Wynton Marsalis offers some post-Katrina reflections (free registration):
Immediately following the landing of Hurricane Katrina, I received hundreds of phone calls from all over the world. They offered sympathy and resources. I don’t get those phone calls now. The ones I receive now are rife with disgust at bureaucratic fumbling, with rage at an unspecified they who are in charge of everything from predicting which levees would break to choosing which people will return. They made it happen. They were responsible. In this case, they means Mayor Nagin, Governor Blanco, Secretary Chertoff, and President Bush. But this ongoing tragedy is of such magnitude that a they big enough to have had that much control has yet to be found. It is fruitless to demonize those who may be to blame, to pretend that, if the almighty they had only done their jobs, then this intolerable level of destruction would not have happened. In the case of New Orleans, it was also we who watched as money to fix the levees was removed from the federal budget, in spite of the warnings of dire consequences from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers; we who ignored the local and national press, which predicted doomsday; we who settled for Category Three-worthy defenses to save us from a Category Four or Five attack; we who were complacent about New Orleans and about Washington.
Marsalis goes on to say that ‘the ingredients for social disaster are present in cities all over the United States’ and that jazz might have a lesson to teach – being about ‘who we are as Americans’ and about common purpose. He concludes:
Now, through the displacement of 300,000 families, we are forced as a nation literally to come closer and deal with one another in an unprecedented way. The development of jazz showed what Americans can do when we come together.
It’s a well-intentioned message. The problem is, as it has always been, that some have more interest in working together than others do. (Thanks: HG.)