In this week’s Village Voice, my friend and colleague Larry Blumenfeld writes about “When the Levees Broke,” Spike Lee’s HBO film on Hurricane Katrina and the fate of New Orleans. This passage is ripe for further comment:
One potentially controversial element of the story—persistent suspicion that levees were intentionally exploded in some sections to flood the poorer black sections of New Orleans—is considered [in Lee’s film] without sensationalism.
Lee raised this possibility during an October appearance on HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher, mentioning 1965’s Hurricane Betsy, when similar rumors surfaced, and the 1927 floods, when some levees were, in fact, intentionally blown. “I don’t put anything past the American government when it comes to people of color in this country,” Lee told Maher. Tucker Carlson shot back that Lee was a “reckless conspiracy theorist” and that he was “feeding paranoia.” Yet David Remnick raised these same points in much the same manner in a New Yorker piece earlier that month. In the film, such suspicion is considered by residents who “heard a boom” as well as by John M. Barry, author of Rising Tide, who finds “too many similarities between 1927 and Katrina,” especially similar failures of the levee policy.
“Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t,” Lee says. “We’ll never know because it won’t be investigated. But the flood should not have happened anyway. The Army Corps of Engineers has said it was their fault. Somebody should go to jail.”
Readers of this blog know that I have little patience with conspiracy theories (for my take on 9/11 conspiracies see here, here and here). “Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t,” says Lee, but it’s really necessary to pick one: Either the Bush administration was woefully and criminally incompetent in responding to the disaster, or it was so diabolically in control of the situation as to engineer the levee collapse itself.
To believe the latter — that the administration deliberately flooded New Orleans’s poorest districts, creating a humanitarian catastrophe — one would also have to believe that they proceeded to mismanage their own man-made crisis in full view of the news media, the American people and the world. They were just pretending to be a bunch of callous and ineffectual morons! They deliberately flushed their moral and political credibility down the toilet for all time! The evil genius of it!
From what I recall of David Remnick’s New Yorker piece, he simply explained the conspiracy theories and why they’ve gained traction among the poor and disenfranchised. He certainly did not endorse the theories. I haven’t yet seen Lee’s film; it’s possible that he raises the subject in a similarly responsible way. But his statements on the Bill Maher program were not exactly measured and circumspect. The meat of the exchange is here. [Note: I’m not endorsing the right-wing agenda of the “NewsBusters” blog.] To my mind, the only person making any sense during the contretemps is Michel Martin of ABC News, who accused both Spike Lee and Tucker Carlson of “following a script,” generating heat rather than light.
Conspiracy issue aside, there’s little doubt of this film’s importance. HBO will broadcast “When the Levees Broke” on August 21 (part one) and August 22 (part two), and again in its four-hour entirety on August 29. Watch.
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