Johnnie White’s

It is morning here and the dog has dragged me around his course. He is a good boy and now sleeping quietly by the screen door, his major accomplishment of the day is history now, and he is taking a break. I’m unsettled. I want to lie by the pool and bake, and yet the company has called and put me on alert to possibly do something in response to the disaster on the Gulf.

I did not sign up for this, but happy to help if I can. That means I will drink only Cokes at poolside, and the last day before we roll up our sleeves and get back to work has a pall over it.

The Chief Justice is dead, I saw that in passing, and we would be in an uproar over two simultaneous vacancies on the high court if we weren’t firmly trying to party one last day, and if the rest of the news wasn’t so bad.

I went to get gasoline yesterday at the Base nearby. The Army contracts for fuel for the long haul, and the price is normally protected from the gouging that is going on in town. I was surprised to pay $3.27 a gallon for high-test, and it was rationed, only ten gallons to the customer.

The military police had the gas station cordoned off behind orange traffic cones, and there was an intricate traffic pattern to get to the pumps. I was early, but it looked like the troops were ready to declare their own martial law if anyone got excited.

I have not read the Times, only glanced at the headlines. Walking the dog takes some of my quiet time in the morning, and it is fine in its own way. But the stories I saw about New Orleans are grotesque and sickening.

There is life there, yet. Johnnie White’s bar is open on Bourbon Street . They say it never closes, and really has no need for doors. It has been a few years since I was there, but I wish I could have been there yesterday for the Southern Degeneracy Parade. It took place as scheduled, albeit with only a few dozen revelers. The parade is popular with the alternately gendered, and I was gratified to see that they felt the celebration needed to go on, as an affirmation of hope and life.

Elsewhere in town, the grim work of inspecting the flooded neighborhoods is going on. The bodies are expected to number in the thousands, as you have heard, and now forms the bookend to 9/11- the same number of casualties, only these people were killed by the bureaucracy.

One of the stories said that FEMA’s performance was worse than abysmal. Maybe criminal. The agency reportedly turned away three tractor-trailers of water donated by Wal-Mart, and a shipment of diesel fuel. Issues appeared to center on authority, and who was in charge, rather than concentrating on the victims.

Awful is not a word that describes the situation. The stench of decomposition might be something that starts it, the churning feeling that goes with the gaseous presence that the earth and the water has reached out and seized the living, dragged them down into corruption.

I heard that was the same problem in the last major exercise they ran to demonstrate disaster preparedness last May. It was called “Top Officials 3,” the third in a Congressionally-directed series. The first one was bad, the second was better, and the last was a disaster in itself. The new national response plan arrived early this year. Apparently has some significant turf issues in it. It has got to be fixed. The next disaster could be worse.

Interestingly, no one seems to be accountable for the human failure that has transformed this natural disaster into the worst catastrophe since the complete destruction of San Francisco in earthquake, in 1906, or the drowning of Galveston in 1900. The death counts were 3,000 and 10,000, respectively, and so there is a precedent from which we should have learned.

There is a technical issue in the drowning of New Orleans . If one was to put a fine point on things, as the Government Employees Insurance Company has, the hurricane did not damage the automobiles in New Orleans . The flood did, which is a separate issue and regrettably not applicable under comprehensive coverage.

GEICO is the company represented by the little green gecko. You might want to remember that, next time you live below sea level and are looking for a good rate.

But insurance is a notoriously quirky business and shenanigans are to be expected. I expect that form government, too, but always hope that it won’t work out that way.

It does not appear that anyone is going to be fired yet for the performance that undoubtedly killed those that drowned or died form thirst. I think we should take a bold step and actually hold someone accountable.

I think a good candidate might be Michael D. Brown, the gentleman who was appointed by President Bush to be the first Under Secretary of Emergency Preparedness and Response in the newly created Department of Homeland Security. That was in January of 2003, two months before the formal establishment of the Department.

Mike heads FEMA, which was gobbled up by DHS. FEMA used to be a cabinet post all its own. It has a long and troubled history of corruption and political patronage, but when I worked with it after 9/11, I was impressed. There were good people and amazing capabilities.

Even under Mike Brown they had performed pretty well in disaster response and recovery operations. There have been a lot of them since he has been on the job, 164 Presidential-declared disasters, including the Columbia Shuttle crash and the California wild fires.

I guess it is 165 disasters now. They haven’t had time to update the web-site.

The FEMA homepage claims that it delivered aid “more quickly and more efficiently than ever before” during this most active hurricane season in a century.

There has been some discussion about Mr. Brown’s credentials to hold his job. The International Arabian Horse Association is not mentioned in his FEMA resume, though he made over $100 grand a year as their czar of standards and enforcement before they fired him. His stewardship there was so effective that the association folded. One member said he was less than satisfactory in his performance there for three years, a discrepancy of seven year form the count in Brown’s official bio.

As HorsesAss.org, the member went on to say “he was an unmitigated, total fucking disaster. I was shocked as hell when Captain Clueless put him in charge of FEMA a couple of years ago… He ruined IAHA financially so badly that we had to change the name and combine it with the Purebred registry…”

From one perspective, it is clear that the ten years he spent with the horses has paid off: to my knowledge, not one Arabian Horse perished in the disaster.

Mike actual credentials are that he is a Republican from Oklahoma , who ran unsuccessfully for Congress, bounced from job to job before arriving in the equine business at mid-life. Being well connected to the Iron Triangle around the President through his old pal Joe Allbaugh, who was FEMA director, but him in the FEMA leadership when Joe went on to be a lobbyist.

He wound up as FEMA director with no credentials whatsoever for the job.

And then he stood in front of the microphones last Thursday and said he was surprised to see on the news that things were so back down south. He said FEMA hadn’t known until that day that thousands of storm victims were stranded at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center .

He gave another nationally televised interview the next morning and said, “We’ve provided food to the people at the Convention Center so that they’ve gotten at least one, if not two meals, every single day.”

Mr. Brown misspoke. He had confused the Convention Center with the Superdome.

A natural mistake, I suppose. The President said he had been doing “a heck of a job.”

Which I suppose is true. But I think it was a hell of a job, and not a good one. He needs to be fired immediately as an example, along with whoever helped to screw this up.

If I could get there I would stop for a drink at Johnnie White’s bar, and then roll-up my sleeves and see what could be done for the living, and help try to collect the dead.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

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