The storm has passed, but dark clouds remain

IT circles the Earth like a battle chant, “Remember “Pearl Harbor,” “Remember the Maine,” “Remember the Alamo.” Commentators pontificate on the subject, politicians orate, journalists point their fingers and bloggers swarm through cyberspace like flies over a dead horse.

One must suppose in a way that “Who’s to blame?” is something of a battle cry, a call to accounting of those who failed when the high winds blew and the waters rose.

In many ways, Katrina was a force mightier than the bombs dropped at Pearl Harbor or the explosion that sank the Maine or the army that conquered the Alamo. It was an elemental power straight out of hell, an omnipotence that destroyed cities and cowed a nation.

We watched it coming from the comfort of our Western homes even as they watched it from the nervous atmosphere of the Gulf Coast. Space technology tracked it circling in from the ocean like a great white shark stalking prey.

And then it struck.

Neither still photographs nor videotape, no matter how compelling, could ever capture the kind of horror that the storm engendered in its initial moments: the last cries of terror, the final gasps for air, the last looks of fear, the intense pain of crushing weights. Fading heartbeats are too quiet, too personal to convey.

In the aftermath, we heard the screams and saw the tears and stared awestruck as television cameras panned the destruction. Even then, it was too big to absorb, too massive to totally comprehend.

When it was over, the people of the storm were on their own. If there was help, it was invisible. Those who survived struggled alone. Those who didn’t floated face down in the toxic waters of New Orleans or lay crushed in the debris of what had been a city. Some who might have been saved died begging for the help that came too late.

Now uniformed soldiers patrol the devastation, helicopters scoot about like mosquitoes in the bayous, trucks and buses rumble in packed with supplies, and boats ride the floodwaters, up canals that had once been city streets. The sick are tended, the trapped rescued, the hungry fed, the homeless evacuated, the dead body-bagged.

And the blame game, as the sour wits of Washington are calling it, has begun.

Writing from the blue-sky beauty of the Santa Monica Mountains, I am taken by a sense of unease even considering the question. I wasn’t there. But the issue of guilt begs consideration, and I have been in a war, and I have covered other disasters, so I am not without blood on my memory.

What troubled me initially was that order to evacuate. We saw cars and vans and SUVs lined up on the highways, edging slowly away from the ominously spinning storm. But one had to wonder, what if you didn’t own a car or a van or an SUV or a motorcycle or even a bicycle? What if what money you possessed was meant only for food and a place to live? What if you didn’t even have that?

No buses or trucks roamed the neighborhoods of the poor to move them from the path of the storm. No police vehicles offered them safe transit north. No benevolent taxi or limousine companies waited to get them out of there. The mayor ordered everyone to leave ... but failed to offer ways to do so.

A whole retinue of assorted politicians bumbled about like children in the dark, crying for help. The poor were once more left to their own devices, and if those devices at times seemed extreme, survival is a powerful need, and you do what you can to fulfill the overwhelming instinct to live. Life, like a hurricane, is a force to be reckoned with.

And so it comes down to George W. Bush, the man who blinked in confusion when told that New York’s Twin Towers had collapsed under terrorist attacks, and who blinked again, and did nothing, when told that cities along the Gulf Coast were dying. A leader of the most awesome military force on Earth can order bombers to targets halfway around the world in a matter of hours but can’t get help for a week to a stricken city in his own country? What’s wrong with this picture?

We boast of an infrastructure capable of responding to any disaster. It’s all in place, we say, FEMA, Homeland Security, the military, an army of relief agencies and, of course, the benevolence of a born-again Christian White House. But where were they all when the stuff hit the fan? Well, we’ll have a committee look into that, and meanwhile, we’ll pray for everyone.

Clearly, George W. Bush is no man to match the winds, but he’s what we’ve got, the honcho in charge, the CEO, the commander in chief, the guy who should have leaped to his feet when the world started coming apart. Harry S. Truman had a sign on his desk in the Oval Office that said, “The buck stops here.” Bush needs one to fit his bewilderment: “The buck stops where?”