Wet Bank Guide

As I troll through the long, dismal piece in a past Times-Picayune on the state of our sewerage and water system, I hear again the ugly refrain: "the Stafford Act does not allow...under the Stafford Act FEMA cannot....the Stafford Act generally requires..."

The Stafford Act for those of you who have not lived for a year or more in a disaster area is the Federal's law that governs how the central government doles out emergency assistance in the case of a Presidential emergency declaration. It places close limits on how money may be spent in disaster recovery, and empowers legions of unambitious accountants in the government's employ to pick over every bill before it is paid, and even to deny payment for work previously authorized, leaving local government in the lurch.

If the logic of the Stafford Act were applied to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, every National Guardsman would be required to demonstrate that every gallon of fuel consumed and every round fired was directed at a card carrying member of al-Queda, or else the state from which he was called might be required to pay the cost. Very little shooting would occur, however, as the accountants would need to vet every operation in advance to determine if it in fact was part of the war on terror, and would reserve the right to change their nasty little bean-counter minds after the fact.

People like to think that New Orleans was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. It was not. The storm struck the city only a glancing blow, and I will remind you how the mildly disappointed crews from the Weather Channel stood in the foyers of their downtown hotels and put the best possible face on it: the city had dodged the bullet. What happened to the city was the failure of the federally engineered and built levee system, through clearly demonstrated negligence of both the engineers and their political masters.

For this, we feel entitled (as we would be if the levees were a private concern) to fair compensation for our losses. Flood control, alas, is not a private concern but one of the federal government ever since the middle 20th Century. And our government (like those everywhere) cloaks itself in "sovereign immunity" against any lawsuit, and for good measure tosses in our own unique separation of powers. In the end we turned hat in hand, like petitioners before a throne, and like every farmer who loses a cow to a snowstorm, to the federal government and to FEMA for help. It seemed reasonable, since our loss (unlike that of the tornado blasted Kansan or the blizzard-buried North Dakotan) was not a caprice of nature, but a failure of the government.

That is what might ultimately destroy this great city: the flinty hearts of bureaucratic Federal accountants. Their's is the miserliness of the fellow who demands an exact accounting of the shared bill at lunch down to the last pat of butter. It is the driving principal of the Stafford Act, the product of a stony Vermonter who wanted to bring order to therough-and-tumble way Congress sought to shower their constituents with disaster aid at every sight of a funnel cloud or every instance of a snowbound cow not getting its feed.

We are bleeding to death from a thousand paper cuts inflicted by the Byzantine origami beast of the federal bureaucracy, as carefully folded by the hands of Robert T. Stafford.

Most Americans will never recognize this, unless some great disaster should befall them. I think we have a civic obligation to help them understand this. I also think we should do this in the way that is guaranteed to attract the greatest amount of attention: by throwing a big party.

In England, there is a long-standing civic celebration called Guy Fawkes Night. Briefly, Mr. Fawkes and some co-conspirators attempted to decapitate the ruling regime by blowing up the House of Lords during its opening ceremony. This early terrorist was caught in the act of putting the torch to the fuse, tortured until he confessed, and executed along with his fellow travelers.

The date of the plot and its failure are celebrated to this date in boisterous celebrations by bonfires and fireworks. There is eating and I am fairly certain there is some drinking, based on what we know of pub and football (that's soccer to youse guys) culture.

The main part of the celebration is the humiliation of straw figures of Guy Fawkes, which were paraded through the streets by small boys and humiliated. There were poems and songs and in the old days young boys would often shake people down for "a penny for the Guy". Mr. Fawkes is then tossed on the bonfire with much hooting and shooting off of fireworks.

So far, we have a parade, eating and drinking, and a bonfire with fireworks. That's starting to sound like something we understand how to do.

I think it's time we embraced our new relationship with the central government, and gave that relationship a real New Orleans twist. I think we need our own Guy Fawkes celebration, and I propose that we center this one on the people who are out to destroy us. Now, burning President Bush might not sit well with some people. I don't want to offend any of the people who've actuallly come to help. So I suggest that we make the center of our festival Mr. Stafford. I would not, however, find any objection to the odd effigy of the Micheals Brown and Chertoff or penny-pincher-in-chief Donald Powell.

We'll need a date for this bonfire, something symbolic of our increasingly edgy relationship with the central government. We need a day charged with political significance and one in which people are off work so we can hope for a good turnout.

I suggest the Fourth of July. Personally, I don't find much to celebrate based on my personal experience of what the United States has become. Should we celebrate the incompetence that flooded the city and then stood by and watched? The miserliness of the compensation we were offered, or the continuing federal sabotage of efforts to rebuild? I am grateful to the American people who continue to come to help us. The depth of ill-will I have for the central government I increasingly regard as a hostile foreign capital can scarcely be expressed, except in terms that would likely bring a visit from homeland security.

I say this Fouth of July we forget the patriotic clap trap, which has just become a tawdry front for something that in no way resembles the governments of Washington or Jefferson or Lincoln, and put Mr. Stafford and the rest to the torch.


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