Dispatches From the Edge_ A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival - Anderson Cooper [53]
“So, please, I understand. You might say I’m a politician, but I grew up in New Orleans. My father was the mayor of that city. I’ve represented that city my whole life, and it’s just not New Orleans. It’s St. Bernard, and St. Tammany, and Plaquemines Parish that have been completely underwater. Our levee system has failed. We need a lot of help. And the Congress has been wonderful to help us, and we need more help. Nobody’s perfect, Anderson. Everybody has to stand up here. And I know you understand. So thank you so much for everything you’re doing.”
When it’s done, there is silence in my ear. We are in a commercial break, and my producers are not saying a thing. I worry I’ve crossed the line. I hate TV anchors who are rude, and I never want to be disrespectful to any guest on my program. I always pride myself on not wearing my opinion on my sleeve, and on being able to adapt to a given situation and discuss ideas with anyone. This is different, though. No one has any information, and people are desperate. The least our politicians can do is answer questions. It seems to me totally inappropriate to stick to sound-bite statements and praise of the president.
Three days later, Senator Landrieu appears on ABC News, being interviewed by George Stephanopoulos. Her tone seems to have changed. She says she is upset about the pace of relief efforts and angry about federal criticism of New Orleans police. “If one person criticizes our sheriffs,” Landrieu says, “or says one more thing, including the President of the United States, he will hear from me—one more word about it…and I might likely have to punch him—literally.”
Just as we come back from commercial break, a pickup truck drives by. In the back a young man with a trucker hat holds up a tattered American flag. He salvaged it from the wreckage. He’s tired and worn, but proud of that flag, proud that he and his family are still standing. We don’t speak—he is too far away—but I look him in the eye and we nod to each other. In his face I think I detect betrayal and anger, but also strength and resolve. I’m on the air, but I find myself tearing up. My throat tightens; I’m almost unable to speak. I quickly try to move on to another story, and hope no one has noticed.
MY DAD USED to cry often: in movies, at church, once even in a restaurant in Mobile. A woman moved among the tables singing “Amazing Grace,” and tears rolled down his cheeks. I always found it embarrassing. When he was a child, a relative whom everyone called Mr. Raspberry was known for his prodigious crying. Mr. Raspberry was a devout Pentacostalist, and one year at a family reunion he became overcome with emotion. Weeping, he shouted, “Glory to God! We’ve all been spared another year!”
“Why does Mr. Raspberry cry so much?” my father asked his grandmother.
“Oh, if you ask me, his bladder’s just located too close to his eyes,” she said.
There is so much about my father I’m just starting to remember, so much I recognize now that I’m nearing the same age he was when I was born. My father wrote a book called Families, a memoir about growing up in Mississippi. The book is a celebration of family and of the importance of remembering one’s roots. He wrote it two years before he died, as a letter to my brother and me. I think he knew he wouldn’t live to see us grow into men. His father had died young, and his sister Elsie had died of a heart attack when she was just thirty-eight. I know he worried that in his absence my brother and I would forget our Mississippi roots, our blood connection to the South.
When my father’s book came out, he went on speaking tours throughout Mississippi and several times brought my brother and me along. He didn’t try to hide the state’s faults from us. He’d been an early