with Jefferson that unless you're vigilant, you're not going to have liberty. And this country is slowly losing its liberties. But we're making liberty here today. Unfortunately, we don't make enough of it in Alabama, but we try.
"As for Iraq, I say get out now. Leave Iraq to the Iraqis. Bring our young people home this minute. All that equipment that could have been used in New Orleans and Galveston and Houston. If we want democracy in Iraq, we should encourage it, not impose it. I saw a sign earlier that said, ‘Read between the pipelines,' but it's deeper than oil. Oil just happens to be the greedy object of the moment. The real struggle is between those of us who want to speak up for ourselves and want to have a government we have a part in, and those who have other goals, which are mostly selfish and greedy, and are interested in imposing their wills on others."
Mother Lion: She's holding up a hand-scribbled sign which reads, "Not with my sons." She's Robbie from New York. "I'm a writer and a mom. I have three sons. One is almost 19, one's almost 18. I wrote this sign. I mean it. You know, the mother lion. I feel so outraged. It's the outrage of mothers -- and fathers too -- to see children sacrificed for these lies. We have to start getting angry and that's why I'm here.
"I thought of this sign when I was home and identifying with those mothers who had lost their sons. Seeing all of these banners here representing each child who has been killed, that is just so graphic. You stop thinking of the war as being fought by another group of people. I feel this outrage, this energy. Like Cindy Sheehan said, we have to get back to our humanity, and so we mothers have to begin to be teachers. We've lost our way."
College Students: Samantha Combs and Andrea Solazzo are weaving happily through the crowd, wearing matching tie-dyed T-shirts, pink and blue. Samantha's says, "Peace Takes Time, Not Lives!" They're startled to be stopped, embarrassed at the thought of being interviewed. Extremely charming, a little giggly, they're both 18, from Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida and they've spent 19 hours on the Alliance for Concerned Individuals' bus to get here. ("It's a campus group that focuses on everything that deals with human rights," Samantha tells me.)
Why are they at the demonstration? The responses are brief and to the point. Samantha: "So much money's being spent in Iraq, when it should be spent here."
Andrea: "My cousin went to Afghanistan and then Iraq. He's been trying to go to college for years and he keeps getting called up! I don't think Iraq's worth his life."
And then they exclaim in unison, "Our group's leaving," and with another round of embarrassed giggles they bound off.
School Teacher: Sadida Athaullah is a social studies teacher in metropolitan Baltimore. She's wearing a blue "March on Washington/End the Iraq War" T-shirt and a light blue headscarf. She's quiet-spoken and thoughtful. "This is my first time at such a demonstration. I'm a naturalized American of 25 years, originally from India. I gave up my heritage to be an American because I admired American values, and I don't like what this country is turning into. When the war first began, I didn't really take an active part against it. I thought it would be a quick action, over in weeks, not months, and not turning into this big, long disaster, which makes no sense to me. I don't think the Iraqis are going to drink the oil in their country. They're going to have to sell it on the open market and we could buy it like anyone else."
Father and Daughter: As we leave the rally grounds, in a milling mass of humanity and pour out onto 15th Street, the sound level beginning to rise, I notice Frank Medina in a reddish baseball cap, and on his shoulders, his young daughter in a pink shirt and bright yellow dress. As I ask for his name, she leans over and shouts out with delight: "Claire Elizabeth Medina!" He's a lawyer with the Securities and Exchange Commission. "I was at the demonstration before the war," he tells me. "And now, this is just an appalling circumstance. That's why I'm back. It's an appalling war and it needs to end immediately. There needs to be a coherent plan to turn the country back over to the Iraqis, with definite dates for the return of American troops. What can't be done is to continue to justify the war there by the sacrifices that have already been made. It's like saying that, when you've lost everything at the casino, you're going to double-down. At some point, you need to cut your losses.
"However, it's an administration that can't admit its mistakes, that can't admit the truth, and consequently that can't change. So there is no hope."
Why bother to come then, I ask.
"It's important," he says firmly, "to express your views, to protest."
Grandfather and Daughter: Only moments later, another man with a little girl on his shoulders catches my eye. I approach him, introduce myself, and mention that he's the second father I've seen this way in so many minutes. Joe Stone promptly corrects me: "I'm her grandfather. Her father's in Iraq." He lifts MacKenzie down from his shoulders, tired and ready for her nap, and puts her in a stroller pushed by his actual daughter Cindy. Then he turns back to me. "I haven't done this in thirty years. I was here in 1970. I was tear-gassed at the University of Maryland. Same kind of war, different time."
From Virginia, he's the assistant controller at a dairy ("an accountant basically"). Like a lot of people at this demonstration, he speaks calmly, even quietly, but with a deep-seated disgust. "I'm just sick of it. I think Bush is immoral. You have to say something. We're proud to be here. I'd slam the door in George Bush's face if he came knocking."
His daughter, like most of the demonstrators, is dressed casually -- sweat shirt, blue jeans, sneakers. She tells me her husband, a combat engineer who joined the military in 2002, is back for his second tour of duty in Iraq. He was gone for his daughter's birth, home for nine months, returned in the winter and now is stop-lossed. They're not certain when he'll be back.
I ask whether he knows she's at the demonstration -- her first, it turns out, other than a small "free Tibet" one.
"He wouldn't say not to," she replies in almost a whisper. "But I haven't had a chance to tell him yet. I just feel the same as my dad, though. I'd had it. I can't believe there are so many people in this country who still think the President's so great, especially after his first term. I couldn't get a single one of my friends to come. I work at a government contracting company and my co-workers thought it was strange to do this because I might not have a job if the war ended. One of them even said, ‘You know, there's video cameras down there.' So what!"
Her father chimes in: "Defense contractors don't need a war to keep going."
She adds, "I don't really know what to do about Iraq now. They can't just leave, but I don't see a plan of action for how we're going to get out. I wish George Bush could get out of office. I just don't see how, though."
The Farmer: His sign reads, "U.S. Farmers Say No to War" and we bump into him just as we turn the corner and head for the White House, the march slowing into gridlock, the roaring of the crowd ahead rising to a din. But Michael O'Gorman's voice carries well. "I'm a real farmer," he says in response to my query. "I farm a thousand acres of organic vegetables for sale to the U.S. market in Baja, California [Mexico]. I've been farming for 35 years. I've earned all these wrinkles." And indeed his face is deeply creased.
"When I began in 1970, U.S. farmers were feeding the world. This is the first year, possibly in our history, when we're importing more than we're exporting, when we're not feeding ourselves. China will feed itself. India will feed itself. We won't. When I began farming, there were 2 million farmers in the U.S. Three hundred thousand of us remain; average age, sixty-two. I'm almost there." He laughs.
He tells me that he sits on the steering committee of United for Peace and Justice, which helped organize this demonstration. He flew in from Baja. "I was supposed to be in the lead contingent." He shows me a badge that indicates exactly that. "But we were swamped by the crowd and so I'm here. I remember joining protests back on July 4, 1987 in my community. We were supposed to speak about local issues, but I was protesting that the U.S. was arming Saddam Hussein's Iraq and [Ronald Reagan aide] Oliver North was arming Iran in a war between those two countries where two million young men would die. I warned that it would come back to haunt us.
"On 9/11, my oldest daughter was at Ground Zero, right across the street, and she survived. My son volunteered after that because his sister had been there. Now, he's at Guantánamo, so that war is haunting not just our society, but my own family.
"My son joined the Coast Guard Reserves. He thought it was a peaceable way to serve. Then they shipped him off to Cuba. I support him. We don't argue about it too much. I'm waiting for him to make his peace with it. He had a week off recently and -- can you believe it -- they didn't even fly him to Florida. We had to pay $750 to get him home.
"It's a horrible situation. People say it'll be a total mess if we pull out, but it's a mess and we're there. I don't see any argument for the United States staying. If, in pulling out, we could create an alternative to the U.S. military that would, of course, be best."
He shakes hands and invites us to visit his farm in Baja. "I believe," he says in parting, "that this is a very American movement. We're reclaiming our country."
Protester with Cane: I approach Camille Hazeur, who works for George Mason University's Office of Equity and Diversity, because of her cane ("arthritic hip"). I say that I thought, in a march like this, the cane indicated real commitment. "Darn right!" she replies. "I'm against this war. It's indescribable that we're even there. It's my small way of saying, no, get out! And it's for our kids over there. To bring them back. And for the Iraqis. You never even hear what's happening to them. And I feel we're just sitting here while atrocities are going on, and I'm afraid our kids will have to suffer the impact of what we're doing there now. Those of us who are reading and thinking people... I'm not naïve about the Middle East or Saddam Hussein, but none of it justifies this.
"I was here in the seventies. I went to college in this town. I remember the demonstrations. I remember them all. They had a distinctive smell, of tear gas and grass, and we haven't smelled either of those today."
Protester with Cane (2): We're past the White House now and Ann Galloway is walking with determination, cane well deployed ("I need a knee replacement"). The gridlock of the march has ended and open space has appeared. She has a blue backpack strapped on. A little sign sticks out: "Support our troops, Bring them home alive."
"I hosted a Cindy Sheehan vigil in Stanford, Connecticut, and have been a leader of one of the MoveOn teams there. This is the first big march I have been in since Doctor Martin Luther King, Doctor Benjamin Spock, and the Reverend William Sloan Coffin demonstrated in maybe 1967 against the Vietnam War. I actually became energized again because everything this administration does is so antithetical to what America is about and I intend to be part of a movement that takes back the Congress in 2006.
"I'm a grandmother and, if anything, I am marching for my grandchild's future. She'll be two in December. I wrote to a friend that I'm going to show up with a cane and a floppy hat [which indeed she's wearing] and become one of those little old ladies we used to joke about. But this -- the abuses, there are just so many -- has to stop. They won't take the tax cuts off the table, but they're willing to squander our precious dollars on the war in Iraq that could be used for a myriad of other things in this country, including" -- she says it emphatically -- "homeland security. These guys don't care about any of it, just those tax cuts for their people who are not sending their children to fight this war."
Flight Attendant: She's standing at the curb in a green shirt with a sticker on the back that reads, "Sex is back in the White House. Bush is screwing us all!" She introduces herself as Liane. "I'm a flight attendant," she says. "I got this sticker from a woman I met at a union rally by the Labor Department. I liked it and she was so interesting. She had a history of coming to protests. She told me, if I gave her my address, she would send one my way. It was at least six months ago. I just haven't had a chance to use it until now."
This is her first antiwar protest. "I don't know what to do," she says. "I just think that the war in Iraq is a big mistake. Especially when I saw New Orleans and thought about the money for the levee system diverted to Iraq. That was upsetting. Even before that, though, I got the impression that the ones pushing the war were really planning for the best-case scenario, that they hadn't planned for anything but the best outcome. I think what they're doing is creating more terrorism."
Toy Soldiers: As we turn the corner, heading up 17th away from the White House, I'm approached by a young man dressed all in black and wearing headgear that looks like a cross between a fedora and a top hat. It's fronted by a yellow piece of cardboard with images of toy soldiers stamped on it. He hands me a little bag of green plastic soldiers of the sort I played with as a child and, strangely enough, in the midst of this antiwar demonstration, my heart takes a leap. I genuinely want them.
Each soldier, whether shooting or throwing a grenade, turns out to have a little piece of paper attached that says, "Bring me home" and includes the Mouths Wide Open website address. There's even a small explanation in the bag that begins, "We're spreading plastic Army Men around the country and around the globe as small, everyday reminders of the ongoing horrors of the war in Iraq -- using them as tools to foster dialogue, action and resistance to the war."
I ask if he'd mind being interviewed, which flusters him. He finally indicates Merry Conway, who is older. "She's better to talk to," he says. And it's true. She's happy to talk. In fact, she's an enthusiast as well as an artist who "creates performance and installation shows with a very large community element."
So I ask about Mouths Wide Open. "We're a little group of friends in New York. Many are artists. We came together after 9/11 to see what we could do. We created the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse Crusade. Maybe you've seen it at other demonstrations. It's huge. But we were still thinking about how to create a dialogue, because so many people were acting as if the war wasn't happening if they didn't have a relative involved. It was business as usual. What, we thought, if we left a trace, started that dialogue with a poignant emotional effect. And these little toy soldiers that so many boys have played with are it.
"The other night in New York at a Cindy Sheehan event, we were handing these out and I gave a packet to one of the mothers there. She recoiled. She said, ‘My son's in Iraq. I can't take those. I used to hide them from him.' But you know what she said then? She said, ‘Keep going. But keep going!'
"People get very excited about putting them in places and then other people find them. The other day we got an email from a cop who had found one in the Federal Courthouse in New York and he was so moved he wrote us."
New Orleans Evacuee: She's holding up a bright red sign that says, "New Orleans Evacuees for Peace." Erica Smith is twenty-five, a law student at Loyola in New Orleans. ("We've been relocated to the University of Houston law school.") "I've probably met about ten people from New Orleans today and I've had lots of people come up to give me a hug.
"I was planning to come to this anyway. But with what happened in New Orleans, well... I was lucky, I live uptown and my place is on the third floor and a friend had a key and checked. It's okay. But all of our National Guard troops were off in Iraq instead of rescuing people here. Instead of being here to help out, they were off making problems in the rest of the world."
Mother and Son: As we circle back toward the Mall, we pass a mother and son standing on the sidewalk. She's holding what, for me, is the most striking sign of the day: "No Iraqis left me on a roof to die." Her twelve year-old son, Muata Hunter, holds a sign too. It's simple and eloquent. "No war." Just as I approach them, a young black woman comes up to ask (as I was about to do), "Is your home in New Orleans?"
"No," the woman answers, "but my heart is. It's my people."
She's Aziza Gibson-Hunter, a local artist. "I've been thinking and thinking," she says, "trying to figure out how to make my people understand the direct correlation of this war and our well-being and I just thought this put it succinctly."
Her son shyly tells me that he made his sign that morning. "I just think war shouldn't be done. War isn't necessary. My uncle's been in war and my cousin Jimmy was in Iraq."
His mother adds, "He made it back."
Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War.

