The Hoodoo Gurus song, " Tojo " is about Cyclone Tracy which flattened Darwin on Christmas eve of 1974. Dave Faulkner sings from Tracy's point of view, where the cyclone motivates itself to out-do the Japanese Army and Navy, which, despite bombing Darwin, never invaded the city. The United States lost a city in New Orleans to Hurricane Katrina four days before the Labor Day long weekend.

The Shit is Burning Show

Henry Rollins in his Spoken Word performances told the story of the Los Angeles riots and how the television media distilled the event into "the shit is burning show". After September 11th, the mainstream media did the same. All the major news outlets were doing twenty-four hour coverage of the attack, and they had collapsed the attacks into twenty second video bites, where an aircraft would start 300 yards from the WTC and then fly into it, exploding in a television-o-genic orange flameball.

I was disgusted.

Worse it started to desensitise me to the horror of September 11th. Two of my mates were working in the Pentagon that day, fortunately one arc of the Pentagon around from where the plane hit. After seeing the endlessly repeating ten second "plane flying into the building show" that afternoon, I switched the television off. In that moment, cynicism toward mainstream media translated into contempt.

I have lived in the North-East US, and the Mid-Atlantic. The north gets hit by snow and ice storms regularly each winter. The Mid-Atlantic gets tropical storms coming up the Chesapeake Bay, as well as some pretty nasty ice storms. In all cases the media hypes any predicted weather to the point of a natural disaster. In most cases less than an inch of snow falls, or the storm is nothing more than a house can handle, yet there are snow days galore, or state emergencies where everyone has to clear the road. The media and politicians compete to see who can be the most hysterical in manufacturing a non-existent crisis.

If I had been in New Orleans, there is a good chance I would have stayed too. Why? Because I literally do not trust the media, nor the politicians, to give me the information with which I can make an informed decision. There is a massive warning for Australia here. Mainstream media might be profitable, and capable of attracting an audience, but it erodes trust for many people.

Politicians need the same warning, their constant fear campaigns are desensitising, people will tune out, and simply not trust what is coming out of a politicians mouth , or the arms of government. We have heard this before, and many, many, many times.

Fox News

I was in New Jersey last week when the hurricane hit Louisiana and Mississipi. Due to circumstance of where I stay, I usually end up having to watch Fox News. Their ideological bias doesn't bother me, there is a market for it, and if people feel better hearing their news that way - well it is their decision. If they want to be better informed, they have the choice of approximately one hundred other channels in the US.

I consider Fox News and the Weather Channel the two worst exponents of hysteria. They rely almost solely for news on crisis; and if one doesn't present itself, they will manufacture one. This is not unique to America. I can recall being at the Canterbury Bulldogs and Penrith Panthers semi-final game at Belmore, in probably 1995, when there was a riot.

I was there. I saw no riot.

The first I heard of it was the next morning when a workmate asked me if I started the riot. My reply was, "What riot?". It should be noted that all mainstream media outlets do it, creating hysteria, fear, even panic just for the sake of ratings.

Fox News' main news presenter is Shepard Smith. During the telecast of nightly news I watched between Monday and Thursday, it was typical Fox fare. Constant calamity, perpetual announcement of some new horror - and at the end of each report, Smith would repeat a sentence from the report to drive in the horror, saying something like, "hundreds stranded on rooftops", or "gunfire, rapes, and violence in the superdome". Designed to ram home the point.

I drove home on Friday night, and was surprised to see this clip of Shepard Smith losing patience on Saturday morning. It appears five days of being knee deep in human tragedy is greater coin than the salary from the media's masters. The disaster has certainly had an effect on some of the mainstream media who are breaking ranks and not accepting spin from politicians and bureaucrats. To many, however, it just means they are finally doing their job by asking hard questions, and demanding answers.

Fault Lines

David Brooks argued on PBS that this disaster was going to change how American's view their institutions .

I think it is a huge reaction we are about to see. I mean, first of all, they violated the social fabric, which is in the moments of crisis you take care of the poor first. That didn't happen; it's like leaving wounded on the battlefield.

I don't agree with them. Americans rather than viewing the world through rich and poor, believe themselves to be generous and caring people. I would argue this, rather than violating some "look after the poor first" principle, is making Americans recoil in horror at the inability of its institutions, both public and private to handle this type of tragedy. Having Geraldo Rivera thrust a ten month old baby in television's face, one who is in the dark of the Superdome, without water or food, only amplifies the fact that the institutions down there are selfish and brutal. That is not how America views itself.

