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City of the Dead
Donations (make checks payable to Evangeline Parish Katrina Relief Fund) and messages of solidarity (as well as requests for the recipe for hurricane gumbo) may be sent to: Ville Platte Shelter, c/o Jennifer Vidrine, PO Box 795, Ville Platte, LA 70586; (jennifervidrine@hotmail.com).
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Human Ecology
Mike Davis: As human actions change the planet in irreversable ways, will human bonds suffer irreversable damage, too?
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People Burn Here
Mike Davis: Illegal immigrants are the invisible victims of the California wildfires.
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Denial in the Desert
Mike Davis: Abrupt climate change is rapidly turning the American West into a desert. But a culture in denial continues rampant suburbanization, fueled by the delusion that our water supply is inexhaustible.
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Car Bombs: WMDs the Surge Can't Stop
Mike Davis: The favored weapon of the ill-armed and underfunded is the one weapon of mass destruction that the Bush Administration has totally ignored.
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Dorothy Healey
Progressives, Liberals, & The American Left
Mike Davis: An appreciation of one of the last members of the left's "greatest generation," known for her physical courage, warmth and intelligence, who spent a lifetime arguing eloquently for socialism, feminism and peace.
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Dorothy Healey
Progressives, Liberals, & The American Left
Mike Davis: An appreciation of one of the last members of the left's "greatest generation," known for her physical courage, warmth and intelligence, who spent a lifetime arguing eloquently for socialism, feminism and peace.
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Who Is Killing New Orleans?
Mike Davis: Mayor-appointed commissions and experts, mostly white and Republican, propose to radically shrink and reshape a majority-black and Democratic city.
"I wore a [hazmat] space suit and piloted the boat. I was chosen because I'm trained in forensics, and since I am a Cajun the higher powers assumed I was a water baby. We worked at night because of the heat and to avoid the goddamn news helicopters that hover like vultures during the daytime. We didn't want some poor son of a bitch seeing his grandma covered with ants or crabs on the 6 o'clock news."
Ants and crabs? "Hey, this is Louisiana. The minute New Orleans flooded it became swamp again. The ecosystem returns. Ants float and they build big colonies on floating bodies the same as they would upon a cypress log. And the crabs eat carrion. We'd pulled the crabs off, but the goddamn ants were a real problem."
Vincent described the exhausting, gruesome work of hauling bloated bodies aboard the boat and then zipping them into body bags. (FEMA neglected water, food rations and medicine, but did fly thousands of body bags into Louis Armstrong Airport.) Although Vincent was supposed to tag the bags, few victims had any identification. Some didn't have faces.
One of us asks about the demographics of death. "We pulled seventy-seven bodies out of the water. Half were little kids. It was tough--no one died with their eyes closed, and all had fought like hell, some slowly drowning in their attics.
"I deal with crime scenes and human remains all the time and usually keep a professional distance. You have to, if you want to continue to do your job. But sometimes a case really gets to you. We found the corpse of a woman clutching a young baby. Mother or sister, I don't know. I couldn't pry the infant out of the woman's grasp without breaking her fingers. After finally separating them, the baby left a perfect outline imprinted across the lady's chest. That will really haunt me. And so will the goddamn cries of the people we left behind.
"We were under strict orders to remove only bodies. But there were still lots of people on the roofs or leaning out the windows of their houses. They were crazy with fear and thirst. They screamed, begged and cursed us. But we had a boatload of bodies, some probably infectious. So we saved the dead and left the living." Vincent believes that the "sniper activity" so luridly reported in the media was from stranded people who were outraged when boats and helicopters ignored them.
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