ETAN THOMAS AT tHE ANTI WAR MARCH SEpt. 24 2005

"Giving all honor, thanks and praises to God for courage and wisdom, this is a very important rally. I'd like to thank you for allowing me to share my thoughts, feelings and concerns regarding a tremendous problem that we are currently facing. This problem is universal, transcending race, economic background, religion, and culture, and this problem is none other than the current administration which has set up shop in the White House.
In fact, I'd like to take some of these cats on a field trip. I want to get big yellow buses with no air conditioner and no seatbelts and round up Bill O'Reilly, Pat Buchanan, Trent Lott, Sean Hannity, Dick Cheney, Jeb Bush, Bush Jr. and Bush Sr., John Ashcroft, Giuliani, Ed Gillespie, Katherine Harris, that little bow-tied Tucker Carlson and any other right-wing conservative Republicans I can think of, and take them all on a trip to the 'hood. Not to do no 30-minute documentary. I mean, I want to drop them off and leave them there, let them become one with the other side of the tracks, get them four mouths to feed and no welfare, have scare tactics run through them like a laxative, criticizing them for needing assistance.
I'd show them working families that make too much to receive welfare but not enough to make ends meet. I'd employ them with jobs with little security, let them know how it feels to be an employee at will, able to be fired at the drop of a hat. I'd take away their opportunities, then try their children as adults, sending their 13-year-old babies to life in prison. I'd sell them dreams of hopelessness while spoon-feeding their young with a daily dose of inferior education. I'd tell them no child shall be left behind, then take more money out of their schools, tell them to show and prove themselves on standardized exams testing their knowledge on things that they haven't been taught, and then I'd call them inferior.
I'd soak into their interior notions of endless possibilities. I'd paint pictures of assisted productivity if they only agreed to be all they can be, dress them up with fatigues and boots with promises of pots of gold at the end of rainbows, free education to waste terrain on those who finish their bid. Then I'd close the lid on that barrel of fool's gold by starting a war, sending their children into the midst of a hostile situation, and while they're worried about their babies being murdered and slain in foreign lands, I'd grace them with the pain of being sick and unable to get medicine.
Give them health benefits that barely cover the common cold. John Q. would become their reality as HMOs introduce them to the world of inferior care, filling their lungs with inadequate air, penny pinching at the expense of patients, doctors practicing medicine in an intricate web of rationing and regulations. Patients wander the maze of managed bureaucracy, costs rise and quality quickly deteriorates, but they say that managed care is cheaper. They'll say that free choice in medicine will defeat the overall productivity, and as co-payments are steadily rising, I'll make their grandparents have to choose between buying their medicine and paying their rent.
Then I'd feed them hypocritical lines of being pro-life as the only Christian way to be. Then very contradictingly, I'd fight for the spread of the death penalty, as if thou shall not kill applies to babies but not to criminals.
Then I'd introduce them to those sworn to protect and serve, creating a curb in their trust in the law. I'd show them the nightsticks and plungers, the pepper spray and stun guns, the mace and magnums that they'd soon become acquainted with, the shakedowns and illegal search and seizures, the planted evidence, being stopped for no reason. Harassment ain't even the half of it. Forty-one shots to two raised hands, cell phones and wallets that are confused with illegal contrabands. I'd introduce them to pigs who love making their guns click like wine glasses. Everlasting targets surrounded by bullets, making them a walking bull's eye, a living piñata, held at the mercy of police brutality, and then we'll see if they finally weren't aware of the truth, if their eyes weren't finally open like a box of Pandora.
I'd show them how the other side of the tracks carries the weight of the world on our shoulders and how society seems to be holding us down with the force of a boulder. The bird of democracy flew the coop back in Florida. See, for some, and justice comes in packs like wolves in sheep's clothing. T.K.O.'d by the right hooks of life, many are left staggering under the weight of the day, leaning against the ropes of hope. When your dreams have fallen on barren ground, it becomes difficult to keep pushing yourself forward like a train, administering pain like a doctor with a needle, their sequels continue more lethal than injections.
They keep telling us all is equal. I'd tell them that instead of giving tax breaks to the rich, financing corporate mergers and leading us into unnecessary wars and under-table dealings with Enron and Halliburton, maybe they can work on making society more peaceful. Instead, they take more and more money out of inner city schools, give up on the idea of rehabilitation and build more prisons for poor people. With unemployment continuing to rise like a deficit, it's no wonder why so many think that crime pays.
Maybe this trip will make them see the error of their ways. Or maybe next time, we'll just all get out and vote. And as far as their stay in the White House, tell them that numbered are their days."

