BY LOIS WADSWORTH
Spike Lee
If An American City Dies
Who cares?
WHEN THE LEVEES BROKE: A
REQUIEM IN FOUR ACTS: A Spike Lee
Film. 40 Acres and A Mule Filmworks Production.
Directed and produced by Spike Lee. Producer, editor,
Sam Pollard. Cinematographer, Cliff Charles. Editors
Greta Gandbhir, Nancy Novack. Composer, Terence
Blanchard. Line producer, Butch Robinson. HBO pro-
ducer, Jacqueline Glover. HBO executive producer,
Sheila Nevins.
I
used to pore through my daddy’s old
Life magazines when I was a kid, fas-
cinated by photographs of the night
bombings of London during the Blitz, the
firebombing of Tokyo, the bleak, bombed-
out ruins of Berlin at war’s end and the
utter, barren wastelands of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki after the U.S. dropped the first
atomic bombs in 1945.
Television has covered graphically the
death throes by armed conflict of cities such
as Beirut, Sarajevo and Baghdad. Several
Phyllis
Montana
LeBlanc
months after Mexico City’s powerful 1987
earthquake, the city’s dead zones were still
holes in the city’s center. Aerial photos of
the enormous portion of coastal Indonesian
erased by a deadly tsunami showed that the
earth itself is malleable.
Manmade and natural physical destruc-
tion have become familiar, but the fates of
whole populations are as unfathomable as
SALSA
DANCING
Vets Clubª Ballroom Upstairs
1626 Willamette St.
the agonies of the frozen figures fleeing
Vesuvius’s lethal eruptions. The American
people rush to help the victims, but our
government often turns its back on human
tragedies from distant, Third World coun-
tries. We’ve seen many places die piece-
meal before our eyes, making it easy to
rationalize such disasters as aberrant but
human historical experiences.
Growing up in Texas Gulf Coast hurri-
cane country, I never imagined I’d see such
unbridled arrogance and neglect by local,
state and federal governments following a
huge storm as occurred with Hurricane
Katrina. While 80 percent of New Orleans
lay covered by toxic, murky water, and
thousands of people were visibly stranded
on freeways, bridges, rooftops and the
overcrowded Superdome awaiting rescue,
government help did not come. Five days
after the storm hit, institutional,
organized aid had not reduced
the peoples’ suffering, although
courageous volunteers were out
there doing what they could do
to save people from day one.
My outrage has been sim-
mering a long time.
Yet a year later, far too many
people are waiting still for a
FEMA trailer, an insurance
check or some kind of financial
assistance to rebuild their
destroyed homes and businesses.
Again, volunteers, church groups
and private charities have tried to
fill the void left by government.
New Orleans’s inauspicious geography
and the state’s competing political interests
were ripe for Katrina, a fierce storm brewed
in the cauldron of global warming and made
fiercer by the decades-long loss of wetlands
to development. Among the storm’s human
collaborators, the U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers is notable for its criminally shod-
dy design and negligence of the city’s levees.
Water from the breaching of the 17th
Street levee near Lake Pontchartrain began
flooding into the lower Ninth Ward in a
matter of minutes. In Lee’s documentary,
an unidentified man wades across a flooded
street to inform a television reporter on
higher ground near the French Quarter that
he heard the levee break from his house.
This may have been the first time anyone
outside the impacted area learned of the
levee’s catastrophic failure.
Other unforgettable images from Lee’s
brilliant film include Condi Rice in New
York trying on a pair of peacock blue
Ferragamo stilettos (the spendy shoes made
famous on “Sex and the City”) while peo-
ple were dying in N’awlins’ overcrowded
shelters and inundated neighborhoods. Aw
Shucks! Bush and Who Me? Cheney are
caught vacationing during the crucial first
days of the city’s plight, with not so much
as a word of heartfelt empathy for the
storm’s survivors. The best summary of the
Bush administration’s attitude came from
rapper and comedian Kanye West, who
famously remarked to a stunned Mike
Meyers on national television, “George
Bush doesn’t care about black people.”
Lee’s stunning, understated and creative
HBO documentary presents an excellent
overview of New Orleans’ sorry fiasco.
Using archival footage as well as contem-
porary interviews, the director lets the
voices and faces of people who were there
show us the human picture, which packs an
emotional wallop. Many people are mad as
hell and unstinting in their condemnation
of all the politicians who fiddled while the
levees failed.
For Lee’s part, he takes a back seat to let
the people speak their own words. The
interviewees span the Louisiana political
spectrum, with the most passionate voices
being those of locals who’ve watched the
unfolding of this tragedy. The result is a
searing indictment of the Bush government.
Interviewees
include
Louisiana
Governor Kathleen Blanco, New Orleans
Mayor Ray Nagin, resident Phyllis
Montana LeBlanc, activist Harry Belafonte,
Rev. Al Sharpton, CNN reporter Soledad
O’Brien, musician Wynton Marsalis, com-
poser Terence Blanchard and his beautiful,
aged mother, actor Sean Penn, Kanye West
and dozens of New Orleanean witnesses to
the destruction of their city.
Local cablecaster Comcast will carry
repeats of When the Levees Broke on HBO
On Demand from Aug. 30 through Sept. 27.
Check for showtimes. I urge you to see this
important, fearless documentary.
ew
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Rogue Creamery
Cheese Available
AUGUST 31, 2006 21