Posted on 08/21/2006 10:29:43 AM PDT by Chi-townChief
I'm watching Spike Lee's documentary about Hurricane Katrina with my mom. She's finally visiting since the storm hit a year ago. She lives in a FEMA trailer in the now gray-from-destruction yard in front of her broken home in the New Orleans neighborhood of Gentilly, next to the elementary school where she taught, which has remained closed.
"When the Levees Broke" is hard to watch. It's hard to take. The anger. The sadness. All over again.
What's it like to live in New Orleans now?
"I'm sitting there thinking you know what?" a woman named Phyllis tells Lee. "If you kill yourself, then you don't have to deal with this s--- anymore. If you just disappear from the face of the f---ing Earth, the pain stops, the tears stop, and everything else that's gonna bother you for the rest of your life ... is just gonna stop."
'WHEN THE LEVEES BROKE: A REQUIEM IN FOUR ACTS' PARTS ONE AND TWO: Critic's rating: ***1/2 8 to 10 tonight on HBO
PARTS THREE AND FOUR: Critic's rating: **** 8 to 10 p.m. Tuesday on HBO (The full documentary airs from 7 to 11 p.m. Aug. 29.)
A million people are gone from an American city of joy and jazz that provided America with oil and a premier port for centuries.
Instead of using a narrator, Lee lets scores of residents voice their own stories. Images revisit the chaotic horror in four-plus hours of chronology. The first half plots the storm's course and the political squall to come. The second half powerfully measures the angry despair of death and desertion.
To start, there are bumper-to-bumper lines of cars evacuating. ("That was us," Mom says of my family there. "That bridge broke about four hours after we crossed it.")
A survivor: "It sounded, like, just bubbling boil and I started hearing clank-clank-clank down the street, and it was the manhole covers popping off."
Another: "It looked like a nuclear bomb had been dropped on every part of the city."
At the Convention Center, a man says, he tried to keep his elderly mother alive in 100-degree heat in a search for shelter, food and water. She died in her wheelchair. People told him to put something over her. A blanket. A poncho. He did, then they told him to push her to the side. "I didn't really want to do it." But he had to, and there she sat, a piece of paper stuck in her hand with his name and contact info scribbled on it.
Dead bodies. Against fences. Not just face-down on the ground but face into the ground.
A cop says of a child's body, "This could have come from anywhere. She could have floated from miles away."
A mom holds a photo. "This is my daughter, Sarina, who drowned in Hurricane Katrina. She was 5 years old. And I never got a chance to say goodbye." Sarina is smiling in her picture. "I miss her so much."
"A little pink coffin," my mom says. "How sad."
When those who fled went home, they found their moms and children like this: "She was in the kitchen under the refrigerator."
There's blame: "Who knew," says historian Douglas Brinkley, "that Bush had appointed the head of the Arabian horse association to head FEMA?" Says Mom, "The thing that makes me the angriest is Bush just sat there with that grin on his face, and you just want to slap it off."
Voices in the film see Katrina as a natural event but also a manmade disaster in that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers didn't build the levees correctly for generations (politically, that's a bipartisan and nonpartisan crime, locally and nationally); it was made more tragic by the murderous (yes, murderous) abandonment by the federal government while people died by the hundreds.
Streets are still covered in debris. Whole neighborhoods are gray scatterings of large-scale Pick-Up Sticks. Insurance companies fight in court to keep from paying. FEMA continues to drag its feet a year later and gives residents runarounds. Congress and Bush haven't delivered on promises.
The few hundred thousand New Orleaneans who returned are attempting to repair life and the city. Trumpeter Terence Blanchard, seen in "When the Levees Broke," and other musicians were back at work even amid the rubble. A lot of residents are working two and three jobs. They haven't given up. Many want to.
"It's like I can't go on," a grown man, heartbroken in his mother's house, tells Lee.
"And so the jazz funeral continues," Mom says.
delfman@suntimes.com
sorry won't watch anything with the worlds spike and lee attached to it
But, but...the New Black Panthers said Bush blew up the levees and that they had proof.
Yup. President Bush steered that storm right into the NO. Then he didn't send any help. Then he didn't visit the city multiple times. Then he simply forgot about the NO.
What a load of macaca!
The voters in New Orleans elected a city government that couldn't take responsibility and couldn't adequately manage local affairs. Load people into school buses and evacuate them? That's too much to expect.
The voters in Louisiana elected a state government that also couldn't take responsibility and couldn't adequately manage a state-wide crisis.
It's so much easier to blame the guy 1000 miles away and three levels of government up the chain. Sure, he's fighting a war, and yes he has 50 states to look after, but if your momma drowned, he's the one to blame.
There are only two words that need to be brought up to put Spike back in his place. "Reggie" and "Miller".
A mom holds a photo. "This is my daughter, Sarina, who drowned in Hurricane Katrina. She was 5 years old...
This is indeed a sad situation. But how does it happen that no one is looking out for a 5 year old child? How do these children become separated from parents? We know that it can happen. But, this was a familiar theme during the aftermath of Katrina. Children missing, one man complaining that he didn't have diapers or formula for his children. How is this Bush's or the governments fault or even the hurricane's fault?
My children are my responsibility ONLY and I will make every effort to put their welfare ahead of my own.
I would not watch his films even if they pay me! :) -- a leftie idiot
Where's the obligatory pic of Looter Guy?
Dweeb with small penis Alert!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Well, gee, now you mention it. If you'd told Dubya there was oil there in the first place, he'd have done something. [ /SARCASM ]
?
...educate me...
Did people not evacuate after the NOAA issued a hurricane warning because of the 'it'll never happen to me' syndrome???
This dumb statement reminds me of the quote from "Blazing Saddles":
"Instead of leaving, they're staying in droves!"
Doug, I'm not sure I'd be complaining when the federal government is taking better care of your mom than you are.
Another case of Bush wearing a KICK ME sign
His taking responsibilty for Katrina was a stupid move period
If he hadn't gotten the dumbass governor off her butt the evacuation would have occurred in time
His spokespeople were worthless and should have been all over her and the boob mayor
You nailed it!!!
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