People Still Need Homes

My dearest friends and family,

I am writing to you, uncharacteristically, to ask for your help. I can't begin to explain to you how moved I've been by the horrific tragedy that is occurring in our country right now. ALTHOUGH IT HAS ALL BUT DISAPPEARED FROM THE FRONT PAGES ALREADY, THE STRUGGLE OF THOSE LEFT HOMELESS BY HURRICANE KATRINA STILL GOES ON IN A BIG WAY.

I know you all want to help, and most of you have probably already made donations. But as you have probably heard by now, the survivors are not receiving your donations! Most of the evacuees are still residing in temporary shelters or hotel rooms they'll soon have to vacate and have no money and no way of even getting to the assistance that has been promised to them, let alone begin to rebuild their lives.Three weeks ago, Kirby Sommers, my new hero, was just one woman, sitting on her living room floor watching TV when this all started. Now she is running a grassroots organization that has already matched hundreds of survivors up with no- or low-cost housing. A team of volunteers -- the HOME ANGELS -- from all over the country have been working their phones and pounding their keyboards night and day, trying to keep up with the overwhelming flow of calls from survivors.

WE NEED YOUR HELP!Please read this and respond to the website ASAP! Volunteers are needed RIGHT NOW.Thanks, love and peace,Jane RayKATRINA HOME DRIVE is a team of volunteers who speak to survivors, listen to their needs & try to help find them housing. We've been able to place hundreds of people into homes.

Our HOME ANGELS, all volunteers, offer their services to help Hurricane Katrina Survivors free of charge. We make calls to homeowners, landlords and others offering assistance to help match survivors with the right home situation, and we try to secure transporation to these new homes.∑ If you have some TIME to give, consider becoming a KATRINA HOME ANGEL.

We have hundreds of calls coming in every week from survivors in need.∑ If you have some MONEY to give, choose to make a tax-deductible contribution to KATRINA HOME DRIVE today…and put your money where it will REALLY MAKE A DIFFERENCE!∑ If you have a HOME to give, contact our website today -- we have families waiting to rebuild their lives.∑ If you have RESOURCES to give, think about KATRINA HOME DRIVE’s Adopt-a-Family Program and see how grateful these survivors are to have a chance to start over. Imagine it was happening to YOU…www.KatrinaHomeDrive.Org..................................A survivor writes: “I lost everything I owned in St. Bernard Parish.I am a veteran of the US Army, a senior at Loyola City College at night, volunteer firefighter, and a construction worker with 15 years experience.I need housing and so do two other families related to me. We have lost everything,(one of the aforementioned families has two disabled members on Social Security). I have applied for disaster unemployment and all I have received is a $147 food stamp card and a 2 week reprieve on my motel room which ends Sept. 26. My life was totally turned upside down and I am more than eager to return to work. I take pride in New Orleans and will assist in rebuilding New Orleans nail by nail.I called HUD and they are placing everyone on a 1year waiting list. We have nowhere to go."

A KATRINA HOME ANGEL writes: ‘The manager of a Motel 6 in California contacted KATRINA HOME DRIVE about a family in the motel with 5 little ones, ages 9 to 2.One week later, they had to be out of the motel. They had nothing. They had seen unimaginable horrors and one child wouldn't bathe because he had become afraid of the water.After calling every emergency number I could find, I spent a restless night with tears praying for this family. I wanted to get them immediate help. I learned that California is not issuing section 8 vouchers for Katrina victims. Out of desperation, I started calling people who posted on sites listing shared housing. I reached a woman who happened to live near the motel and within 5 minutes, she headed to the motel with a small refrigerator and some food for the hungry familyIt happened that the husband of the displaced family is deaf and this woman has6 adopted children of her own who are also deaf. She took this family to her house for dinner and enrolled the children in school the next day. Though relieved this family's immediate crisis was resolved, they still needed housing and I was getting no help from government agencies.

A post I made to the KATRINA website was seen by a generous family and the SAME DAY, this "angel" family was able to find a church to adopt the survivors. All of this began on September 15th. Today is September 19th. This family has now been given a car, the father has started a new job, and the children are in school. There is still a long road ahead - the family has no records, we need to find someone who is willing to rent to them, they need everything to set up a household and much more to rebuild these seven lives. But they are now starting their journey with full stomachs and people who care. Katrina's devastation truly will be fought only by people helping people. Thank you to everyone who is doing this."

