Still standing

The lede on an AP story on the Yahoo news page:

NEW ORLEANS - Ragtag armies of the desperate and hungry begged for help, corpses rotted along flooded sidewalks and bands of armed thugs thwarted fitful rescue efforts as Americans watched the Big Easy dissolve before their eyes..

The story itself is short and concerned mainly with explosions of unknown origins that may very well have been accidental, fallout from the storm or the flooding or the evacuation of people whose job it was to keep watch on whatever it was that exploded and see it doesn't explode.  But following that lede, the news of the fires sounds like a continuation of the chaos and violence and death, with even the implication that the explosions were the work of vandals or other armed thugs, and further evidence that the Big Easy is dissolving before our eyes.

(Note: AP has updated the story.  It's no longer short and the lede's been changed.  The city isn't dissolving.  As of noon, though, AP is reporting that the fires have deepened the sense that the city is collapsing, which I guess isn't as dire as dissolving.)

There has been a lot of talk and speculation in the news and on many blogs about how New Orleans is done for.  I am not there.  I haven't talked to anyone who is there.  What I know of what's going on in New Orleans is what most everybody else who is not there knows---parts of the story.

We are being handed pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle and trying to assemble them in our heads to form a complete picture.  Of course lots of pieces are missing.  Every piece has flat sides so we're each free to put any one piece up against any other.  We're all putting together different puzzles and comparing the results so far.

But I have a lot of pieces that show that the core of the City is pretty much dry and intact.  The water didn't get that high in the older parts of New Orleans because the people who built the city three hundred years ago put it on the highest ground they could find.  Elsewhere the water levels are going down, the troops are on the way, money and relief will follow.  Things are still awful.  People are in terrible trouble.  But none of my pieces show that the City itself has been wiped out.

Whole neighborhoods have been.

But the City's main reason for being hasn't disappeared.  It's a port and an important port and talk of "moving" New Orleans is plain stupid unless people suggesting it are also suggesting moving the Atlantic Ocean and the Mississippi River.

The City is still there.  It's a wreck.  But it will be rebuilt.  Chicago was rebuilt.  San Francisco, Galveston, Johnstown, and London were rebuilt.   Lisbon was rebuilt.

All of them suffered as badly or worse than New Orleans and all of them survived, having had to overcome the added disadvantages of not having 21st Century technology to work with and engineering skills to draw on and not being able to rely for help on nation-wide and world-wide aid and recovery agencies.

I am not being unrealistically optimistic.  I know it's going to take years and years for the City to recover.  The next few months, with no electricity, clean water, or working sewers, with tens of thousands of people having no homes to return to and they and many more having no jobs either, will be much worse than the storm itself.  I know that many residents' lives are ruined and they won't bounce back.

But I'm beginning to feel that I'm witnessing a journalistic cliche unfolding more than I am being told the actual story.

Journalists are trained in cliches and conventions as thoroughly as Hollywood filmmakers.  It used to be a truism that every reporter had an unfinished novel in her desk drawer (later, on her hard drive).  Nowdays she's as likely to have an unsold screenplay, and I think her prospects are better for it.  Screenwriting is her true metier.  The structure of a news story, especially a big story that unfolds over days or weeks, has much more in common with the structure of a screenplay than it does with any novel.

The two main points of similarity are:

1.  It's always darkest before the dawn.

2.  The cavalry always arrives in time.

In the American journalistic tradition, all stories have happy endings, even stories that seem to have ended tragically all around---that's why the idiotic word closure won't die the ignominious death it deserves.

If the cavalry didn't get there in time, we're assured that it will next time, when we're the ones who'll need them, and we're solaced with the final image of our own narrow escapes and rescues.

Stories that won't close, that won't end happily, if not with the cavalry arriving, then with "closure," drive the Media to despair, frustration, and, finally, boredom.  This happened with the tsunami.  It's happening in Iraq. 

So I can't help feeling that the Media is already working its way toward the happy ending in New Orleans.

The disaster occurs, the plucky common folk react with stoicism and bravery at first and the handsome and courageous rescue workers do their best, but then the situation begins to change for the worse.  The Indians appear on the hill.  Sorry, gangs of armed thugs appear in the streets.  Violence.  Supplies run out.  The plucky survivors are cut off.   The city is dissolving!

New Orleans is doomed!

But look, over there!

Troops!

The Cavalry is on the way!

Pretty soon order will be restored.  The water will go down.  The plucky survivors will be rescued.  The news will be full of pictures of loved ones reuniting and big strong National Guardsmen handing stuffed animals to wide-eyed and adoring children.  Presidents Bush the First and Clinton will announce how much money is on its way---an amazing amount, an unimaginable amount, an amount that restores your faith in the generosity and goodness and decency of your fellow Americans.

And then the current President will appear on the scene, looking grim but resolute in the company of soldiers, firefighters, and engineers all chosen for how well they resemble the hero Karl Rove wants voters to imagine George Bush to be.

Cut to shots of people moving back into their homes and business owners turning over the CLOSED signs in their shop windows and looking hopefully out at lines of decent folk come to buy their goods and wares and swap stories of how they survived Katrina.

