Voltage blog entries tagged with: New Orleans

We just finished watching the entire Spike Lee documentary When The Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts recently. It's four hours long, but worth the time - it draws you in with the footage and the interviews and the raw power of the events. It's hard to describe it briefly, but if I had to pick one word it would be comprehensive. It brings you through the events, the problems, the (few) successes, the pain, the suffering, the consequences (at the time), and attempts limited analysis without letting it obscure it's focus on what happened.

And how did what happened - happen? Why did the federal government respond so poorly? Why was the response so uncoordinated at all levels? What was it actually like to have lived through it? These are the questions that Spike Lee tries to answer - not directly, but by showing lots of footage, and taking lots of interviews. I think I only heard his voice once, off camera - it seems that as much as he could detach himself from what comes through, he did. Obviously he can edit and select to great effect, but I'd be hard pressed to say that this was propaganda. His films can vary widely in quality, but this project was done with care and love and it shows.

There are lots of things you could point to in the GWB presidency as bad judgments or failures, but this, to me, is the worst. This is the one thing that should make historians look back and write 'the president and his administration failed their people.' It's just a shame that this country couldn't do more for it's own residents.