Forgotten, USA

Today [McCain] took a walking tour of the Ninth Ward--perhaps the most visible symbol of the Bush administration's inaction in the wake of Katrina--passing a mix of rebuilt homes and vacant, blighted houses. After the tour, McCain addressed reporters in front of a restored church. "Never again will we allow such a mishandling of a natural disaster," he vowed. "Never again." [...]

Asked earlier this week if he thought the Lower Ninth Ward should be rebuilt, McCain shrugged, considering the question for several seconds. "I really don't know," he finally said. "That's why I am going ... We need to go back to have a conversation about what to do: rebuild it, tear it down, you know, whatever it is."

-- Newsweek, Apr 24th, 2008

John McCain is currently on his tour of "Forgotten Places" in America; small towns and nooks of the nation so ravaged by poverty, unemployment, shrinking populations or just plain forgottenness that they qualify for the term. It is unclear how a community qualifies as sufficiently Forgotten to merit a bus stop on the latest McCain tour -- and even more unclear how we should feel about the towns so forgotten that they will never qualify for such a visit -- but by any standard, the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans qualifies. It is America's most famous forgotten city, a neighborhood that is very publicly rediscovered and reforgotten nearly every week. It is the forgotten town on everyone's mind, and yet it still remains forgotten.

In this way it is very much like the place where McCain started his tour, the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, where civil rights marchers in 1965 were attacked by state troopers using whips, clubs, and tear gas. Both are places for politicians to go when they want to prove they have not forgotten important lessons on race, and class, and America. Then the politicians leave, and the quiet breeze returns, and the clouds continue to wander from one horizon to the other, and the town is the same is it was, forgotten by those politicians until the next time someone remembers to forget them again.

John McCain is presenting himself as a Republican Who Cares. This is subtly different from George W. Bush's similar message of Compassionate Conservatism, primarily because McCain has the good sense to stay away from the now openly mocked phrase. Both, though, are premised on the same notion. Visit the towns of America, declaring that You Care. Then do nothing.

Hurricane Katrina flooded the Lower Ninth Ward and much of the rest of New Orleans at the end of August, 2005. It has thus been over two and a half years since the destruction of the city. Rebuilding remains a slow, difficult process, and it is now a given that a sizable subset of the evacuated population will not return. This is not surprising, as we have yet to even declare whether they will, at any arbitrarily far-off date, have anything to return to.

It seems surprising that an American senator and candidate for the presidency of the United States would, two and a half years, not have a ready opinion on whether or not the wounded city should be rebuilt. Having a plan one way or the other would at the least be something worthy of discussion and debate. Do you want the city to be rebuilt? Fine, then how shall it be accomplished? What role does the government have in this, the largest natural disaster to hit an American city in our lifetimes? Should it help actively? Passively? Not at all?

Or, on the other hand, should the Lower Ninth Ward be abandoned, left to the will of future hurricanes? That seems unlikely, given the interest in repaving the area and making it something different -- something classier, something with more malls and different residents -- but it seems a notion that at least requires defending, among those that have it. The Lower Ninth is not necessarily the most vulnerable of New Orleans' many vulnerable parts, and yet discussions of New Orleans (non-)rebuilding efforts always seem to center on it. It has become a symbol of race and class, and an ongoing allegory for America's will, or lack of will, to heal its own wounds.

Both man and nature have carved deep holes into America in these Bush years. In the first case, the event started two wars. The second event was met with a now-institutionalized paralysis. Absent anyone but God to blame, and nothing to strike back against, the government remains frozen in inaction; the relief continues to trickle in but there is no plan for what should happen after the relief is done and gone. It is not that there is a fervent debate being played out before action can be taken -- there is not. There is no plan, there is no urgency to have a plan, and there is little effort to create an urgency to have a plan. We provided trailers for some that did not have homes. We provided paychecks to those that had lost not just their jobs, but their entire communities. And then we left, returning on occasion to shake our heads at how forgotten they remain.

John McCain's off the cuff assertion rings hollow. In his quest to lead the nation, he has determined that there are three courses of action possible, for the still-stricken Lower Ninth Ward. We can "rebuild it", we can "tear it down", or we can "whatever it is." It has been two and a half years -- we are less than forty days away from the third hurricane season since Katrina struck the city -- and the Republican presidential candidate has not thought about the matter enough to have an opinion on it; the best we can hope for, in his promise, is that if he is elected it will finally be time to perhaps discuss the subject. Unless, of course, the Lower Ninth somehow is forgotten again, come January.

Those rebuilding in the Lower Ninth are probably deeply interested in whether or not "tear it down" remains an option being considered. Those waiting to rebuild but unable to, without assistance, probably are interested in knowing whether there will be some year in which that assistance will come. And all parties are probably keen to know what may exist, in the murky waters of "whatever it is", and if any of those unspoken, not-worthy-of-mention plans will offer either neighborhood relief or neighborhood reformation.

If you are going to tour the most forgotten city of Forgotten America, one would think it prudent to at least pretend that you have not forgotten them even during your visit. If you are going to tour Forgotten America on a bus, it seems rational to expect that the tour would consist not just of declaring each town forgotten, but in having a concrete plan to assist those towns beyond your mere momentary presence. It is within a hair's breadth of mockery, to ostentatiously tour towns so injured that they deserve special attention, and yet have given no apparent thought to those towns in advance, or have no more substantive thoughts on the matter more profound than "whatever it is."

Compassionate Conservatism, after all, was the fine art of saying something while doing nothing; apparently the 2008 version has been further streamlined in order to say not a damn thing, either.

On the day Katrina struck New Orleans, John McCain was meeting with President Bush on an Arizona tarmac in order to be presented with a cake; the occasion was his 69th birthday. In the next months, McCain used his position in the Senate to vote against Medicare relief and unemployment benefits for homeless New Orleans residents, and against investigations into what went wrong. But McCain understands the forgotten city, and McCain is alarmed by the inaction of senators such as himself, and McCain vows to investigate what went wrong so that it will not be repeated. You must believe all these things, because if you do not, you are calling into question the sincerity of a four day bus tour.

If I were a community leader in New Orleans, I would launch a drive to rename the Lower Ninth Ward to Forgotten, USA. You could spell it out on the ground in enormous letters, using the rubble of abandoned houses, so that the word would be visible to anyone flying over the city. You could light the letters on fire, so that the glow would light the sky at night and the smoke would darken it during the day.

Perhaps that way it would be easier to remember.