The Big Liar Goes On

Message: I Care About the Black Folks
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By FRANK RICH , NY TIMES OP-ED
Published: September 18, 2005
ONCE Toto parts the curtain, the Wizard of Oz can never be the wizard again. He is forever Professor Marvel, blowhard and snake-oil salesman. Hurricane Katrina, which is likely to endure in the American psyche as long as L. Frank Baum's mythic tornado, has similarly unmasked George W. Bush.
The worst storm in our history proved perfect for exposing this president because in one big blast it illuminated all his failings: the rampant cronyism, the empty sloganeering of "compassionate conservatism," the lack of concern for the "underprivileged" his mother condescended to at the Astrodome, the reckless lack of planning for all government operations except tax cuts, the use of spin and photo-ops to camouflage failure and to substitute for action.
In the chaos unleashed by Katrina, these plot strands coalesced into a single tragic epic played out in real time on television. The narrative is just too powerful to be undone now by the administration's desperate recycling of its greatest hits: a return Sunshine Boys tour by the surrogate empathizers Clinton and Bush I, another round of prayers at the Washington National Cathedral, another ludicrously overhyped prime-time address flecked with speechwriters' "poetry" and framed by a picturesque backdrop. Reruns never eclipse a riveting new show.
Nor can the president's acceptance of "responsibility" for the disaster dislodge what came before. Mr. Bush didn't cough up his modified-limited mea culpa until he'd seen his whole administration flash before his eyes. His admission that some of the buck may stop with him (about a dime's worth, in Truman dollars) came two weeks after the levees burst and five years after he promised to usher in a new post-Clinton "culture of responsibility." It came only after the plan to heap all the blame on the indeed blameworthy local Democrats failed to lift Mr. Bush's own record-low poll numbers. It came only after America's highest-rated TV news anchor, Brian Williams, started talking about Katrina the way Walter Cronkite once did about Vietnam.
Taking responsibility, as opposed to paying lip service to doing so, is not in this administration's gene pool. It was particularly shameful that Laura Bush was sent among the storm's dispossessed to try to scapegoat the news media for her husband's ineptitude. When she complained of seeing "a lot of the same footage over and over that isn't necessarily representative of what really happened," the first lady sounded just like Donald Rumsfeld shirking responsibility for the looting of Baghdad. The defense secretary, too, griped about seeing the same picture "over and over" on television (a looter with a vase) to hide the reality that the Pentagon had no plan to secure Iraq, a catastrophic failure being paid for in Iraqi and American blood to this day.
This White House doesn't hate all pictures, of course. It loves those by Karl Rove's Imagineers, from the spectacularly lighted Statue of Liberty backdrop of Mr. Bush's first 9/11 anniversary speech to his "Top Gun" stunt to Thursday's laughably stagy stride across the lawn to his lectern in Jackson Square. (Message: I am a leader, not that vacationing slacker who first surveyed the hurricane damage from my presidential jet.)
The most odious image-mongering, however, has been Mr. Bush's repeated deployment of African-Americans as dress extras to advertise his "compassion." In 2000, the Republican convention filled the stage with break dancers and gospel singers, trying to dispel the memory of Mr. Bush's craven appearance at Bob Jones University when it forbade interracial dating. (The few blacks in the convention hall itself were positioned near celebrities so they'd show up in TV shots.) In 2004, the Bush-Cheney campaign Web site had a page titled "Compassion" devoted mainly to photos of the president with black people, Colin Powell included.
Some of these poses are re-enacted in the "Hurricane Relief" photo gallery currently on display on the White House Web site. But this time the old magic isn't working. The "compassion" photos are outweighed by the cinéma vérité of poor people screaming for their lives. The government effort to keep body recovery efforts in New Orleans as invisible as the coffins from Iraq was abandoned when challenged in court by CNN.


But even now the administration's priority of image over substance is embedded like a cancer in the Katrina relief process. Brazenly enough, Mr. Rove has been officially put in charge of the reconstruction effort. The two top deputies at FEMA remaining after Michael Brown's departure, one of them a former local TV newsman, are not disaster relief specialists but experts in P.R., which they'd practiced as advance men for various Bush campaigns. Thus The Salt Lake Tribune discovered a week after the hurricane that some 1,000 firefighters from Utah and elsewhere were sent not to the Gulf Coast but to Atlanta, to be trained as "community relations officers for FEMA" rather than used as emergency workers to rescue the dying in New Orleans. When 50 of them were finally dispatched to Louisiana, the paper reported, their first assignment was "to stand beside President Bush" as he toured devastated areas.
The cashiering of "Brownie," whom Mr. Bush now purports to know as little as he did "Kenny Boy," changes nothing. The Knight Ridder newspapers found last week that it was the homeland security secretary, Michael Chertoff, not Mr. Brown, who had the greater authority to order federal agencies into service without any request from state or local officials. Mr. Chertoff waited a crucial, unexplained 36 hours before declaring Katrina an "incident of national significance," the trigger needed for federal action. Like Mr. Brown, he was oblivious to the humanitarian disaster unfolding in the convention center, confessing his ignorance of conditions there to NPR on the same day that the FEMA chief famously did so to Ted Koppel. Yet Mr. Bush's "culture of responsibility" does not hold Mr. Chertoff accountable. Quite the contrary: on Thursday the president charged Homeland Security with reviewing "emergency plans in every major city in America." Mr. Chertoff will surely do a heck of a job.
WHEN there's money on the line, cronies always come first in this White House, no matter how great the human suffering. After Katrina, the FEMA Web site directing charitable contributions prominently listed Operation Blessing, a Pat Robertson kitty that, according to I.R.S. documents obtained by ABC News, has given more than half of its yearly cash donations to Mr. Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network. If FEMA is that cavalier about charitable donations, imagine what it's doing with the $62 billion (so far) of taxpayers' money sent its way for Katrina relief. Actually, you don't have to imagine: we already know some of it was immediately siphoned into no-bid contracts with a major Republican donor, the Fluor Corporation, as well as with a client of the consultant Joe Allbaugh, the Bush 2000 campaign manager who ran FEMA for this White House until Brownie, Mr. Allbaugh's college roommate, was installed in his place.
It was back in 2000 that Mr. Bush, in a debate with Al Gore, bragged about his gubernatorial prowess "on the front line of catastrophic situations," specifically citing a Texas flood, and paid the Clinton administration a rare compliment for putting a professional as effective as James Lee Witt in charge of FEMA. Exactly why Mr. Bush would staff that same agency months later with political hacks is one of many questions that must be answered by the independent investigation he and the Congressional majority are trying every which way to avoid. With or without a 9/11-style commission, the answers will come out. There are too many Americans who are angry and too many reporters who are on the case. (NBC and CNN are both opening full-time bureaus in New Orleans.) You know the world has changed when the widely despised news media have a far higher approval rating (77 percent) than the president (46 percent), as measured last week in a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll.
Like his father before him, Mr. Bush has squandered the huge store of political capital he won in a war. His Thursday-night invocation of "armies of compassion" will prove as worthless as the "thousand points of light" that the first President Bush bestowed upon the poor from on high in New Orleans (at the Superdome, during the 1988 G.O.P. convention). It will be up to other Republicans in Washington to cut through the empty words and image-mongering to demand effective action from Mr. Bush on the Gulf Coast and in Iraq, if only because their own political lives are at stake. It's up to Democrats, though they show scant signs of realizing it, to step into the vacuum and propose an alternative to a fiscally disastrous conservatism that prizes pork over compassion. If the era of Great Society big government is over, the era of big government for special interests is proving a fiasco. Especially when it's presided over by a self-styled C.E.O. with a consistent three-decade record of running private and public enterprises alike into a ditch.
What comes next? Having turned the page on Mr. Bush, the country hungers for a vision that is something other than either liberal boilerplate or Rovian stagecraft. At this point, merely plain old competence, integrity and heart might do.

