Dispatches From the Edge_ A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival - Anderson Cooper [70]
“This National Guard guy took my seat when I went to the bathroom,” he says. “When I get back, I tell him, ‘That’s my seat,’ and he tells me, ‘Fuck off.’ Fuck off? He’s with the National Guard. What the fuck is that? I’m the PO-leese. So I grabbed him and took him outside. Bullshit.”
The night grinds on. Buying beers and whisky shots, the cops come and go, off duty, tired. Their wives and girlfriends are gone; they have no homes to go back to.
“You gotta do something,” one cop tells me, inches from my face. It’s late, everyone is drunk, the stripper’s G-string is filled with wet bills. “No one gives a shit,” the police officer tells me, tears streaming down his face.
Earlier, the police were asked to pass a hat for a fellow officer shot in the head during the looting. He’s in a hospital in Houston; the money is for his family.
“You can’t let them forget. We’re counting on you,” he tells me. The stripper finishes her set, and another takes the stage.
“I love you, man,” one cop tells me. He doesn’t mean it, of course, but right now he thinks he does. They’ve been screwed and abandoned, and I’m buying the rounds.
EVERY POLITICIAN I talk to seems to say the same thing: “Now is not the time to point fingers.” Spin doctors even come up with the term blame game. “I’m not going to play the blame game,” they say, dismissing you when you ask for answers, for the names of officials who made key decisions. I notice that some reporters start using the term too. I can’t understand why.
Demanding accountability is no game, and there’s nothing wrong with trying to understand who made mistakes, who failed. If no one is held accountable for their decisions, for their actions, all of this will happen again. Not one person has yet to stand up and admit wrongdoing. No politician, no bureaucrat, has admitted a specific mistake. Some have made blanket statements, saying they accept responsibility for whatever went wrong. But that’s not good enough. We need to know specifics. What was done wrong? What were the mistakes?
I ask any official I can. No one will answer. The only “mistakes” they admit to are actually veiled criticisms of others. The mayor should have declared a mandatory evacuation on Saturday, instead of waiting until Sunday. Precious hours were lost. The governor could have done that as well, but didn’t. They could have moved hundreds of city buses and local school buses to higher ground and used them to evacuate the nearly one hundred thousand residents who had no access to private transportation. They didn’t. There were plenty of mistakes to go around. I just want someone to admit to them.
THE MAYOR ANNOUNCES a plan to repopulate the city, but three days later after heavy criticism, he backs off, blaming Hurricane Rita. Rita is on the cusp of becoming a category 3 storm, and it’s heading this way. It’s projected to make landfall around Galveston, Texas, and already the media is gearing up, pulling out, like children drawn by shiny objects.
After weeks of asking, the mayor finally agrees to an interview with me, but after it’s done, I feel as if I blew it. We spoke a lot about Rita, because it was in the headlines, but I wish I’d focused more on Katrina mistakes. I worry that politicians are trying to divert attention away from the failures, to delay and distract people until they forget.
At the end of the interview I ask the mayor if he’d be willing to come back on again and discuss what he did wrong and what others did wrong. He says he would be happy for the opportunity. For the next four months, however, he declines my every invitation to sit down and talk.
Over the phone my producers are telling me that I’m doing great. Each day they tell me the ratings for my broadcast are high, but the truth is, I don’t want to hear about it. This is not a “story”; these people aren’t characters. It doesn’t feel right to talk about plot lines and rating points.
At times I feel like a failure,