Summary
The irony of the president posing for pictures on the inland edge of her town where one remaining school still stands didn't escape [Jonean Crowle], who lives just a couple of miles down the road from the school, closer to the water where pretty much nothing still stands. Crowle can't get a permit for a FEMA trailer because she doesn't have electricity, and she can't get electricity until sewer and water service are restored to her neighborhood, which won't be any time soon. But, judging by politicians' speeches and the media's feeding frenzy over feel-good recovery stories, neighborhoods like Crowle's have been wiped off the map in more ways than one. Just last week, crews scooping debris near Crowle's house saw the leg of a human corpse fall out. But you don't hear about that on the news, and the two miles separating her neighborhood and the reopening school mark the line between two worlds divided by the whims of Hurricane Katrina and the public-image manipulation that's arrived in its wake.
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Extract
Going South
Our president and most media reports say life is improving along Mississippi's Gulf Coast. They should ask the people who have to live there.
On Oct. 11, President George W. Bush visited Delisle Elementary School near Pass Christian, Miss. He embraced kindergarteners and spoke in inspirational aphorisms about how hard the federal government has been working to restore order and rebuild the Gulf Coast since Hurricane Katrina roared ashore almost two months ago.Don't believe everything you hear.Two weeks before Bush posed for his eighth storm-zone photo op, I stood in the parking lot of that same school, warily watching six uniformed cops shove ammunition clips into their automatic weapons. It was just about sunset, a streaky pink and orange sky heralding the end of another exhausting day and the beginning of yet another chaotic night for the folks trying to make sense of their lives in Katrinaville.We'd best move along, the officers advised, good-naturedly but without question of our obedience. It was almost curfew, and things were about to get a little dicey: They were hunting down a man who'd been threatening to shoot police in the neighborhood.We were wrapping up a long first day of our animal rescue mission. After traveling mile after mile past flattened buildings, malodorous sewage ponds and razor-wire checkpoints guarded by soldiers in full combat gear, the parking lot of the cheerful little school - the only one left standing in that ...See the full content of this document
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