The Biggest American Catastrophe in since The Depression

An Urgent Letter

from Michael Moore


Friends,
Last week I closed my New York production office and sent my staff down to New Orleans to set up our own relief effort. I asked all of you to help me by sending food, materials and cash to the emergency relief center we helped set up on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain with the Veterans for Peace. We did this when the government was doing nothing and the Red Cross was still trying to get it together. Every day, every minute was critical. People were dying, poor people, black people, left like so much trash in the street. I wanted to find a way to get aid in there immediately.
I hooked up with the Vietnam veterans and Iraqi war vets (Veterans for Peace) who were organizing a guerilla, grass-roots relief effort. They were the same group that had set up Cindy Sheehan's camp in Crawford and now they had moved Camp Casey to Louisiana.
I have good news and horrible news to report. First, your response to my appeal letter was overwhelming. Within a few days, a half-million dollars was sent in through my website to fund our relief effort. This money was immediately used to buy generators, food, water, a mobile medical van, tents, satellite phones, etc.
Others of you began shipping supplies to our encampment. People in communities all over the country started organizing truck caravans to us in Louisiana. Twenty-two trucks from southern California alone have already arrived. A semi-truck from Chicago delivered ten tons of food. A group of friends in New Jersey got two 24 foot trucks, got their community to load them up with goods, and arrived in Covington tonight. Fifteen iMacs are inbound from California. One man gave us his pick-up truck and another donated truck is en route from Houston.
Your response to my appeal has been nothing short of miraculous. And it has saved many, many lives.
A number of you decided to just get in your cars and drive to our camp to volunteer to help. We now have had 150 volunteers here doing the work that needs to be done. Last night they unloaded twenty tons of food from a tractor trailer in under two hours. Each day more volunteers arrive. Everyone is sleeping on the ground or in tents. It is a remarkable sight. Thank you, all of you, for responding. I will never forget this outpouring of generosity to those forgotten by our own government.
My staff and the vets spend their 18-hour days delivering food and water throughout the city of New Orleans and the surrounding areas. What they have seen is appalling. I have asked them to post their daily diaries on my website (www.michaelmoore.com) along with accompanying photos and video so you can learn what is really going on. What the media is showing you is NOT the whole story. It is much, much worse and there is still little being done to bring help to those who need it.
Our group has visited many outlying towns and villages in Mississippi and Louisiana, places the Red Cross and FEMA haven't visited in over a week. Often our volunteers are the first relief any of these people have seen. They have no food, water or electricity. People die every day. There are no TV cameras recording this. They have started to report the spin and PR put out by the White House, the happy news that often isn't true ("Everyone gets 2,000 dollars!").
The truth is that there are dead bodies everywhere and no one is picking them up. My crew reports that in most areas there is no FEMA presence, and very little Red Cross. It's been over two weeks since the hurricane and there is simply not much being done. At this point, would you call this situation incompetence or a purposeful refusal to get real help down there?
That's why we decided not to wait. And we are so grateful to all of you who have joined us. The Veterans for Peace and my staff aren't leaving (and that's why we are hoping those of you who can't get to Covington will make it to the Veterans for Peace co-sponsored anti-war demonstration in DC on September 24: www.unitedforpeace.org.)
If you want to help, here's what we need in Covington right now:
Cleaning Supplies (glass cleaner, bleach, disinfectant, etc.)Aspirin and other basic over the counter drugs.Bottled WaterCanned GoodsHygiene SuppliesBaby Supplies - Baby Food Formula, diapers #4, #5, Wipes, PedialyteSterile GlovesBatteries - All kinds, from AA to watch and hearing aid batteries.Volunteers with trucks and carsSelf contained kitchens with generators, utensils, workers
Consider sending supplies in reusable containers. List the contents on the outside of the package so the folks in the warehouse can easily sort the items.
Clothes are not needed. If you go, keep in mind that you MUST be self-sufficient. Bring a tent and a sleeping bag. People are driving to Covington from across the country and often have extra room in their cars for you or for an extra box of supplies. For more information, go to the Veterans for Peace message board: www.vfproadtrips.org/katrina/.
Send supplies via UPS to:Veterans for PeaceOmni Storage74145 Hwy. 25Covington LA
Thanks again for funding and supporting our relief efforts. It has been a bright spot in this otherwise shameful month.
Yours,Michael Mooremike@michaelmoore.comwww.michaelmoore.com

God Blesses Chimichangas

After the Deluge:A God With Whom I Am Not Familiar
by TIM WISE

This is an open letter to the man sitting behind me at La Paz today, > in Nashville, at lunchtime, in the Brooks Brothers shirt:>>You don’t know me. But I know you.>>I watched you as you held hands with your tablemates at the >restaurant where we both ate this afternoon. I listened as you >prayed, and thanked God for the food you were about to eat, and for >your own safety, several hundred miles away from the unfolding >catastrophe in New Orleans.>>You blessed your chimichanga in the name of Jesus Christ, and then >proceeded to spend the better part of your meal — and mine, since >I was too near your table to avoid hearing every word — >moralistically scolding the people of that devastated city, heaping >scorn on them for not heeding the warnings to leave before disaster >struck. Then you attacked them — all of them, without >distinction, it seemed — for the behavior of a relative handful: >those who have looted items like guns, or big-screen TVs.>>I heard you ask, amid the din of your colleagues’ “Amens,” why > it was that instead of pitching in to help their fellow Americans, > the people of New Orleans instead — again, all of them, in your >mind — chose to steal and shoot at relief helicopters.>>I watched you wipe salsa from the corners of your mouth, as you >nodded agreement to the statement of one of your friends, her hair >neatly coifed, her makeup flawless, her jewelry sparkling. When you >asked, rhetorically, why it was that people were so much more decent > amid the tragedy of 9/11, as compared to the aftermath of Katrina, > she had offered her response, but only after apologizing for what >she admitted was going to sound harsh.>>“Well,” Buffy explained. “It’s probably because in New >Orleans, it seems to be mostly poor people, and, you know, they just > don’t have the same regard.”>>She then added that police should shoot the looters, and should have > done so from the beginning, so as to send a message to the rest >that theft would not be tolerated. You, who had just thanked Jesus >for your chips and guacamole, said you agreed. They should be shot. > Praise the Lord.>>Your God is one with whom I am not familiar.>>Two thoughts: First, it is a very fortunate thing for you, and >likely for me, that my two young children were with me as I sat >there, choking back fish tacos and my own seething rage, listening >to you pontificate about shit you know nothing about. Have you ever >even been to New Orleans? And no, by that I don’t mean the New >Orleans of your company’s sales conference. I don’t mean >Emeril’s New Orleans, or the New Orleans of Uptown Mardi Gras >parties.>>I mean the New Orleans that is buried as if it were Atlantis, in >places like the lower 9th Ward: 98 percent black, 40 percent poor, >where bodies are floating down the street, flowing with the water as > it seeks its own level. Have you met the people from that New >Orleans? The New Orleans that is dying as I write this, and as you >order another sweet tea?>>I didn’t think so.>>Your God — the one to whom you prayed today, and likely do before >every meal, because this gesture proves what a good Christian you >are — is one who you sincerely believe gives a flying fuck about >your lunch. Your God is one who you seem to believe watches over you > and blesses you, and brings good tidings your way, while >simultaneously letting thousands of people watch their homes be >destroyed, and perhaps 10,000 or more die, many of them in the >streets for lack of water or food.>>Did you ever stop to think just what a rancid asshole such a God >would have to be, such that he would take care of the likes of you, >while letting babies die in their mothers’ arms, and letting old >people die in wheelchairs, at the foot of Canal Street? But no, it >isn’t God who’s the asshole here, Skip (or Brad, or Braxton, or >whatever your name is).>>God doesn’t feed you, and it isn’t God that kept me from turning > around and beating your lily-white privileged ass today either. >God has nothing to do with it. God doesn’t care who wins the >Super Bowl. God doesn’t help anyone win an Academy Award. God >didn’t get you your last raise, or your SUV. And if God is even >half as tired as I am of having to listen to self-righteous >bastards like you blame the victims of this nightmare for their >fate, then you had best eat slowly from this point forward.>>Why didn’t they evacuate like they were told? Are you serious? >There are 100,000 people in that city without cars. Folks who are >too poor to own their own vehicle, and who rely on public >transportation every day. I know this might shock you. They don’t >have a Hummer2, or whatever gas-guzzling piece of crap you probably >own.>>And no, they didn’t just choose not to own a car because the buses > are so gosh-darned efficient and great, as Rush Limbaugh implied >yesterday, and as you likely heard, since you’re the kind of >person who hangs on the every word of such bloviating hacks as >these.>>Why did they loot? Are you serious? People are dying, in the >streets, on live television. Fathers and mothers are watching their >babies’ eyes bulge in their skulls from dehydration, and you are >begrudging them some goddamned candy bars, diapers and water? If >anything, the poor of New Orleans have exercised restraint.>>>Maybe you didn't know it, but the people of that city with whom you >likely identify — the wealthy white folks of Uptown — were >barely touched by this storm. Yeah, I guess God was watching over >them: protecting them, and rewarding them for their faith and >superior morality. If the folks downtown who are waiting >desperately for their government to send help — a government >whose resources have been stretched thin by a war that I’m sure >you support, because you love freedom and democracy — were half >as crazed as you think, they’d march down St. Charles Avenue >right now and burn every mansion in sight. That they aren’t doing >so suggests a decency and compassion for their fellow man and woman >that, sadly, people like you lack.>>Can you even imagine what you would do in their place? Can you >imagine what would happen if it were well-off white folks stranded >like this without buses to get them out, without nourishment, >without hope? Putting aside the absurdity of the imagery — after >all, such folks always have the means to seek safety, or the money >to rebuild, or the political significance to ensure a much speedier >response for their concerns — can you just imagine?>>Can you imagine what would happen if the pampered, overfed corporate > class, which complains about taxes taking a third of their bloated > incomes, had to sit in the hot sun for four, going on five, days? >Without a margarita or hotel swimming pool to comfort them, I mean?>>Oh, and please, I know. I’m stereotyping you. Imagine that. I’ve > assumed, based only on your words, what kind of person you are, >even though I suppose I could be wrong. How does that feel, Biff? >Hurt your feelings? So sorry. But, hey, at least my stereotypes of >you aren’t deadly. They won’t affect your life one bit, unlike >the ones you carry around with you and display within earshot of >people like me, supposing that no one could possibly disagree.>>But I’m not wrong, am I, Chip? I know you. I see people like you >all the time, in airports, in business suits, on their lunch >breaks. People who will take advantage of any opportunity to ratify >and reify their pre-existing prejudices toward the poor, toward >black folks. You see the same three video loops of the same dozen >or so looters on Fox News and you conclude that poor black people >are crazy, immoral, criminal.>>You, or others quite a bit like you, are the ones posting messages >on chat-room boards, calling looters subhuman “vermin,” >“scum” or “cockroaches.” I heard you use the word >“animals” three times today: you and that woman across from >you. What was it you said as you scooped the last bite of black >beans and rice into your eager mouth? Like zoo animals? Yes, I >think that was it.>>Well, Chuck, it’s a free country, and so you certainly have the >right, I suppose, to continue lecturing the poor, in between >checking your Blackberry and dropping the kids off at soccer >practice. If you want to believe that the poor of New Orleans are >immoral and greedy, and unworthy of support at a time like this — >or somehow more in need of your scolding than whatever donation you >might make to a relief fund — so be it. But let’s leave God out >of it, shall we? All of it.>>Your God is one with whom I am not familiar, and I’d prefer to >keep it that way.>

