In the nearly 6 years since Hurricane Katrina, there has been tremendous progress made in making the city better than it was before. Lakeview, Slidell, Uptown, Downtown, etc. have all seen a makeover that in many ways makes the city appear new and reborn. Other areas, such as New Orleans East and many parts of the Lower Ninth Ward still look devastated, with the added eyesore of six years of neglect.
I mention this only to remind people that while the job isn’t done, we’ve made significant headway into doing a job many thought was not only impossible, but a foolish endeavor to even attempt.
In the time since the storm, we’ve heard many personal accounts of what people went through when they evacuated, and from those who stayed. We’ve heard stories from people who lost everything, to those who survived unscathed. For many, the storm changed their perspective on their city completely. What the world saw on those days after August 29, 2005, was what New Orleanians cynically knew about their city all along, but didn’t really want to do the work to change. Katrina exposed the dirty underbelly of New Orleans. The chaos, the looting, the actions of the New Orleans Police Department (everything from the Henry Glover shooting to the Danzinger Bridge incident and the stealing of Cadillacs from a downtown car dealership by the NOPD), the incompetence along all levels of government –city, parish, state, and national levels and so on revealed how New Orleans had to change to keep this nightmare from ever recurring again.
Hence, the physical and political changes I alluded to earlier. The city and state have pushed the Army Corps of Engineers to not only build a better levee system, but have demanded a better pumping system to handle the floodwaters. Citizens are pushing for reforms in the school system as they have the property assessors’ office. However, the old guard who enjoyed the spoils of the system that empowered it, have been pushing back –but the fight continues.
Into this mix, former New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin has self-published his own memoir, “Katrina’s Secrets: Storms After The Storm.” Nagin is exhibit A in someone who completely changed after the storm. Nagin was first elected in 2002. He came in as crusader against the old corruption that has plagued City Hall as far as I can remember. A successful businessman with the telecommunications company Cox Cable of New Orleans, he was initially portrayed by the old Morial-Jefferson political machine as being a threat to the established order –referring to Nagin as “Ray Reagan” on African-American/Urban radio stations. Nagin defeated the apparent Morial chosen successor, Police Chief Richard Pennington, and began his crackdown on corruption in the city. He targeted patronage positions and city inspection stations, much to the citizens’ approval.
Nagin even endorsed Republican gubernatorial candidate Bobby Jindal over fellow Democrat Kathleen Blanco for governor in 2003. Blanco won, but it appears Nagin had some personal animosity toward Blanco that surfaced during the days following Katrina.
During those three days after the storm, the city was in chaos. Nagin went on a famous rant on WWL radio complaining about all the press conferences by politicians, but nothing was being done. He cited “one John Wayne looking dude”, Lt. Gen Russel Honore, showing up and actually getting something organized and done, but Nagin sounded disgusted and frustrated by the entire situation –and understandable emotion.
What I didn’t know was this was the cry of a man losing his grip on reality. His book takes half-truths of those days and peppers them with delusions and paranoid rants that are completely devoid of reality.
Nagin on trying to sleep in the damaged Hyatt Hotel, where the window was blown out:
“If I would doze off for a few minutes, I would wake up quickly from nightmares of CIA agents or Blackwater operatives with facemasks swinging into this room on ropes attached somewhere on the roof.”
Nagin also alludes to mysterious figures attempting to inject him with poison, and that the White House and Governor Blanco were trying to manipulate the national press corps to blame Nagin for failing to evacuate the city prior to the storm.
He is critical of Bush and then FEMA Director Michael Brown –alleging, among other things, that rescues were done on a race and political basis: meaning Republican whites received preferential treatment over others. Of course, no helicopter pilot was asking party affiliation before dropping a rescue basket, nor were their red boats for Republicans and blue boats for Democrats. However, beating the race drum was something Nagin would do throughout the book.
Finally, Nagin goes after Blanco with gusto, claiming that the storm took her out of her comfort zone; so while her administration was trying to figure out what to do, people suffered. Nagin asserts that Blanco’s incompetence -not Nagin’s- was why things were so disorganized.
Nagin also alleges that there was supposed to be a march across the Crescent City Connection bridge, to Gretna and then on to the governor’s mansion, by people who were left stranded in the Superdome and the Convention Center –organized in part by Honore. Problem is, Honore has no recollection of any such event even discussed. The only “march”, Honore stated was from the Superdome and Convention Center onto buses to get out of the city. Nagin also alleges that there were “hundreds” of buses and drivers kept in LaPlace on Governor Blanco’s orders.
And, that’s the biggest problem with Nagin’s book. Stories such as the levees being deliberately blown up to flood only the poor, black neighborhoods and so on, only serve to exacerbate the problems exposed by Katrina, not resolve them. Nagin’s book was self-published, because obviously, most of his ramblings would have never made it past the editors.
So what the reader is left with is a cartoon interpretation of a historical event, where Ray Nagin and his small band of supporters are against the world which seeks to destroy him. Playing the race card only inflames the issue –and that is the most insulting aspect of all. Former Slidell Mayor, Ben Morris –a Republican- watched his entire city nearly be wiped off the map by Katrina. Yet Slidell was rarely in the news. National reporters who stood in the lower Ninth Ward daily, never made the trip to Slidell –nor did presidential or governor entourages. Indeed, Morris, who dealt with the frustrating incompetence of FEMA, once stated that he would scream if he heard about the Ninth Ward one more time. Likewise, Lakeview wasn’t mentioned much because I suppose million dollar homes flooded out do not make for good television.
The storm impacted everyone: rich and poor, black and white, urbanites and suburbanites. Nagin’s mythology based on half-truths only serves to bring back the old split to a city that is attempting to unify itself. The book should only be viewed as a sad tale of an individual who lost his grip on reality, not as a document on the immediate events after the storm that changed everything.
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