Project Katrina

Hunter at Daily Kos says all that really needs to be said about John McCain’s walking tour of the Ninth War and his shit all stupid comments:

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.