The Bigger Problem

The Biggest Shame
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
The wretchedness coming across our television screens from Louisiana has illuminated the way children sometimes pay with their lives, even in America, for being born to poor families.
It has also underscored the Bush administration's ongoing reluctance or ineptitude in helping the poorest Americans. The scenes in New Orleans reminded me of the suffering I saw after a similar storm killed 130,000 people in Bangladesh in 1991 - except that Bangladesh's government showed more urgency in trying to save its most vulnerable citizens.
But Hurricane Katrina also underscores a much larger problem: the growing number of Americans trapped in a never-ending cyclone of poverty. And while it may be too early to apportion blame definitively for the mishandling of the hurricane, even President Bush's own administration acknowledges that America's poverty is worsening on his watch.
The U.S. Census Bureau reported a few days ago that the poverty rate rose again last year, with 1.1 million more Americans living in poverty in 2004 than a year earlier. After declining sharply under Bill Clinton, the number of poor people has now risen 17 percent under Mr. Bush.
If it's shameful that we have bloated corpses on New Orleans streets, it's even more disgraceful that the infant mortality rate in America's capital is twice as high as in China's capital. That's right - the number of babies who died before their first birthdays amounted to 11.5 per thousand live births in 2002 in Washington, compared with 4.6 in Beijing.
Indeed, according to the United Nations Development Program, an African-American baby in Washington has less chance of surviving its first year than a baby born in urban parts of the state of Kerala in India.
The national infant mortality rate has risen under Mr. Bush for the first time since 1958. The U.S. ranks 43rd in the world in infant mortality, according to the C.I.A.'s World Factbook; if we could reach the level of Singapore, ranked No. 1, we would save 18,900 children's lives each year.
So in some ways the poor children evacuated from New Orleans are the lucky ones because they may now get checkups and vaccinations. But nationally, 29 percent of children had no health insurance at some point in the last 12 months, and many get neither checkups nor vaccinations. The U.S. ranks 84th in the world for measles immunizations and 89th for polio.
One of the most dispiriting elements of the catastrophe in New Orleans was the looting. I covered the 1995 earthquake that leveled much of Kobe, Japan, killing 5,500, and for days I searched there for any sign of criminal behavior. Finally I found a resident who had seen three men steal food. I asked him whether he was embarrassed that Japanese would engage in such thuggery.
"No, you misunderstand," he said firmly. "These looters weren't Japanese. They were foreigners."
The reasons for this are complex and partly cultural, but one reason is that Japan has tried hard to stitch all Japanese together into the nation's social fabric. In contrast, the U.S. - particularly under the Bush administration - has systematically cut people out of the social fabric by redistributing wealth from the most vulnerable Americans to the most affluent.
It's not just that funds may have gone to Iraq rather than to the levees in New Orleans; it's also that money went to tax cuts for the wealthiest rather than vaccinations for children.
None of this is to suggest that there are easy solutions for American poverty. As Ronald Reagan once said, "We fought a war on poverty, and poverty won." But we don't need to be that pessimistic - in the late 1990's, we made real headway. A ray of hope is beautifully presented in one of the best books every written on American poverty, "American Dream," by my Times colleague Jason DeParle.
So the best monument to the catastrophe in New Orleans would be a serious national effort to address the poverty that afflicts the entire country. And in our shock and guilt, that might be politically feasible. Rich Lowry of The National Review, in defending Mr. Bush, offered an excellent suggestion: "a grand right-left bargain that includes greater attention to out-of-wedlock births from the Left in exchange for the Right's support for more urban spending." That would be the best legacy possible for Katrina.
Otherwise, long after the horrors have left TV screens, about 50 of the 77 babies who die each day, on average, will die needlessly, because of poverty. That's the larger hurricane of poverty that shames our land.

Dear Republicans: You Got Him Hired

To All My Fellow Americans Who Voted for George W. Bush:
by Michael Moore
On this, the fourth anniversary of 9/11, I'm just curious, how does it feel?
How does it feel to know that the man you elected to lead us after we were attacked went ahead and put a guy in charge of FEMA whose main qualification was that he ran horse shows?

That's right. Horse shows.

I really want to know -- and I ask you this in all sincerity and with all due respect -- how do you feel about the utter contempt Mr. Bush has shown for your safety? C'mon, give me just a moment of honesty. Don't start ranting on about how this disaster in New Orleans was the fault of one of the poorest cities in America. Put aside your hatred of Democrats and liberals and anyone with the last name of Clinton. Just look me in the eye and tell me our President did the right thing after 9/11 by naming a horse show runner as the top man to protect us in case of an emergency or catastrophe.

I want you to put aside your self-affixed label of Republican/conservative/born-again/capitalist/ditto-head/right-winger and just talk to me as an American, on the common ground we both call America.

Are we safer now than before 9/11? When you learn that behind the horse show runner, the #2 and #3 men in charge of emergency preparedness have zero experience in emergency preparedness, do you think we are safer?

When you look at Michael Chertoff, the head of Homeland Security, a man with little experience in national security, do you feel secure?

When men who never served in the military and have never seen young men die in battle send our young people off to war, do you think they know how to conduct a war? Do they know what it means to have your legs blown off for a threat that was never there?
Do you really believe that turning over important government services to private corporations has resulted in better services for the people?

Why do you hate our federal government so much? You have voted for politicians for the past 25 years whose main goal has been to de-fund the federal government. Do you think that cutting federal programs like FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers has been good or bad for America? GOOD OR BAD?

With the nation's debt at an all-time high, do you think tax cuts for the rich are still a good idea? Will you give yours back so hundreds of thousands of homeless in New Orleans can have a home?

Do you believe in Jesus? Really? Didn't he say that we would be judged by how we treat the least among us? Hurricane Katrina came in and blew off the facade that we were a nation with liberty and justice for all. The wind howled and the water rose and what was revealed was that the poor in America shall be left to suffer and die while the President of the United States fiddles and tells them to eat cake.

That's not a joke. The day the hurricane hit and the levees broke, Mr. Bush, John McCain and their rich pals were stuffing themselves with cake. A full day after the levees broke (the same levees whose repair funding he had cut), Mr. Bush was playing a guitar some country singer gave him. All this while New Orleans sank under water.

It would take ANOTHER day before the President would do a flyover in his jumbo jet, peeking out the widow at the misery 2500 feet below him as he flew back to his second home in DC. It would then be TWO MORE DAYS before a trickle of federal aid and troops would arrive. This was no seven minutes in a sitting trance while children read "My Pet Goat" to him. This was FOUR DAYS of doing nothing other than saying "Brownie (FEMA director Michael Brown), you're doing a heck of a job!"

My Republican friends, does it bother you that we are the laughing stock of the world?
And on this sacred day of remembrance, do you think we honor or shame those who died on 9/11/01? If we learned nothing and find ourselves today every bit as vulnerable and unprepared as we were on that bright sunny morning, then did the 3,000 die in vain?
Our vulnerability is not just about dealing with terrorists or natural disasters. We are vulnerable and unsafe because we allow one in eight Americans to live in horrible poverty. We accept an education system where one in six children never graduate and most of those who do can't string a coherent sentence together. The middle class can't pay the mortgage or the hospital bills and 45 million have no health coverage whatsoever.

