I’ve only ever been to New Orleans once in my life, and I wasn’t even there for 18 hours – I was on an Amtrak “See America” railpass, and the train stopped into Nawlins in late afternoon, then took off again at around 6:30 AM – but it still made an impression on me. Granted, I didn’t see much of the city, since the only places I went were from the train station to the French Quarter and back, but, still, I loved it, and I’ve wanted to go back ever since, so I was just as upset as anyone when the city was devastated as a result of Hurricane Katrina.
Watching “Big Easy to Big Empty,” the short but powerful documentary by reporter Greg Palast and producer Matt Pascerella, I’d like to tell you I was surprised at the anti-Bush slant to the coverage, but A) I wasn’t, and B) I’m not exactly pro-Bush myself, so I sure as hell wasn’t bothered by it, anyway. And, really, how can you help but paint an anti-Bush slant when it’s revealed that the White House knew full well that the levees of the city were destined to fail, yet they did nothing to have the problem fixed? Palast shows us a house which sat in the path of the flood waters, noting the number which has been painted on the front window in order to clarify how many bodies were pulled from the house. It’s horrifying.
We find out that the city’s evacuation planning was left up to IEM (Innovative Emergency Management), who were paid a half million dollars to create a plan, then didn’t. We see a field of FEMA trailers, where the residents are all but trapped for the time being, with access to bus rides to Wal-Mart but not much else in the way of transportation. We also find out that there’s an ongoing plot in New Orleans to rebuild the city as a sort of “Six Flags Over Louisiana,” where it’s non-stop alcohol down Bourbon Street and the streets are, shall we say, a little less dark than they were before the Ninth Ward was destroyed in the flooding; disturbingly, a portion of this plot includes leaving some residents locked out of their apartments, even though they were never affected by the flooding in the first place, just because it’s high-dollar real estate that could be better serving the city in forms other than low-rent housing.
Of course, let’s be realistic here: “Big Easy to Big Empty” feels about as biased as Michael Moore at his most pissed off. Palast comes off looking like a real bully at times, particularly when he invades the offices of IEM in search of answers, and there’s a certain feeling that he’s going for the most sensational interviews possible. Still, there’s no reason to believe that the facts he provides are anything less than accurate; this DVD was released through Disinfo.com, and they’re pretty good about offering the unpolished truths you won’t generally get elsewhere in the U.S. media.
In the end, we’re still left wondering exactly what’s going on down in the Big Easy…and, personally, I’m wondering if I’m quite as interested in giving them my tourism dollars as I thought I was.
