Anticlimax: Fema on Film

By Demon

Large scale threat and disaster is nothing new to Hollywood. And when it happens, government emergency response agencies have a role to play in the picture. Whether the culprit is alien visitation (Close Encounters), contagious virus (Outbreak), or even terrorism (The Siege) the gov is quick to respond.

FEMA
Even scarier than you thought

In Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the Devil’s Tower area is cordoned off by the military to prevent curious people from getting too close to visiting aliens and leaving earth without permission.

In Outbreak, an entire town is covered in saran wrap by disease control experts to keep the vicious monkey flu from spreading.

And in The Siege, terrorist-threatened downtown New York is turned into a massive concentration camp by Bruce Willis.

One actually gets the impression from these movies that government agencies responding to disaster are not only competent, but that they do their job only too well. Bruce Willis’ Major General Devereaux says as much in The Siege when he warns Annette Benning’s smart CIA spook about the serious impact of sending the military into New York.

Now, however, real disaster has hit the United States in the form of a Class 5 hurricane. New Orleans and much of South have been decimated. Death estimates run from 10,000 to 40,000 people, with financial tolls in the billions.

But if federal response in movies about disaster is sending Caesar’s army into the city in order to save it, the real life thing is fiddling while Rome burns. FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, ostensibly the nation’s big guns of defense in planning for and confronting disasters like Katrina, was apparently on vacation with President Bush during the buildup, impact, and immediate aftermath of the storm. Furthermore, when FEMA finally woke up, dragged itself out of bed, and turned on the TV to realize it had a job to do, it responded by actually making things worse by many accounts - ordering citizen flotillas to refrain from rescuing survivors, keeping a navy floating hospital at bay in the gulf, neglecting evacuees at the Superdome, cutting communication lines of local officials, and preventing police and firemen from entering the city.

For years, right wing extremists have included FEMA in their conspiratorial fantasies. FEMA was the shadowy government of the future, biding its time until a suitable disaster unfolded, one that would allow FEMA to take formal control over the country in the form of perpetual martial law.

At that point militant liberals under the control of Jews and homosexuals would be in charge of everything, stripping away the guns from the noble citizenry and forcing the bountiful white women of Montana into sexual slavery. Or something like that. But that’s not the point. The point is that FEMA of the popular imagination in this country was an overaccomplished, militaristic, ultraprepared superagency. Instead, FEMA revealed itself as a bumbling, dimwitted bureaucracy that most likely requires a helmet to watch television.

Imagine getting rescued by the DMV and you’ll get the picture.

In Hollywood, superagencies like FEMA are run by people like Bruce Willis’ Major General Devereaux (The Siege), Morgan Freeman’s Colonel Curtis (Dreamcatcher) and Lee Van Cleef’s Commissioner Hauk (Escape from New York). These guys are smart, confident, former military guys, so competent only people like Snake Plissken can outsmart them.

In real life we get a failed bureaucrat named Michael Brown who’s previous job was - can this be real? - grand poobah of an Arabian horse and pony club? Unlike his Hollywood archetypes, Brown couldn’t even secure the perimeter of the city in order to effectively lie to the public about the situation being under control (well, to be fair the guys in the Hollywood movies never could either - Richard Dreyfuss’ Roy Neary managed to get past the military and board an alien spacecraft before he could even get his passport stamped). In New Orleans, three Duke students in a Hyundai managed to slip through his force field and rescue sevent survivors.

It’s obvious in Hollywood movies that people like Devereaux, Curtis, and Hauk earned their posts by getting the job done. These are results minded individuals, pissing on bureaucracy and cracking skulls. Hauk, the most surly of the bunch, even fought in World War Three! Brown on the other hand? One need hardly speculate on how this grossly incomptent individual got the attention of Bush and took command of one of the most important offices in the United States government? Certainly there were horses involved (Arabians), and coctails, maybe cocaine, money (duh!), and likely some form of intermarriage among the ruling elite.

Brown must simply be the “right kind of person.” Not right the sense of competence, but right in what he owns and who he knows. In Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, an English Lord explains: “We represent the right people, not the best people, but the right people.”

And speaking of Kubrick movies, let’s step back a minute to another movie that has some relevance here - a movie that is not about fixing disaster, but creating one - Dr. Strangelove. The bombardeers in that film have war plans that describe in detail how to annihiliate specific cities. And they even have backup plans if they can’t make it to their primary target because it’s been hit by a missile or otherwise destroyed. Doesn’t FEMA have similar documents for saving cities from floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, and the like? Especially events seen as inevitable?

For instance, it’s only a matter of time before a massive earthquake hits a heavily populated area in California. This isn’t speculation or conspiracy, this is geological truth. It could be fifty years from now or it could be ten. It could be tomorrow. Does FEMA have a plan for this - something illustrating the basic problem and various contingencies? New Orleans levies were supposed to be incapable of withstanding a Category 3 hurricane and the Gulf of Mexico sees powerful hurricanes cross its waters every year. Was there truly no plan in place for this eventuality, a plan that could take effect before, during, or immediately after the storm and not several days later?

This storm did not strike with sudden fury. It slowly tracked it’s way up to New Orleans. This wasn’t a fastball, this was a slow pitch! FEMA should have shined in such a scenario. Instead, it languished in the shitwater.

And one must also wonder how the FEMA response fits into the larger picture of homeland security. Since September 11, 2001 the universal refrain from public officials has been “terrorists will strike again.” If FEMA (and it’s parent organization, the Office of Homeland Security) can’t handle a long-predicted, slowly-approaching menace like a hurricane striking a city in a hurricane zone, how will FEMA handle the sudden and unpredictable nature of a terrorist attack?

By blaming poor people?

It’s safe to say that when the Big One finally happens, we’re screwed. If you are part of the ruling elite, you might be able to evacuate yourself and locate medical care from one of your doctor friends on the putting green. But most of this country, it’s just plain screwed. And the poor - those least able to defend themselves in this society - will most likely be blamed for it too. At least one Senator, Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, has already suggested fining people who refuse to heed future evacuation orders, completely missing the point many in that doomed city of New Orleans were poor and elderly unable to evacuate.

The idiocy of comments like Santorum’s raise an important question, one that transcends right and left politics in this country where the political parties often differ only by their symbols. Is the ruling elite capable of protecting the citizenry of this country, or has it become completely divorced from the everyday reality of work, debt, and struggle faced by the majority of people?

America likes to think of itself as a classless society, but the situation in New Orleans displays anything but classlessness, and in America class is often further distinguished along racial lines. Reporting on the aftermath of the storm, the Wall Street Journal reported that “wealthy white neighborhoods emerged very much intact, while black neighborhoods are swimming in toxic sludge” and on the issue of rebuilding, quoted one of the wealthy survivors of the priviledged class as saying “The new city must be something very different, with better services and fewer poor people.”

But perhaps nothing illustrates the divide between those on top and those on the bottom more than President Bush’s initial “visit” to the city. While the poor lay dead in the fetid waters below, Bush surveyed the devastation 2500 feet overhead in Air Force One. People below had lost everything, many of them even their lives. Bush never had to dirty his feet; he just had to look out the window and proclaim everything was going to be all right.

A few days later, President Bush visited fellow ruling elite millionaire politician Trent Lott’s damaged home in Mississippi. “Out of the rubble of Trent Lott’s house,” Bush declared, “there’s going to be a fantastic house. And I’m looking forward to sitting on the porch.”

All this while bodies were still being pulled from the flooded city.

Henry Fonda would have handled this much differently.