Are we safe? Do you really feel safe? You can only move so far out and build so many gated communities before the fruit of what you've sown will be crashing through your walls and demanding retribution. Do you really want to wait until that happens? Or is it your hope that if they are left alone long enough to soil themselves and shoot themselves and drown in the filth that fills the street that maybe the problem will somehow go away?

I know you know better. You gave the country and the world a man who wasn't up for the job and all he does is hire people who aren't up for the job. You did this to us, to the world, to the people of New Orleans. Please fix it. Bush is yours. And you know, for our peace and safety and security, this has to be fixed. What do you propose?
I have an idea, and it isn't a horse show.

Yours,Michael Moore

End of an Era

End of the Bush Eraby E. J. Dionne Jr. The Bush Era is over. The sooner politicians in both parties realize that, the better for them -- and the country.Recent months, and especially the past two weeks, have brought home to a steadily growing majority of Americans the truth that President Bush's government doesn't work. His policies are failing, his approach to leadership is detached and self-indulgent, his way of politics has produced a divided, angry and dysfunctional public square. We dare not go on like this.The Bush Era did not begin when he took office, or even with the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. It began on Sept. 14, 2001, when Bush declared at the World Trade Center site: "I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon." Bush was, indeed, skilled in identifying enemies and rallying a nation already disposed to action. He failed to realize after Sept. 11 that it was not we who were lucky to have him as a leader, but he who was lucky to be president of a great country that understood the importance of standing together in the face of a grave foreign threat. Very nearly all of us rallied behind him.If Bush had understood that his central task was to forge national unity, as he seemed to shortly after Sept. 11, the country would never have become so polarized. Instead, Bush put patriotism to the service of narrowly ideological policies and an extreme partisanship. He pushed for more tax cuts for his wealthiest supporters and shamelessly used relatively modest details in the bill creating a Department of Homeland Security as partisan cudgels in the 2002 elections.He invoked our national anger over terrorism to win support for a war in Iraq. But he failed to pay heed to those who warned that the United States would need many more troops and careful planning to see the job through. The president assumed things would turn out fine, on the basis of wildly optimistic assumptions. Careful policymaking and thinking through potential flaws in your approach are not his administration's strong suits.And so the Bush Era ended definitively on Sept. 2, the day Bush first toured the Gulf Coast States after Hurricane Katrina. There was no magic moment with a bullhorn. The utter failure of federal relief efforts had by then penetrated the country's consciousness. Yesterday's resignation of FEMA Director Michael Brown put an exclamation point on the failure.The source of Bush's political success was his claim that he could protect Americans. Leadership, strength and security were Bush's calling cards. Over the past two weeks, they were lost in the surging waters of New Orleans.But the first intimations of the end of the Bush Era came months ago. The president's post-election fixation on privatizing part of Social Security showed how out of touch he was. The more Bush discussed this boutique idea cooked up in conservative think tanks and Wall Street imaginations, the less the public liked it. The situation in Iraq deteriorated. The glorious economy Bush kept touting turned out not to be glorious for many Americans. The Census Bureau's annual economic report, released in the midst of the Gulf disaster, found that an additional 4.1 million Americans had slipped into poverty between 2001 and 2004.The breaking of the Bush spell opens the way for leaders of both parties to declare their independence from the recent past. It gives forces outside the White House the opportunity to shape a more appropriate national agenda -- for competence and innovation in rebuilding the Katrina region and for new approaches to the problems created over the past 4 1/2 years.The federal budget, already a mess before Katrina, is now a laughable document. Those who call for yet more tax cuts risk sounding like robots droning automated talking points programmed inside them long ago. Katrina has forced the issue of deep poverty back onto the national agenda after a long absence. Finding a way forward in -- and eventually out of -- Iraq will require creativity from those not implicated in the administration's mistakes. And if ever the phrase "reinventing government" had relevance, it is now that we have observed the performance of a government that allows political hacks to push aside the professionals.And what of Bush, who has more than three years left in his term? Paradoxically, his best hope lies in recognizing that the Bush Era, as he and we have known it, really is gone. He can decide to help us in the transition to what comes next. Or he can cling stubbornly to his past and thereby doom himself to frustrating irrelevance.

Bill Maher Hits a Home Run

Bill Maher's
from recent
REAL TIME WITH BILL MAHER,
HBO: An Open Letter to the President

"Mr. President, this job can't be fun for you any more. There's no more money to spend--you used up all of that. You can't start another war because you used up the army. And now, darn the luck, the rest of your term has become the Bush family nightmare: helping poor people. Listen to your Mom. The cupboard's bare, the credit cards maxed out. No one's speaking to you. Mission accomplished."Now it's time to do what you've always done best: lose interest and walk away. Like you did with your military service and the oil company and the baseball team. It's time. Time to move on and try the next fantasy job. How about cowboy or space man? Now I know what you're saying: there's so many other things that you as President could involve yourself in. Please don't. I know, I know. There's a lot left to do. There's a war with Venezuela. Eliminating the sales tax on yachts. Turning the space program over to the church. And Social Security to Fannie Mae. Giving embryos the vote."But, Sir, none of that is going to happen now. Why? Because you govern like Billy Joel drives. You've performed so poorly I'm surprised that you haven't given yourself a medal. You're a catastrophe that walks like a man. Herbert Hoover was a shitty president, but even he never conceded an entire city to rising water and snakes."On your watch, we've lost almost all of our allies, the surplus, four airliners, two trade centers, a piece of the Pentagon and the City of New Orleans. Maybe you're just not lucky. I'm not saying you don't love this country. I'm just wondering how much worse it could be if you were on the other side."So, yes, God does speak to you. What he is saying is: 'Take a hint.' "

Operation Freedom

http://www.friedwire.org/friedspam.html

OPERATION CAJUN FREEDOM
September 8, 2005 (NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana)

There is strong evidence that aid was deliberately withheld by the White House and the Pentagon as part of a strategy for asserting unfettered military control over the city of New Orleans. Both hurricane victims and public officials have given multiple accounts of US authorities actively turning back aid and blocking rescue attempts in the days that followed the breaching of the city’s levees.Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish, for example, broke down in tears Sunday during an appearance on the NBC television program "Meet the Press," declaring, "Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area." He cited repeated actions by FEMA that involved the deliberate sabotage of relief efforts. He reported that FEMA turned back trailer truckloads of water sent by Wal-Mart, claiming the city didn’t need them. He also said that the Coast Guard’s offer of fuel urgently needed to power generators was countermanded by FEMA.Finally, he said that just a day earlier FEMA agents had come in and "cut all of our emergency communication lines" without any warning. The local sheriff, he added, had the lines reconnected and then posted armed guards to see that they were not cut again. This last, and most sinister, example is in keeping with the Pentagon’s "information war" doctrine, which demands the complete control of communications in an area targeted for invasion and occupation. There were also reports that the Red Cross was prevented from going into the city and that FEMA refused to allow the unloading of food, water and medical supplies brought by ships into New Orleans harbor.The apparent aim of this organized obstructionist behavior by the agency that is supposedly charged with coordinating relief was to block any significant aid until the military could intervene in the city with overwhelming force. This came on Friday, with military commanders treating New Orleans as a combat operation. This was the term used by Brig. Gen. Gary Jones, commander of the Louisiana National Guard’s Joint Task Force, in an interview with the Army Times. "This place is going to look like Little Somalia," said General Jones. "We’re going to go out and take this city back. This will be a combat operation to get this city under control."The newspaper clearly got the message, referring in its report to troops coming in to "fight the insurgency in the city."

