The National Guard responds to Hurricane Harvey in Texas. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.“It happened to Texas and Texas can handle anything”, President Trump said last week, waving the flag of the Lone Star State to an approving crowd in Corpus Christi in the wake of Hurricane Harvey. “They represent truly the very best of America”, he added later. Trump’s characterization of Harvey as a trial to be met by Texan grit and an all-American resilience couldn’t be further from the portrait painted of those impacted by Hurricane Katrina by George W. Bush 12 years earlier. Following an aerial tour of New Orleans completed soon after Katrina, he remarked, “I’ve just completed a tour of some devastated country”. He also claimed to “know the people of this part of the world are suffering…” People “from this part of the world”, Bush insisted, would not be forgotten.
Bush’s disconnection from the region reflected a larger sense that post-Katrina New Orleans resembled a ‘Third World’ disaster zone.
Bush’s disconnection from the region reflected a larger sense that post-Katrina New Orleans resembled a ‘Third World’ disaster zone, a sense that also led to storm survivors being widely referred to as ‘refugees’, despite the fact that only a tiny minority were not US citizens. This feeling that the post-storm city was not quite American has a long history. It relates to the fact that New Orleans is a majority-black city, but is also connected to the city’s distinctive and pronounced relationship to its French and Spanish colonial past, its links to West Africa, and its apparent flouting of the Protestant work ethic as evidenced in its calendar of festivals, its rich parading and performance culture, and an economy dominated by tourism. New Orleans has thus come to stand out as a quaint relic amidst a relentlessly forward-looking national culture that dispenses with the past in favour of the future.
