Olbermann: Truth and consequences

Hurricane Katrina

September 5, 2005

While we didn’t realize it at the time, and we hadn’t yet enshrined the format or come up with the name, this was in fact the First Special Comment.*

I was on my way out to a minor league ballpark to clear my head of the first week of the cascade of disasters that was Hurricane Katrina, when I chanced to turn on the television. There was the secretary of Homeland Security—a John Waters look-alike without the charm— explaining to me that Louisiana was a city that was largely underwater. At first, the gaffe made me feel as if I were underwater. I needed to check that transcript to see if that’s what he had really said.

Needless to say, I never made it to the ball game.

As I would later tell an interviewer, this was one of those moments when it felt like the words were just coming out of my fingers—when

*Just for the record: For the sake of utter (ahem) historical accuracy, these Special Comments have been reproduced in this book as I uttered them on the air, and that includes the sort of little grammatical infelicities that my copy editor tried to weed out. But what I said, I said, and I stand by it.

My indignation, more as a citizen than as a journalist, made it necessary to address a topic directly and at length.

And the words had not come out at that length in sixteen years. The only time I had ever previously written anything resembling, in shape, tone, or texture, the definition of the word “screed,” I had been a local sportscaster in Los Angeles—angered and humiliated that when the 1989 World Series was interrupted by the Loma Prieta earthquake in the Bay Area, baseball staged no charity exhibition game, or promised any specific aid, even though the players wore on their chests the very names of the cities most heavily impacted by the disaster—San Francisco and Oakland. I pledged to donate the equivalent of the salary I would have made covering the series and challenged baseball’s teams and players to do the same. The commentary lasted six minutes—six minutes out of a twenty-five-minute Sunday night sports broadcast.

When I got back to the office the next afternoon, the phones were still ringing, management was encouraging me to repeat the commentary on that evening’s news, and the first reactionary newspaper columnist was comparing me (unfavorably, I should point out) to the character Howard Beale in the prescient movie Network. Almost all of the elements, good and bad, of the Special Comments were foreshadowed in those few days, principal among them that it was necessary to do and say things like this—but only when it was necessary, and not merely when it was rating “sweeps” time.

The next time it was necessary, for me anyway, was after Michael Chertoff faux-pas’d himself into the history books. For some, Hurricane Katrina was a lightbulb moment, when they realized that the president and administration in whom they had put their faith were in fact incompetent. For the rest of us, it was yet another case study in the dissonance between what they said and what they did. Like a lot of people, I was outraged as much by the administration’s incompetence as I was by its apparent indifference to the people of New Orleans.

A day after I presented this Comment, Barbara Bush had her own Marie Antoinette moment, a jaw-dropping moment in which she was blissfully sanguine about the people huddled in the Astrodome: “And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.” Suddenly those murmurs, that “Bar” was not the benevolent grandmother implied by her carefully manicured image, had been confirmed. It was suddenly not hard to figure out either of the George Bushes.

The Katrina comment apparently struck a chord. It quickly made the rounds on the political blogs; my boss pulled me aside to encourage me to make similar remarks whenever the spirit moved me; Rolling Stone would put me alongside everybody from Jack Murtha to Seth MacFarlane in its year-end issue saluting “rebels”; and we even heard rumblings that the commentary was viewable in a pirated edition online, courtesy of some brand-new company called “YouTube”— whatever that was.

secretary of homeland security Michael Chertoff said it all, starting his news briefing Saturday afternoon: “Louisiana is a city that is largely underwater . . .”

Well, there’s your problem right there.

If ever a slip of the tongue defined a government’s response to a crisis, this was it.

The seeming definition of our time and our leaders had been their insistence on slashing federal budgets for projects that might’ve saved New Orleans. The seeming characterization of our government: that it was on vacation when the city was lost, and could barely tear itself away from commemorating VJ Day and watching Monty Python’s Flying Circus to at least pretend to get back to work. The seeming identification of these hapless bureaucrats: their pathetic use of the future tense in terms of relief they could’ve brought last Monday and Tuesday—like the president, whose statements have looked like they’re being transmitted to us by some kind of four-day tape delay.

But no. The incompetence and the ludicrous prioritization will forever be symbolized by one gaffe by the head of what is ironically called “the Department of Homeland Security”: “Louisiana is a city . . .”

Politician after politician—Republican and Democrat alike—has paraded before us, unwilling or unable to shut off the “I-Me” switch in their heads, condescendingly telling us about how moved they were or how devastated they were—congenitally incapable of telling the difference between the destruction of a city and the opening of a supermarket.

And as that sorry recital of self-absorption dragged on, I have resisted editorial comment. The focus needed to be on the efforts to save the stranded—even the Internet’s meager powers were correctly devoted to telling the stories of the twin disasters, natural and government-made.

But now, at least, it is has stopped getting exponentially worse in Mississippi and Alabama and New Orleans and Louisiana (the state, not the city). And, having given our leaders what we know now is the week or so they need to get their act together, that period of editorial silence I mentioned should come to an end.

No one is suggesting that mayors or governors in the afflicted areas, nor the federal government, should be able to stop hurricanes. Lord knows, no one is suggesting that we should ever prioritize levee improvement for a below-sea-level city ahead of $454 million worth of trophy bridges for the politicians of Alaska.

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