New Orleans

blissblogger

Well-known member
it's like two JG Ballard novels compacted into one

--'the drowned world'
meets

'High Rise'
(i'm thinking here of the situation inside the Superdome where 20 thousand refugees are corralled---NYT today: "Fights and trash fires broke out at the hot and stinking Superdome and anger and unrest mounted across New Orleans on Thursday" )

unbelievable that the richest, most powerful nation in the world can get caught off guard like this

i tend to see everthing through the prism of music to a shameful degree but i must admit one of the first things i thought was "i hope mannie fresh, juvie and the rest of cash money crew are OK"
 

dHarry

Well-known member
blissblogger said:
it's like two JG Ballard novels compacted into one

--'the drowned world'
meets

'High Rise'

[...]

i tend to see everthing through the prism of music to a shameful degree but i must admit one of the first things i thought was "i hope mannie fresh, juvie and the rest of cash money crew are OK"

These 2 points are elucidated by this previous thread - the Ballardian nightmare of the crazed armed looters described by a witness and the fact that the thread is named "when the levee breaks" (led zep).

blissblogger said:
unbelievable that the richest, most powerful nation in the world can get caught off guard like this

Not to reduce sympathy for the appalling situation that these people find themselves in (presumably only those too poor to evacuate?), or turn this calamity into a political football, but if the USA was caught like this because most of the local army are in Iraq, this just adds to the shame of the Bush legacy. I have also heard that Bush has already rejected offers of help from Russia and possibly others, in what might be an obscene display of vanity and pride.

It really does seem that very little was done officially beforehand to mitigate the potential disaster, and according to the thread above, the public are not being told the true scale of the crisis either (no surprise there, given the current climate of doublespeak and blatant falsifications of the Bush admin. & news media's collusion and/or state control).
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
ah! didn't see the other thread

as it happens, my next sees-everything-through-the-prism-of-music was going to be bringing up the Led Zep's tune

albeit with a political aside: nothing changes, when the levee breaks, it's the po' black folks (and a few po white folks) that get their lives ruined
 

DigitalDjigit

Honky Tonk Woman
I heard that "When the Levee Breaks" is an old blues standard.

Also, I am doubting the veracity of that looting post. It just seems like a perfect time for those "see what those savages are really like?" stories. I have seen little independent confirmation on this kind of "zombies in the streets" nightmare elsewhere. There was however a hoax about looters besieging a hospital which makes me doubt that story you posted.

Ya'll seen the Bush playing the guitar photo taken the day the hurricane was unfolding, right? And why does every single report that mentions Bush never fails to mention how he cut short his vacation. What a tragedy.
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
DigitalDjigit said:
I heard that "When the Levee Breaks" is an old blues standard.

.

yes it was originally sung by Memphis Minnie, a pioneering electric guitarist apparently, and it was written and recorded with her husband Kansas Joe McCoy in 1929

that's what i meant by nothing changes for the poor

those images of poverty stricken old folk cooped up in the stadium and convention center three days w/o food or water, no electricity, with nowhere to even take a shit - they are are incredibly shameful for America... it's real 2 Nations revelation stuff

good commentary on this in the New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/02/n...&en=bb18ef00f662359e&ei=5094&partner=homepage

not that anything's that much different in the UK, did you see this piece on the BBC website
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4201236.stm

magic, eh, after eight years of Labour govt...
 

dHarry

Well-known member
...and apparently local authorities in New Orleans have been begging for funds to improve the levees in the eventuality of precisely this situation. But increasingly in recent years this became a political football which led to no-one with any technical knowledge being in a position to decide and act in the lead-in to the hurricane strike, with the ensuing organisational mess to add to the natural disaster.

I just heard that FEMA http://www.fema.gov/ in 2001 predicted/warned against three major US catastrophies - a terrorist attack on New York, a hurricane disaster in or around the Gulf of Mexico, and an earthquake in San Francisco. Two out of three so far - I wonder if there is any coherent plan for San Francisco in the country that seemed to help Thai tsunami victims more efficiently than its own down south.
 

k-punk

Spectres of Mark
blissblogger said:
yes it was originally sung by Memphis Minnie, a pioneering electric guitarist apparently, and it was written and recorded with her husband Kansas Joe McCoy in 1929

that's what i meant by nothing changes for the poor

those images of poverty stricken old folk cooped up in the stadium and convention center three days w/o food or water, no electricity, with nowhere to even take a shit - they are are incredibly shameful for America... it's real 2 Nations revelation stuff

Yeh, reminds me of that old blues standard (I think) covered by Nick Cave on Kicking Against the Pricks, 'Muddy Water'....

