Is God In New Orleans

He did nothing wrong, he never does, yet a turmoil as sweeping as any in history has killed hundreds, possibly, and calls are now heard for some $200 Billion in repair and reconstruction money.

Hurricane Katrina has turned the Gulf Coast into a bottomless pit for Americans.

Why would God do this?

That is not a rhetorical question.

No, it is a real question.

Bush is an Evangelical Christian who believes that he and Jesus have literally touched, if not spoken. With that intimate knowledge of God, Bush declared himself able to stop drinking and using whatever else he might have been imbibing as he often ‘recreated.’ He has used, or at least invoked, the power of the deity to give himself strength, supposedly even to learn how to fight terrorists who attacked this nation.

Whether his method was right or wrong, he justified it as though it came to him because he was fighting God’s war against zealots of the Muslim faith. Using this tool, he could not be wrong because he was riding on God’s shoulders.

Might have taken some time, of course, for that dictum to be challenged, but the philosophical direction was inescapable.

Katrina did not come from evil terrorists.

It was a dreadful natural occurrence.

That is all it was.

However, if it was just a natural occurrence, then in the evangelical view, it was an Act of God.

Sure, God does some frightening things, and this was a monster, for reasons that He or She never bothers to explain. In fact, one of the only explanations ever delivered, according to biblical scripts, involved the Egyptians and their seven Plagues, all of which were attributed to the Egyptians’ many gods, serving only to show that the one God was more powerful that all the Egyptian gods combined.

Well, as George Bush has declared so many times, capitalizing on the concept for political goals, God is the boss in Bush’s world.

So this had to have come straight from God.

And it throws Bush’s calculations all off.

For example, there was no hiding anything. The poor, mostly black people in New Orleans and surrounding towns were largely the ones being injured. Federal helpers were days late. They refused to let some supplies even enter the city. They could have saved many lives, but they were too ill informed or too bereft of humanity to do what needed to be done. United States government employees whose job it was to help any and all Americans managed to let the largely poor, black people fend for themselves in conditions where that could only lead to great suffering and often death.

George Bush leads those people and they failed. Worse, they failed to care.

Was this mass racism?

Doesn’t really matter if it was real racism or some other sentiment, the bottom line is that these people from the white government couldn’t do anything, anything at all to feed, clothe, medicate or move this utterly needy crowd of poor blacks.

On all fronts, Bush failed.

Yes, yes there were state and local officials who could have done better jobs, no question. They were acting on their own local authority. United States forces were acting on Bush’s authority. And there was no authority on which they could act because if Mr. Bush thought of it at all, it was clearly relegated to the category of just another messy but fixable problem; a few bulldozers, some rebuilding here and there, no problem.

When he went to New Orleans, Louisiana, and to Alabama and Mississippi a few days later, he changed, as he has done before in the face of inescapable facts that are publicly known.

Historically, he could estimate that this disaster wreaked incalculable damage to people’s lives, homes, and to their livelihood as America citizens. It would take the whole nation, it would mean new engineering, to re-invent New Orleans, and it will require years to be completed.

Mr. Bush said he would fix it.

No hesitation.

He had to make that promise because God sent him the hurricane and expected him to clean up after it.

First he let his Federal Emergency Management Agency chief, Michael Brown, resign. Mr. Brown illustrated Mr. Bush’s first mistake, naming a non-professional to manage emergencies. But of course that was in keeping with the hubris Mr. Bush and the now right-wing, theocratic Republican Party have been exhibiting regarding government in general; that is, shrink it, make it small in all sectors where it provides safety nets and social services for the public, but keep it large and generous in national defense. Average people, in the radical GOP view, can and should fend for themselves, and maybe one day they can become successful and wealthy Republicans.

But under increasing scrutiny over the New Orleans debacle, what George Bush did next was shocking.

He said the federal government’s failure was his failure.

This sounded impossible.

Bush has a well-developed facility for deflecting blame. At times it is almost an art form. But not this time. Blame me, said Bush.

This was Bush the penitent.

We would, he said, make New Orleans over, even better than before. There will be better levees to hold the waters of Lake Pontchartrain, the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico, better homes, better jobs. There will be programs reminiscent of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s efforts to pick up a tired part of the nation and reinvigorate it. It will be wonderful, he assured everyone.

Well, miraculously, at the same time there will apparently be no new taxes on anyone. Nope, that $200 Billion, which could easily go much higher, will have to be paid for by cutting other things.

OK, what things.

George is not prepared to specify right now. Just remember that it will require no new taxes. Now, given the fact that currently most taxes fall on the poor and the rapidly deteriorating middle class, most of the financing for re-growing New Orleans will fall on those same payers.

Of course to be sure New Orleans gets built fast, the government may have to trim away some of the red tape, the bureaucratic regulations built up over time to assure that federal funds are not wasted or diverted (read stolen).

So let’s get away from all this red tape that gets in our way, after all that’s what the Heritage Foundation – perhaps the radical GOP’s favorite right-wing ‘think tank’ – has suggested before, and it had a plan ready to go. Exploiting the urgency of the New Orleans disaster by cutting ‘red tape’ would mean easier rules for the big companies who are now lining up for a piece of the New Orleans pie.

Bush says the poor people of New Orleans must be saved from Katrina’s aftermath and the devastation it has wreaked on the area. So developers will put up houses that look like middle-middle and upper-middle class subdivisions, and probably some upper-class ones too, which will all be utterly different from the homes that were there before.

Lets all hope the people who can afford these houses are the same poor blacks and whites who were flooded out. Also let us hope that all those new jobs and new salaries help the native population as well.

If the rebirth of New Orleans involves a wholly new class, color and accent, then Bush will have built a New Orleans in the GOP’s current image, but he will not have rebuilt the New Orleans of American history.

Bush can probably make that fit with his religious background and his political reality. He might even declare that it will please God to see such new buildings and a new atmosphere, and of course God won’t mind that he threw some bucks his buddies’ way.

But perhaps Mr. Bush and his evangelistic politics are unraveling this time.

This time there is a deeper public scrutiny because the media is, for once, doing its job, and after all this is on the homefront. It will be hard for many Americans to believe that the exploitive policies of Mr. Bush and GOP, with their ‘red tape’ malarkey, can legitimately be compared to FDR’s efforts during The Great Depression, especially for those that will recall Roosevelt acted quickly while stringently enforcing the rules to crush any exploitation and/or corruption.

If Katrina was an Act of God, then what kind of God would condone cynicism and exploitation in the aftermath? Mr. Bush may yet reveal how he perceives the face and voice of God in how he acts now. Does he assume that the hurricane was an act of a wrathful God, bent on cleansing and punishment, or does he view God in the light of Christ’s teachings; that is, that tragedy is an opportunity to make life better for all peoples. Or perhaps Mr. Bush will reveal that he doesn’t think about it all that deeply, just like he doesn’t think much about Osama bin Laden anymore.

Yet perhaps Mr. Bush will finally show everyone that it’s all just politics, an interruption of the ‘recreating’ schedule that allows him to further help out his corporate friends; that is, taking care of the financially proven worthy while teaching the masses how to fend for themselves.