Carrion Birds: Part Two
Let’s imagine you got out of your ground floor when that cold mass of water swept in, and your piano is under water, and your porcelain geegaws are circling your living room in a whirlpool of chintz. Let’s imagine you didn’t die in that first impact; that you weren’t one of the poor souls who died in their favorite armchair, or were in the basement looking for tools when the floodwaters trapped you in down there. Let’s imagine you made it up onto the roof, and sat though that long night, peering into the dark to see whether the neighbors made it too.
Let’s imagine you baked on the roof for two hot post-storm days, waiting for help that didn’t come. There were no CGI Michael Bay helicopters with lean SEALS rappelling down either side, handing out bottled water and hugs; no fleet of Coast Guard launches; maybe one guy in a dory five blocks away, getting the hell out of dodge. Finally, as some of the waters abated, you dragged your wife by the hand and helped her down the drainpipe; gingerly immersing yourself up to your nipples in a murky cocktail of sewage, gasoline and already decomposing German Shepherds and grandmothers.
Let’s imagine you wandered to some higher ground without something in the water brushing against your leg, sending you insane and babbling before your partner could drag you up to the roadside. Let’s imagine you joined a steady exodus of other survivors, silently carrying old folks, dragging their children; gaining height on the freeway, looking back over where you came from and seeing that the floodwaters had taken over everything.
Let’s imagine you reached the Superdome and there was no National Guard and no evident plan for you and the other 30,000 people who had travelled there; or the 20,000 others at the Convention Center. So you went through those desperate days of the injured dying quietly, your kids sobbing quietly, people defecating quietly and ashamed in whatever access corridors they could find. When help arrived you were put on a bus and taken out of the city with no explanation of where you were going. No officials told you anything.
Let’s imagine months later, after sleeping in gymnasiums or on people’s sofas, eating whatever was put in front of you, that you and yours were allowed to return to New Orleans; that you weren’t one of the families who felt that there was nothing left to go back for. So you wander down the old block (the waters have subsided now but the stench remains) and the disaster actually looks worse; like the morning-after of some gigantic cosmic frat-party. Everything smashed, water-warped, stinking. And there’s what’s left of your house, with somebody else’s car upside down on your lawn. There’s a number painted outside on your porch that indicates somebody is still dead inside.
Let’s imagine you don’t simply run back to Texas and that you decide to build a new life. So you begin to file papers with FEMA and the Lousiana Recovery Authority and wait for the massive aid effort that must surely come. You wait for months, through, snowed under a blizzard of bureaucratic delays, federal regulations and loopholes of Kafkaesque proportions (for regular insights into these ongoing absurdities check out Harry Shearer’s weekly Le Show podcast), with no end in sight. You live in a trailer, cooking little because you lack the basic facilities (although you hear that FEMA has a massive warehouse of kitchen utensils, but they can’t get it to you and it’s costing them too much to store so they move it to another agency out of state. This parallels an earlier phenomenon when FEMA let a warehouse of emergency ice go bad, and has since announced it won’t be delivering ice in the event of any future disasters…).
Frustrated, you try to take out a bank loan to make some initial repairs to make your house at least partially habitable again; and FEMA tells you that by doing so you’ll invalidate any future reparations by acting too soon. Just after that you find out that the trailer you’re living in - provided by FEMA - has been exposing you to toxic formaldehyde. By now, the national media has long since migrated on to other newsworthy topics, apart from the occasional spike of interest when Brad Pitt visits his sustainable architecture project in the Ninth Ward. The news cameras are currently being pointed to the Mississippi River flooding in Iowa, Illinois and Missouri, to record pictures of human suffering that is a little more visceral than your own drawn-out fatigue and despair. You are still waiting notification of how your life will get back on track within any finite sense.
By this November, when Mr Villinski’s Emergency Response Studio opens, it will be months after the third anniversary of Hurrican Katrina. So there you are, walking down the street, and you become “visually engaged” (sic) by this weird customized trailer and ask what it’s about. And the artist, overjoyed to have the opportunity to connect with a local subject of his meisterwerk, peels himself away from a cadre of recently inbound New York art dealers hovering over tubs of (non-FEMA-delivered) iced shrimp, and explains to you that it’s a way of embedding artists into disaster areas. So they can, maybe - if the artist grooves on your tale - tell your story. Maybe do a painting, or a video interview, or a bust crafted in the mud of Lake Pontchartrain. Because Mr. Villinski is here to help.
Now - not that we can imagine your response (because we can’t imagine it, remember?) - but… what do we imagine your response will be?
IN PART THREE: Voodoo economics and trickle down.