And that'll be it.  A year from now there'll be stories about how New Orleans has come back.  Five years from now another one.  Another in ten years---twenty five---fifty.

Probably somewhere along the line someone will write a book or make a documentary and we'll learn the real, whole story and be able to see how close the jigsaw puzzles we assembled resembled the real picture.  We'll know just how close New Orleans came to being wiped off the map.

My guess is, about as close as Chicago in 1871.

Or New Orleans in 1915.

Comments

[Pepper]

You're right - I was already thinking the other day that some enterprising writer is whipping up a script of a woman struggling to keep her family alive, and that puppy will be sold to Lifetime, sure as the world.

But last night I saw the NBC interview with one of their photojournalists who had been inside the Convention Center. The photojournalist was choking up while describing the horrors and death inside that place ... and the sheer magnitude of the suffering makes me think that the calvary is coming too late. And that photojournalist definitely stepped away from the script that other channels are writing.

I know the cavalry will come - but I wish they came faster. I guess I take it personally because I live in San Francisco, and I ask myself, "What if the big quake happens to us? Will anyone be able to help?"

[Pepper]

You know, though, the more I think about it, the more I realize that I'd better get cooking on that Lifetime script. I don't think it would be bad ... is Valerie Bertinelli available?

[Kevin Wolf]

Exccellent post, Lance. I know New Orleans will bounce back in one way or another. Never wrote it off - it's been around too long.

I guess it's a question of degree. How bad is it down there? What is lost and will never be fixed or replaced? It will take some time to find out.

Meanwhile, the degree of destruction and awfulness in the aftermath is worse than it needed to be. I think we need to address that sooner rather than later.

[Shakespeare's Sister]

Such a ray of sunshine this morning, Lance!

(I know that sounds sarcastic, especially coming from me, but it's not, I swear.)

(Okay, maybe half sarcastic, but not because I mean it; just because I can't help it.)

[Matt]

This is such an excellent post, Lance.

What I'm wondering is whether the administration bullshit that is already flowing (with the willing aid of the corporate media) will be able to wipe from our collective memory the horrific images we've seen over the past five days.

Given what this administration has overcome so far (everything from My Pet Goat to the lack of WMDs to the Abu Ghraib photos) -- and given, as you point out, the media's love of tragic stories with happy endings -- there is a lot of reason to think that they will be able to whitewash this one, too.

But I sure as hell hope that the spin doctors won't be able to spin away the tragic incompetance of this administration, and the unnecessary deaths it has caused.

[Simp]

Possibly, but....

The big difference this time around is that you have reporters on the ground such as Sheppard Smith and Anderson Cooper that have seen this first hand and they have been personally affected by this experience.

When something affects you that personally, it is not easily shed.

I think this is too big and ugly to be wrapped up neatly. Yes, there will be lots of great stories of survival and reunions but this won't change, fundamentally, how millions of people are now aware of how incapable our government is of protecting us.

[Commander Ogg]

It is one year till the midterm elections. The full power of the right wing noise machine will be unleashed, and while it is self evident that this the most incompetent administration in the 230 year history of this country, they are absolute masters when it comes to politics.

Mind you, they will have to come up with a smooth line of bullsh-t to explain the 5 to 10 thousand dead bodies that will show up in the next few weeks, but do not underestimate the power of the VRWC. Already assholes like mister bowtie F-cker Carlson and Bill 'the luftah' O'Reilly are attempting to redirect resposibility from the Flightsuit in Chief and toward the City and State Government, while denying that race had anything to do with FEMA and the Bush administration leaving those people to die.(http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/tv/239212_tv03.html).

I agree with Shakespeare's Sister, it could swing either way.

[Lance]

Simp,

I think you're right. Or at least I hope so. I wrote this post Friday morning so it's really a reaction to Thursday's news. Since then I've seen stories that make me feel that things in NO are worse than I thought and I've seen and heard of the reaction of the journalists you mentioned; others have been out there swinging hard too. Bush's photo op tour was weak and made him look small and foolish. Frankly, I'm surprised at how lackadaisical the Bush Leaguers have been since midsummer. I've read rumors that Cheney is sick. Maybe he was more the real President than we knew.

And as you pointed out, the other big story here is how Katrina has shown up how dangerously and insanely unprepared for emergencies the Bush Leaugers are. "What if there's a terrorist attack?" is going to be the question asked around water coolers, in barber shops, at church socials, everywhere for the next several months.

Ogg, I think we'll know next week. If the Republicans are able to hold the Roberts hearings and the hearings come to be the lead stories and all the bodies being found are relegated to the inside pages and the second 10 minutes of the news shows, then the Noise Machine will have done its job.

I think they're going to have to postpone the hearings.

[Joe Otterbein]

Yes, you are right.

Part of the reason it will happen is the reporters who have "gone native' over the last few days will be, or have been, read the riot act and given their marching orders by their big-fat-media bosses bosses.

I already see it happening. By Monday the whole thing will be just another feel-good story.