Atlantic: Haiti/Katrina Symmetry
Vice President Joe Biden's upcoming trip Friday in New Orleans prompted an Atlantic journalist to draw comparisons between the federal government's responses to the devastation following the earthquake in Haiti and Hurricane Katrina.
"The symmetry between Haiti's devastating earthquake and Hurricane Katrina is undeniable: the mass human suffering of an impoverished community, the shortage of vital resources, and the government response that was lacking--though for very different reasons--all point to the same understandings of civic responsibility that made Katrina a disaster for Bush and are motivating President Obama's forceful response to Haiti today," writes Chris Good of the The Atlantic.
Good avoids a perfectly fine comparison (Haiti v. the 2004 Tsunami) for the sensational one (Haiti v. Hurricane Katrina). While he says that it's "undeniable" there is symmetry between the two disasters, the only comparable thing about them is that both are terrible tragedies.
The Katrina death toll is in the thousands. For Haiti, it's already in the tens of thousands. New Orleans before the storm was a modern, industrialized city with a mammoth federal government to support it through the crisis -- albeit slowly. Haiti is the world's poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and foreign aid makes up around a third of its budget. New Orleanians had the benefit of a several-day warning before the hurricane, and parts of the city looked like ghost towns when the storm struck. The earthquake happened with little to no warning, with as many as 3 million people in the streets.
While Good admits that it is coincidence that brings Biden here shortly after the Haitian earthquake, he seems to suggest later that whatever Obama does in response to the earthquake should be viewed as him trying to avoid a failure by the government as large as the one following Katrina, or to avoid the earthquake becoming, as some have used the term before, "his Katrina."
"In his first visit to New Orleans as president, Obama said Katrina's damage was caused, along with the hurricane, by a 'failure of government'; today, he declared that Haiti's earthquake would demand 'every element of our national capacity,' pledging the full force of the U.S. government's capabilities to assist," he writes.
The wise decision for Good, I'm led to believe, would have been to leave Katrina out of the argument entirely. But that doesn't make a very good headline, does it?
Multi: Lee To Revisit Nawlins Post Katrina In New HBO Doc
While everyone with an HBO subscription was salivating over the teaser trailer for Treme, it seems that filmmaker Spike Lee was finalizing a deal to direct another documentary in New Orleans for the company.
The film is going to be a follow-up to his controversial film When the Levees Broke, which focused on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Shooting is set to begin Friday and released in August, the fifth-year anniversary of Katrina.
And while this has nothing to do with New Orleans but everything to do with being awesome, HBO and Tom Hanks announced a release date for "The Pacific," their follow-up to the heralded Band of Brothers series: March 14. Should be a good couple months for television.
