Katrina: a native's view (from London)

Jeb is a pal who lives in the UK but whose roots are based in New Orleans - or were:

Jeb's take/rant on Katrina, etc...

Hurricane Katrina - holy hell. My folks didn't see much of the storm, and my aunt in N.O. got out of town OK. No word on what happened to her house.
Her neighbourhood was dry, but who knows if it survived the looting.
The grapevine says some childhood pals still aren't accounted for, but who knows what that means. It should be difficult to contemplate such a catastrophe in a place I know so well, but it's not. You only have to go to New Orleans once to see what a precarious position it is in. I also can't say I'm surprised by anything that happened after the storm - not the flooding, the poor emergency relief, the looting, the murderous brutality, or the bureaucratic incompetence. Louisiana has a pretty poor record of looking after its citizens in normal times, nowhere more so than New Orleans. N.O. isn't a great city in the way of New York or Philadelphia or Chicago, and it isn't part of that white-bread right-wing hypocrisy that rules the nation. It's mean, dirty, poor, and socially moribund. America is a country founded on a cruel system, with only a very tenuous belief in the common welfare, so places like New Orleans will be ignored whenever possible. I suppose now the big question is whether the money and will necessary to rebuild will be forthcoming. You can't help but wonder if there will be a great diaspora of people who won't go back and parts of the city will be abandoned and not rebuilt. That would be a hell of a thing.
It poses the possibility of long-term internal refugee camps and enormous economic dislocations. The final blow is the knowledge that Bush and his gang of chuckleheads won't have learned a thing from this tragedy. The freakish concidence of Rehnquist's death and Katrina was some sort of unholy gift to Bush that will enable him not only to be "presidential" by doing his duty, but also to leave a 30-year legacy on the Supreme Court that could spell all sorts of trouble for America.

The news coverage here must be quite different than in the States. The media here, which has a latent anti-Bush bias anyway, has focused heavily on the incompetence of the government (i.e., Bush), and particularly on the race/class issues supposedly exposed by the disaster. Needless to say, they've missed a few points along the way.
It's not like some great secret has been revealed. American, on the whole, chooses to ignore racial divisions because they generally reflect class divisions as well, and so long as you don't have to live next to the poor black people, you don't think it about it too much. With only 12% of the population being black, and that heavily concentrated in a few large cities and the Mississippi delta, it's easy for most Americans to forget about those divisions. The thing that should attract notice is the unwillingness - and is use that word specifically - of the American government to look after the welfare of its citizens in a crisis. The primary reason to organise a government is for mutual protection. All this neo-con bullshit that we should bomb the fuck out of Iraq and let them eat cake at home and god forbid that government actually assume any duties or powers and yeah it's OK to appoint a horse show manager to head FEMA and umpty other absolutely evil incredible things
- it is all laid bare. And it takes something so horrible to induce the American press to grow some cojones? Man, oh man.

As some idea of the media coverage here, you probably won't see such cartoons in American papers: