Hurricane Katrina and America’s Blame Culture

By Colman McCarthy

When Katrina turned the Big Easy into the Big Queasy, federal, state and local politicians couldn’t find enough fingers on their hands to point blame at each other. The media piled on, their big moment to pummel bungling big shots. Hurricane and flood victims denounced George W. Bush for not showing up until the sun came out, with a rapper declaring that the president didn’t care about black people. This loudmouth was matched by the perennial blabbermouth Barbara Bush who said the poor had risen a notch in the social scale by being moved from a New Orleans slum to the Astrodome.

The venting of accusations, plus the babble, led to the near-unanimous conclusion that the destruction of cities and towns on the Gulf Coast was caused by people, not Mother Nature and certainly not God the Father. It was incompetent people. It was

unprepared people. It was vacationing people: W at his ranch hiding from the other storm, Hurricane Cindy; Dick Cheney kicking back in Wyoming, Condi Rice shopping for shoes in Manhattan. Why weren’t these slackers reading all those Corps of Engineers reports predicting calamity when the next Category Five hit?

This delusion reflects the national perception that America—the world’s superpower, the world’s wealthiest nation, the world’s model democracy—should be exempt from nature’s fury. Getting roughed up by hurricanes, floods, fires, tsunamis, earthquakes, droughts and typhoons is what happens to Haiti, Indonesia, Niger and elsewhere, not in the U.S.—Number One. We’re America the Beautiful, not America the Vulnerable.

Accusing others of failure is the essence of blame projection, a facile two step of recrimination that allows Americans to feel that they are masters of the universe—in this case, the Gulf Coast and its casinos, crawfish pies, shipyards and Fats Domino in the Bourbon Street jazz joints. It’s a hard lesson to learn, that the natural world is the real world and humans are little more than transient guests. And not especially well-behaved guests.

Because nature can’t be dominated,, much less crushed with a Star Wars attack on hurricanes as they advance, better to lambaste the bureaucrats and papercrats. They should prevent calamities.

That thinking is heard, as well, about 9/11: who let those evildoers slip past airport security? The reaction to 9/ll is that it changed the world forever. Rita Lasar, who lost a brother when the North Tower fell, writes: “To the extent that Americans believe that September 11 changed the world, it is because they don’t know much about the world in which they live. I have never heard anyone say that the horrific massacres of 1994 in Rwanda—which took more than 500,000 lives—changed the world. Nor have I been told that Indonesia’s massacre of 200,000 East Timorese during a 20 year span changed the world. I have not ever heard that the daily loss of 8,000 souls in Sub-Saharan Africa due to AIDS changed the world. Were these people less important than my dear brother?”

In post-Katrina America, the country is wondering how did this destruction happen, as if we had a Department of Guaranteed Hurricane Prevention. Better questions are likely to remain unfaced. Why is predominately black New Orleans one of the nation’s poorest cities? How did the country end up with a political hack as president who needed to be shamed into responding to the suffering? Is it human nature not to respect Mother Nature?