They're tryin' to wash us away, part I

What has happened down here is the wind have changed
Clouds rolled in from the North and it start to rain
It rained real hard, rained for a real long time
Six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline.

The river rose all day, the river rose all night
Some people got lost in the flood, some people got away all right
The river has busted thru clear down to Plaquemines
Six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline

Louisiana,     Louisiana,   they're tryin' to wash us away,   they're tryin' to wash us away
Louisiana,     Louisiana,   they're tryin' to wash us away,   they're tryin' to wash us away

President Coolidge come down in a railroad train
With a Little Fat Man with a notepad in his hand
President say "Little Fat Man, isn't it a shame
What the river have done to this poor crackers land.

Louisiana,     Louisiana,   they're tryin' to wash us away,   they're tryin' to wash us away
Louisiana,     Louisiana,   they're tryin' to wash us away,   they're tryin' to wash us away

Louisiana,     Louisiana,   they're tryin' to wash us away,   they're tryin' to wash us away
Louisiana,     Louisiana,   they're tryin' to wash us away,   they're tryin' to wash us away

--Randy Newman, "Louisiana 1927"

A few years ago, my colleagues and I were preparing for a computer trade show at which we were demonstrating our new product. We kicked around ideas for attracting people to our bland, anonymous booth among many identical bland, anonymous booths. My idea was simple: plug in some speakers, store some MP3 files containing Zydeco tunes in the database we were showing off, and crank up the happiest-sounding music in the world. By the end of the trade show, some of my co-workers were tired of hearing the same music over and over again. It did the job, though, of attracting a lot of passers-by.

I've loved New Orleans from near and afar for years. I've only visited the place a couple of times, but it holds a special place in my heart. It first got under my skin through the novels of James Lee Burke, the music of Clifton Chenier (pictured at the right), and a cuisine that knocked me flat the first time I had a mouthful of "the real stuff."

It's the rare city that proves to be even better than you imagined, once you visit there. New Orleans is one of those places. (Just be sure to take the advice I once received from a resident: Skip Bourbon Street. It's a tourist trap for drunken frat boys.) There is nowhere like New Orleans—as an actual city, an artifact of history, and a genuine attitude—anywhere else in the United States, or the world.

Believe me, I'm well aware of New Orleans' faults. Some of the most unrepentant representatives of the Old South live there, and even have a creepy combination chapel/mausoleum in the Museum of the Confederacy. Crime in the poor areas is bad, and the schools are execrable. The most tourist-y areas are as vulgar as anywhere in the United States. Political corruption is brazen and seemingly intractable. However, I don't mind cities with blemishes and faults—Chicago, New York, and Baltimore come to mind when I say that—as long as the good outweighs the bad. The good in New Orleans is very good, from art galleries to restaurants, from some of the best live music in the world to the writers you can meet at breakfast at Mother's, from the striking mansions along St. Charles to some of the more daring hole-in-the-wall clubs, from the kind woman at a bar about to close who made us dinner when we arrived late one evening to the insanely funny guide who took us on a walking tour of the city.

For the last few days, I've been grieving for the people and the city of New Orleans—and, for that matter, the rest of Louisiana, plus three other states mauled by Hurricane Katrina. And I'm outraged at what happened—more to the point, what didn't happen—before, during, and especially after the storm.

Should this blog, dedicated to national security affairs, take a long detour into a seemingly unrelated topic, already being discussed in depth elsewhere? Absolutely, for the following three reasons:

• The federal government's botched response to Katrina tells us a great deal about how secure or insecure we should feel about other threats, including terrorist attack.
• Even if there were no direct connection between Katrina and counterterrorism, the last week of American history is likely to change profoundly our national security policy.
• As someone with a deep affection for New Orleans, as well as other parts of the South that have suffered grievously and needlessly (such as Mississippi, home of the blues), I've been dismayed to see how little coverage there has been about exactly what Katrina damaged or destroyed.

As regular readers of Arms and Influence know, I'm no big fan of the Bush Administration's handling of counterterrorism. I feel that the White House squandered many opportunities, needlessly antagonized possible allies, completely misread the nature and scope of the terrorist threat, reorganized the federal government to no good effect, crashed into Iraq with only the vaguest notion of what it was doing, and in the end, made Americans less safe from terrorist attack. At the same time, I make a considerable effort to keep an open mind, to hear what supporters of the Administration's policies have to say. I'm a scientist at heart, so I'm always willing to subject even my most cherished beliefs to regular re-examination.

At the same time, I've felt that it has been hard for many people to understand how people like myself could be as disappointed with the Bush Administration as we seem to be.  Now, the Administration's defects in policy and execution have made Louisiana synonymous with tragedy, just as they did for Iraq and Afghanistan. Perhaps, in a way that the 9/11attacks, the incomplete victory in Afghanistan, the walking nightmare of post-invasion Iraq, and the self-inflicted moral wounds of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay could not, the sunken ruin of New Orleans will end a terrible era of irresponsibility—a kind of political wilding at a national and international scale.