I finally made some time to watch When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, Spike Lee's documentary film about Hurricane Katrina. There is not much I can say that has not already been said about the utter lack of caring and inhumanity on the part of government, that marked the event and its aftermath. (I have a personal example of that failure to act. My nephew was in the Air National Guard, finishing up his basic training near Biloxi, when Katrina hit. I thought for sure that he would be sent somewhere on the Gulf Coast to help with the disaster. No, it was far more important for his unit to finish up training so they could be shipped out to the Middle East -- in his case, Kuwait -- for a year.)I don't know a lot about the making of the film, but from the film footage I gather that Lee or his associates were on the ground filming in New Orleans from before the time the hurricane made landfall. I'd seen some of the stock footage before, but he had so much more.
Lee also does a good job of putting the catastrophe into historical and sociological context. Race and class issues surely played into it, but I think that Harry Belafonte hit the nail on the head when he said the first thing that kept the Bush administration from acting was "the arrogance of power." Power corrupts, always. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. I believe it corrupts ones heart and soul, making empathy nonexistent.
For me, almost the worst part about it is that the cover-up began almost immediately and continues to this day. It was so effectively swept under the carpet. I think it was writer Bob Harris who said something about one of the major cities in the U.S. being washed off the map and nobody cared. I would guess that, as far as the average person on the street is concerned, everything is back to normal in New Orleans and the surrounding area. Why was so little attention paid to it, once the waters receded?
If you have not had a chance to see When the Levees Broke, it is a must-see. I'll warn you, it is not light entertainment and it is not pretty. Some of it is downright gruesome, and it will probably rile you up. But it is so important that people were there, bearing witness, so others can know about it. Like the Holocaust, like My Lai, like 9/11 and all the other greater and lesser human-made tragedies, I think that the very least someone like me can do is to acknowledge it. Yes, it happened. Yes, we remember.