The Images of Black America

A Nation's CastawaysKatrina Blew In, and Tossed Up Reminders of a Tattered Racial Legacy
By Lynne Duke and Teresa Wiltz
Washington Post Staff Writers Sunday, September 4, 2005;

On TV, we watch them: His braids are flying above his head and he's got a wild look on his face. He's running, one arm clutching a load of looted clothes, the other reaching back to tug at his pants, which are in danger of sliding past his rump. She's crying and forlorn and too young to be carrying a baby in her arms, but carrying one she is, and both are dirty and sweaty and hungry, reduced to an animal-like state of waiting and starving and begging for help. We see them through our respective prisms of race, and call them "refugees," as if they are foreigners in their own land.They are the Other, these victims of Katrina.And in this country, the Other is black. Poor. Desperate.Mainstream America too often demonizes the Other because, well, we've been conditioned to do so. And because it's easier to put people in a box and then shove it in the corner, away from view. Then it becomes their problem, not ours. To talk about race, for those who are weary of it, is to invite glazed-over eyes and stifled yawns -- or even hostility.But Katrina blew open the box, putting the urban poor front and center, with images of once-invisible folks pleading from rooftops, wading through flooded streets, starving at the Superdome and requiring a massive federal outlay of resources. Or dead, wheelchairs pushed up against the wall, a blanket thrown over still bodies. The Other is there, staring us in the face, exposing our issues on an international stage. It is at once an embarrassment -- how did we go from can-do to can't-do-for-our-own? -- and a challenge, critics charge: How do we stop ignoring the folks in the box, the inner-city destitute, and realize that their fate is ours as well?Poor black people, says Lani Guinier, a Harvard University law professor, are "the canary in the mine. Poor black people are the throwaway people. And we pathologize them in order to justify our disregard."But, she says, "this is not just about poor black people in New Orleans. This is about a social movement, with an administration that is bent on weakening the capacity of the national government to act. . . . I hope this is a wake-up call to all of America. To see this as the tip of the iceberg, the thin edge of the wedge. We ignored the early warning signals. But this is another early warning that we are ill prepared to function as a society."Just as the United States was embarrassed globally by its ugly tradition -- racism -- being exposed during the civil rights movement, it is now shamed again by "the spectacle of a Baghdad on the Mississippi River and our own people being so poor and so destitute and so helpless at a time when we are talking about trying to spread democracy and curb looting in Baghdad," says Jim Sleeper, a lecturer in political science at Yale University.Jesse Jackson describes the New Orleans convention center, where tens of thousands live in fetid conditions, as "the hull of a slaveship."Inside the proverbial slaveship are the "captives," who have been described as running completely amok. But witness the man who feels so guilty about the pita bread, water and juice that he'd taken from a Wal-Mart to feed his family that he kept a list -- so he can pay it back later."I feel like an American again," the man says on TV after help began to arrive on Friday. "I thought my country had abandoned me."But also among the abandoned was the young white woman holding her sick baby and crying as she says, "It's not about low-income, it's not about rich people, poor people, it's about people." It sounds more like a wish than a reality.The fact is, the most vulnerable victims of Katrina, though largely black, are also poor whites and Latinos. The poor are paying the highest price.So it is no wonder that Katrina has re-ignited the debate over race and class.There are those who argue, as does Manning Marable, director of Columbia University's Center for Contemporary Black History, that "the class element is inextricably bound to the race element." It has always been so because of the way policies and laws historically have been framed.Roger Wilkins, the George Mason University historian, sees the historic sweep of the legacy of slavery in the helpless straits of folks marooned by the storm. Seen through that arc of history, Wilkins says that Monday's unmasking of the vast inequality within New Orleans is a "day a reckoning" for the United States: of reckoning with a history of ignoring the poorest of the poor that dates back to our earliest days."The worst education in the country is ladled out to the poor kids in big cities. And we're incarcerating black males at a higher rate than any time in our history. After all this time, one in four black people is still impoverished," says Wilkins.The history of marginalizing black folk in America, especially poor ones, runs so deep that it occurs like second nature. It is one reason, say several prominent black intellectuals, that the response to the devastation of Katrina was so slow.Racism runs "so deep that the folks who are slow to respond can't see it," says Russell Adams, professor of Afro-American studies at Howard University. "That's the unperceived character of racial behavior, of what I would call hidden racism where you don't know that this situation has a racial character to it, just like fish have trouble defining water."Scholars are in agreement that race has shaped the lives and prospects of African Americans for generations. They part company on the extent to which racism continues to hinder black prospects in America today.Many conservative thinkers espouse a race-neutral analysis. Racism doesn't cause poverty, they say, poverty is the result of a pattern of dependency that has set in among poor blacks.In New Orleans, "you are dealing with the permanently poor -- people who don't have jobs, are not used to getting up and organizing themselves and getting things done and for whom sitting and waiting is a way of life," says Linda Chavez, president of the Center for Equal Opportunity and a former head of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission."This is a natural disaster that is exacerbated by the problems of the underclass. The chief cause of poverty today among blacks is no longer racism. It is the breakdown of the traditional family."John McWhorter, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, cautions against the use of the "nasty, circular, unprovable" argument of race because "this is a matter of the incompetence of the American infrastructure. It's not a matter of somebody in Washington deciding we don't need to rush [to New Orleans] because they're all poor jungle bunnies anyway."Everyone, it seems, wants to weigh in on the subject.There is the white TV anchor who muses that the left-behind are living paycheck to paycheck and therefore could not afford to evacuate, and how that paycheck-to-paycheck hustle is not a part of the white American experience. (Tell that to the scores of middle-class whites struggling to service their debt.) Or stand-up comic Bill Maher riffing on the subtleties of 21st century racism and the hurricane. And rapper Kanye West declaring at a concert fundraiser for victims, "George Bush doesn't care about black people." He said America is set up "to help the poor, the black people, the less well-off as slow as possible."This feeling of being disregarded is pervasive in the African American community, where old wounds still sting. Witness a "Saturday Night Live" skit from 1998, where Samuel L. Jackson and Tracy Morgan indulge in a bit of hyperbole, playing African Americans in the fifth class steerage of the Titanic. Everyone was rescued before them -- even the furniture.While that may have been comedy, its message is conveyed in all kinds of real-life ways. Deborah Willis, photographer and professor of the arts at New York University, laments some of the images coming out of New Orleans.The frequent replay of what has become an iconic looting photo -- the guy with the flying braids and falling pants -- "desensitizes the viewer of finding compassion for what happened to the thousands of people who have died or who have suffered," she says.It's an us- vs .-them kind of image, she says, and "a racialized image because of the way it's been used and reused over again."Ian Haney Lopez, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, agrees: "If you see a photo from New Orleans of a white person with a shotgun, you think, 'Defending property.' If the news flashes a picture of a black person with a shotgun, you think, 'Looter.' "Then, too, for many people of color, those images come loaded with baggage, in particular, a reflexive sense of guilt, the fear that the looting African Americans will be used to serve as a stand-in for the race as a whole. Ward Connerly admits that he felt a twinge when he saw the images: "I thought this is only going to fuel the perception, there those people go again. It was not as a -- quote -- black man, it was as a citizen who hates to see that kind of thing, but being fully aware of how it plays out in the minds of people."The image of the ghoulish Other arose in natural disasters more than a century ago. In the Chicago Fire of 1871, the Galveston Hurricane of 1900 and the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, minority groups (Germans, African Americans and Chinese) were rumored to be preying on white women by chewing on their fingers to steal their jewelry. It's not such a stretch to see parallels in the unconfirmed reports of roving bands of rapists in New Orleans.So what lessons does New Orleans offer?We are a multi-racial society, and indeed, New Orleans has historically been famed for its racial mixing and matching and resulting complicated family lines. Still, as a nation, we seem to keep aligning ourselves along strict black/white lines, never mind the more complex, brown and beige reality.Remember Guinier's black canary in the mine. And the troubling specter of the federal government's seeming incompetence in the wake of a catastrophic national disaster."The lesson we can take from this is that the society cannot blithely ignore extreme disparities in economic and social situations," Adams says.Noel Ignatiev, author of "How the Irish Became White" and editor of Race Traitor, a journal dedicated to the "New Abolitionism," suggests that the nation is poised at a pivotal point. He sees an opportunity for a realignment of thinking."White is not a matter of color. White is a matter of a sense of entitlement, a sense they are or ought to be entitled to specially protected place in society," he says. "But there are plenty of white folks on the bottom rung of society, people for whom whiteness isn't doing much at all. Some may be awakening to the notion there's no use clinging to an identity that's doing them no good. If white folks start thinking of themselves as poor and dispossessed instead of privileged, it will change the way they act. We will see the beginnings of class conflict."