American's are an industrious people, who aren't scared to take on monumental tasks. I am sure something will change. In the meantime, people are still trapped in New Orleans without food and water - and no relief in sight. I share Shepard Smith's frustration, and feeling of helplessness.

cam

Brown and Chertoff: the new American mediocrity.

After 9-11 it was clear that the Bush administration was being run by below average business school students. That is, people who got an MBA with the hopes of ass kissing their way into wealth and power without doing any work or having any discernible talent or skills .

Now, after this hurricane, we're seeing the same thing, but this time we're seeing it quite directly whenever Brown or Chertoff open their mouths. They are overmatched politically, intellectually, and managerially. They are mired in a bureaucratic mess that is designed to push paper rather than produce results, and they are the last kind of people that would have success in changing that. At almost all points last week they had less information on post-hurricane events than the average citizen watching Geraldo Rivera cry on TV while holding little black babies outside the Superdome on Fox News, when it was their job to be in control of one of the worst disasters in American history. Instead they were on TV trying to perform damage control in a universe they weren't familiar with.

Bureaucratic decay, indifference, and arrogance are nothing new, but this mediocre business school approach is. This administration has shown itself to be amateurish and has been exposed as fraudulent whenever it cannot shape the information surrounding an event, and in kind the media and ultimately the spin. That is, they are shown to be the B school PR hacks they are: 100% spin, 0% beef. And they're not even good at spinning.

Intellectually it's not hard to imagine that the press would grill the government on this in a manner I've never seen before. While the media largely tows the party line, preferring not to to scoop up the easy blood in the pool that lays at their feet, they will take it if it's handed to them in a gift wrapped box, as it was here in the form of photos of dead bodies in the streets, video of people suffering at the Superdome and poor folks in Mississippi who looked on at their ruined houses and lives while the remains were looted, and of course, when Chertoff attempted to bend reality when he said "we didn't have a plan for this new kind of catastrophe, the 'ultra catastrophe,'" when government documents available online show that they themselves called it one of the top three likely disaster scenarios facing this nation, exactly what all the billions in funding the DHS received were supposed to mitigate were such a disaster to occur.

BUT MAN, it sure was viscerally shocking to see the TV and newspapers full of pictures of dead bodies, and to watch Chertoff get taken out behind the shed for the woopin' of his life.

I don't know if Bush will be held accountable for any of this. Even with his historically low ratings he hasn't been taken to task for any of his previous blunders. He doesn't even engage in the time honored tradition of "throwing the low level bureaucrat under the bus" to "cleanse" the government after some disgrace to show the public that it's the person and not the institution that is the problem. I expect Brown and Chertoff to keep their jobs, with Bush heartily congratulating them both for a job well done.

I'm not sure how much responsibility has to be shared between NOLA mayor Nagin and LA governor Blanco. First off, even a best case response from local, state, and federal officials was still going to result in a terrible butcher's bill by the time the levees broke early last week (and I think it's going to be far, far worse than 9-11). I give Nagin credit for calling for the evacuation last Sunday. Should Nagin have had a plan to bus everyone out of the city that couldn't afford to escape on their own? Yeah I think so, but logistically I think that entails more than "local" resources. And really the political will for what would have last week been considered a radical act didn't exist. The taxpayers would have been pissed if 100k people were bussed out of town and the hurricane veered off to Florida.

It's going to be a while before we have a clear understanding of why the federal response took so long. A few things are starting to point to political sniping. First, the fact that FEMA was ordering groups ranging from Walmart, the Red Cross, and citizens with relief supplies to turn around upon reaching NO implies that it wasn't just a logistical issue of reaching NO. Then today I came across this article in the WaPo :

The [Bush] administration sought unified control over all local police and state National Guard units reporting to the governor. Louisiana officials rejected the request after talks throughout the night, concerned that such a move would be comparable to a federal declaration of martial law. Some officials in the state suspected a political motive behind the request. "Quite frankly, if they'd been able to pull off taking it away from the locals, they then could have blamed everything on the locals," said the source, who does not have the authority to speak publicly.

Read the rest of it, the spin from both sides looks real bad.

I'm going to ask HR what they think about me doing volunteer work down there. I wish I had the guts to just leave, go down there, and work for the red cross, but I don't.