Richard Ford POST KATRINA

New Orleans post-Katrina
Ford’s thoughts on the situation in New Orleans are based mostly on the unspoken tension between the black Democratic population of the city and the Republican party in power at the time. He thought that since the population of New Orleans wasn’t (and still isn’t) Republican the Government saw no benefit to making a presence.
“I was writing about this as you know right from the get go, we saw, those of us who were sort of watching new orleans, that all of these African American people were not Republicans. And so they weren’t a voting block that the Republican party had much of an investment in. They could come down here and Bush could come down to New Orleans and make a speech on Jackson Square and grab the sympathy vote of the rest of the country but he didn’t do very much for the people who were actually washed out of their homes.”
These are not light points Ford is making. He offers a reasonable and very shocking explanation to why nothing happened in the days, months and weeks after Katrina struck. He does not hold punches and although he has made these frightening revelations, he treats it like nothing. He goes on to speak about the dire conditions New Orleans residence are faced with.
“They have not been rescued. To this day they have not been rescued. They’ve just been told ‘Come back if you want to and if you come back and you build a house on this land that was inundateable and is inundateable now, if you do that and enough of your friends do that we will begin to restore city services to you but we’re not going to say how many have to come back for that to happen and we’re not going to do much for you.’”
Ford knows the devastation that New Orleans and its citizens have faced first hand, which makes his statements on the matter all the more viable. These are awful truths he presents his readers (and in this case listeners) but the question arises; why was he the only one talking about it? Perhaps the answer is in that quotation. Since the government never made major steps in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane it didn’t make big news beyond the week or so following and the reassurance of a government spokesperson. And since it didn’t make big news after that did people stop caring? Is that possible? It reminds me of a youtube video where a man is trying to stop a robbery but ends up getting beaten by two other men in broad daylight with people standing around watching. The three involved get into a scuffle and still the ones watching do nothing. Finally someone runs in to intervene he lands one kick but slips in a puddle before he can do much good. The muggers decide they’re finished with the man so they begin to run away and a man in a suit who has been closest to the encounter the whole time simply sticks his foot out in an attempt to look useful. It didn’t work. The muggers are Katrina, the good Samaritan is the local and international aid that tried to help but was swamped by the storm and the man in the suit is government who was closest the whole time and made no effort but tried to look like they cared. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJnaDg8MYVI&feature=related (ignore the ridiculous audio)

Ford also writes about New Orleans pre and post Katrina in Leaving for Kenosha. He talks about how some people used the storm as an excuse for their poor behaviour.
“Betsy explained to him during the divorce that she’d read a book in college at Hollins, about some children who were caught in a cyclone on a South Sea island. All the animals on the island—birds and lizards and furry creatures—went crazy before the storm came. Which didn’t explain anything. It had become fashionable to blame bad things on the hurricane—things that would’ve certainly happened anyway—failures, misdeeds, infirmities of character that the hurricane could’ve had nothing to do with. As if life weren’t its own personalized storm.”
This also speaks to the looting that was going on after Katrina hit. There was news footage of people stealing food and tents and gasoline played before footage of people stealing televisions and cars and microwaves. In a situation like that both people could use the excuse of “the storm” but one would hold more merit than the other. We need to steal to live or we are alive so we might as well steal. Ford speaks about a neighbourhood near the parish line in Leaving for Kenosha that was devastated more than the rest of the city because of its proximity to the levee’s and it being below the sea level. He talked about the markings on the door of houses declaring the number of dead or missing and the detritus left throughout the area.
“Charbonnet Street was a long street of wreckages. Where the floodwater had hurtled through, houses had been flattened, others moved off their foundations, others had their roofs floated away. Though others—the compact, sturdy brick ones—had simply been ruined in a way that left them seeming almost whole.”
Ford creates such an image with this passage. In the story, Walter and Louise are driving through the neighbourhood described and you can picture the ghost of the water hurtling past them.