The poor remain subject to Nature in a way that the rich simply aren't. Natural disasters always disproportionatly affect the poor... it was the same in the tsunami in Sri Lanka, which killed many of the poor forced to live on the beaches (and who any way were only living in that part of SL because of the tourist trade).

As for the UK --- well, there was more social mobility in the 50s and 60s than today. The Blair government has presided over the increased stratification of classes and the lowering of opportunities for working class people.
 
blissblogger said:
yes it was originally sung by Memphis Minnie, a pioneering electric guitarist apparently, and it was written and recorded with her husband Kansas Joe McCoy in 1929

that's what i meant by nothing changes for the poor

those images of poverty stricken old folk cooped up in the stadium and convention center three days w/o food or water, no electricity, with nowhere to even take a shit - they are are incredibly shameful for America... it's real 2 Nations revelation stuff

good commentary on this in the New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/02/n...&en=bb18ef00f662359e&ei=5094&partner=homepage

not that anything's that much different in the UK, did you see this piece on the BBC website
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4201236.stm

magic, eh, after eight years of Labour govt...


Apparently the song refers to the Mississippi flood of 1927, sounds like that one really taught african-americans how to 'weep and moan':

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/flood/timeline/timeline2.html

Shameful stuff indeed.
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
k-punk said:
Yeh, reminds me of that old blues standard (I think) covered by Nick Cave on Kicking Against the Pricks, 'Muddy Water'.... .

i forget who did the original but there was a whole spate of blues songs about the Big Flood of 1927. it was that disaster that actually drove a lot of southern blacks up north to chicago, leading to the electric blues. so Muddy Waters was aptly named in a way.

9/11 and Nawlins -- two preventable calamities, on one guy's watch. in both cases, people who don't vote republican -- new yorkers and poor new lousisians -- suffer.

i'd almost take a wager that bush's approval ratings will drop into single figures
 

dominic

Beast of Burden
blissblogger said:
i'd almost take a wager that bush's approval ratings will drop into single figures

the incompetence of the government is staggering

and if they handle things this poorly in new orleans, imagine what really goes on in iraq

he'll go down as one of the worst presidents in u.s. history -- lying, deceit, greed; gross mismanagement of the economy, fiscal madness; administrative incompetence; energy policy; over reliance on brute force (and failure to see the limits of brute force); callousness
 

bruno

est malade
yeah right

dominic said:
he'll go down as one of the worst presidents in u.s. history -- lying, deceit, greed; gross mismanagement of the economy, fiscal madness; administrative incompetence; energy policy; over reliance on brute force (and failure to see the limits of brute force); callousness

to the outside world. to americans he will be remembered as honest, down to earth, brave, etc etc.
 

Elan

Blackbird
What's the lyric? Crying won't help you, prayin' won't do you no good...

Canada has formally offered help but was refused by Bush, but some Canucks are going down to help out anyway.

I cannot help but think that if this was a more Republican area then help would have arrived a damn sight faster. And that Katrina itself was underestimated and that is abysmal. Word on Bush being the worst. Thank God he can't run again.
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
interesting this bit from associated press:

"After several days in the street with little water and less food, people around the convention center began imagining that the storm was somehow a vehicle for ethnic cleansing. One black man insists that authorities want everyone corralled into the convention center - not to facilitate an orderly evacuation, but so police can ignite the gas and blow them up. They want us all crazy so they can shoot us down like dogs!'' a woman shouts. "


cos the Superdome being a stadium did make me think of Pinochet's thugs rounding up all the left wingers in Chile and interning them in sports arenas...

wonder what paranoid conspiracy memes will be generated out of nawlins cf the Bush Planned 9/11 one
 

sufi

lala
blissblogger said:
cos the Superdome being a stadium did make me think of Pinochet's thugs rounding up all the left wingers in Chile and interning them in sports arenas...
... made me think of kigali 1994 :( :( :(
 

carlos

manos de piedra
here's a link to this series of articles from 2002

http://www.nola.com/washingaway/

the headline says "billions have been spent to protect us, but we grow more vulnerable every day"

pretty much everything the article warns about did actually happen

the way the city is built seems hopeless, really.

there's 11,000 nola refugees now in the astrodome (about 10 minutes from where i'm typing this) and the analogy with pinochet seems a bit rough...
 

DigitalDjigit

Honky Tonk Woman
I just saw the funniest thing. There is an appeal for aid going on right now on MSNBC. They had Mike Meyers and Kanye West. They said their thing and Kanye West goes, looking straight at the camera, "George Bush doesn't care about black people" and Mike Meyers just turns immediately and looks at him with a priceless expression on his face. They cut away right after that.
 
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