Fats

I just heard that in the midst of the ruin of New Orleans that Fats Domino is missing and feared dead. If he is indeed lost to us that will add a dimension to the tragedy of the last week impossible for me to calculate.

I can remember the first time I heard Fats, sitting alone in my room in the Bronx, struggling to navigate through my adolescence. Ever since, whenever I was feeling low and trying to get back in touch with myself I would listen to him bang one out.

"Do you remember me baby like I remember you?"

I am doing that right now.

"Got my ticket in my hand...I'm goin' to New Orleans..."

...And More

Katrina on television:

Aside from the thousands of frightened, helpless people still stranded in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast, does anyone look more lost, more out of control than Wolf Blizter on CNN? Someone close down the Situation Room. It will be an act of mercy.

So far has anyone done a more humane, elegant, professional job of telling this terrible story than Arron Brown on CNN and Elizabeth Vargas on ABC? (Hint: the answer is "no.")

Kristina: Bits & Pieces

Katrina: Bits & Pieces

# 1: Katrina came and went having done no more and no less than she was created to do, emptying out her ectoplasm in one hell of a wild ride along the coast. And having done her work now a faded killer queen, a whisper of herself disappearing on the horizon. Behind is the slime of her presence. The crumpled homes, destroyed landscape, mangled cars and boats floating across our screens. The hundreds, perhaps thousands, of dead beneath the fetid, debris clogged waters waiting to emerge.

It should be more than enough.

# 2: But now… now the real story is emerging.

The one where thousands cling to rooftops and wave white flags, or hold up handmade signs saying “Save Me.”

The one where families are separated and can not find each other, or contact each other.

The one where guns are grabbed and stealing begins.

The one where those waiting to be rescued fire at those who have come to rescue them.

The one where the bodies of people who have died since Katrina danced on through begin to pile up. These are the innocents, the left behind, the ones who were supposed to have been saved who lie lifeless on the ground, or propped up in chairs, or on makeshift gurneys. Some covered in sheets; some not. And the grownups watch and the children watch and surround them, and grow hungrier and hotter and more frightened and more desperate and angry. These helpless victims of neglect, and failed response.

# 3: The one where Bush, our cowboy president peers out the tiny window from inside the upholstered cocoon on Air Force One. Above the waters, away from the dead, the smell. Safe in the clouds, nearer his God to him.

“Jesus,” he must have thought, “You gave me 9/11 and I rode that pretty hard on pure instinct. What am I going to do with this?” Then making his vacuous, cliché ridden statement. We will be fine, stronger, as a result of this he tells us. But it will take “years.” Right. Tell that to the terrified, dying and hungry spilling out of the New Orleans Dome. They want to know what he will do for them now. Thursday.

# 4: The one where we want to know why authorities, who had enough advance warning to ask people to leave New Orleans before Katrina did not provide free busses and boats and whatever it took to get the poor, the sick, the old out at the same time. The ones packing the Dome, crouched on their rooftops, or bloated and dead under and above the water.

We wonder, does it have to do with the fact that they are mostly Black.

And even if that nasty suspicion could not possibly be true (after all New Orleans mayor is African American) still…but still….

# 5. The one where the finger pointing and the questions and the blame finding has only begun.

It will be as ugly and vicious and enduring as anything Katrina left behind.