by Matt Taibbi
“You have to take the Jefferson Highway to 1-10 West, sir,” the kid says.
“But I’m trying to leave—” Willie begins.
“Turn around, sir!” the kid barks.
Willie starts turning around, but traffic is backed up behind us. A few minutes later, Angry Guardsman returns. “Sir! You’re leaving and not coming back?”
“Yes,” Willie says.
“Then get the fuck out,” the kid says, waving his arm frantically.
Willie hesitates.
“Take your crew and get the fuck out of here!” he repeats.
We drive off.
Some eighty years ago, after the great Mississippi flood of 1927, white business leaders in New Orleans pressured the state to blow a levee, flooding mostly black areas in the Delta and forcing the rural poor into the cities. Thus part of what gave birth to the vast ghettos of black poor that Katrina wiped out was a man-made disaster in the distant past. Can something like this be remembered in the genes?
That night, no longer basking in the largess of Academy Award winner Sean Penn, I find myself homeless. Willie invites me to spend the night in his church. I am initially not enthused about the plan. I’d seen his church while out on the boats on Sunday. It is across the street from a gigantic cemetery where we’d seen numerous fresh graves—not exactly the kind of place you want to be wading around in waist-deep water, particularly at night. The longer you stay in New Orleans, the scarier that water seems. You start to imagine gangrene, tetanus, a life without legs, family members wheeling you around on your birthday. But Willie seems weirdly insistent about getting us out to his neighborhood that night, so I agree.
By the time we get there night has fallen. The good pastor is strapped, carrying a Rueger automatic. As we head deeper into the neighborhood, he actually draws his gun and carries it at his side as he walks.
Willie had been strangely quiet the entire time he’d been with us out in the boats for the past two days. Not that he wasn’t sociable—he just didn’t say much about the storm or talk much about anything serious. But now that he is back in his own territory he has some things to say.
Not far from his church we come upon a house full of elderly people who are sitting out on their porch. Their house is in only about three feet of water, but no police or guardsmen have come by to talk to them yet. Upon seeing Willie, Warren Champ and Jeannette Carter ask what the latest news is.
“Well, these reporters are here to see what y’all think about the storm,” he says.
“You tell us, preacher,” says Jeannette. “You’re always reading the Bible and whatnot, doing all that reading.”
“Well, you know this is all about bankruptcy,” he says. “That levee? They letting it fail.”
“Why would they do that?” Jeannette asks.
“All those years when they were stealing . . . all those failed schools, all those debts on the city rolls . . . it’s all going to be washed away now. They’re getting a clean slate, a brand-new slate.”
Willie goes on to explain that most of these neighborhoods are going to be condemned, and that people will be asked to sell their properties: “They’re getting all of y’all out of state, sending you to different parts of the country. And they’re hoping you don’t hold on to what you’ve got. They’re hoping you take the money and move. And then they’ll bring in the developers, and they’ll make new neighborhoods, with a new tax base.”
I am about to interrupt here, but white guilt slaps a hand over my mouth. What am I going to say—that white people aren’t dastardly enough to blow a levee on purpose? This is the wrong audience for that joke. As for the rest of it, it rings unpleasantly true. Deep in my white heart I can appreciate the brutal logic of shipping 300,000 blacks out of town and hoping they stay away at a barbecue somewhere while you auction off their houses. I am definitely not going to argue with that part of it.
“But what is your advice for poor black people?” asks Carter.
“Hold on to your properties,” he says. “Don’t let them take what you’ve got. And you can listen to me. I’m not in it for the money. I’m in it for the blessings of God.”
A few hours later, Willie and I sit in the office of the Noah’s Ark Baptist Church, which is surrounded on all sides by water. It is a small church, with just a few pews and a little table full of pamphlets along one wall providing information about STDs and low-interest home loans.
Back in the office it is about a thousand degrees, and we are eating MREs—I am the only one hungry enough to try the tortellini—by the light of Sterno lamps and flashlights. Willie, who first checks to make sure everything is there (“I’ve had eighty-six break-ins”), talks about the neighborhood. He’s never heard of gentrification, but this is what he is describing to us: parts of his community going to hell, vacant lots bought up by developers, the community slowly vanishing. It is his idea that the flood from Katrina will give him an opportunity to raise money to buy up the ruined lots himself—a process he’s already started with a few adjoining partitions behind his church.
His thoughts are grand in scale, and at times he is unable to separate the hurricane and the bureaucratic response to it from the other forces that have helped bring ruin to his neigh-borhood over the years—drug dealers, venereal disease, bankruptcy, municipal corruption. Katrina offers him a final showdown with all of these forces.
“An empty cart makes a lot of noise,” he says. “I don’t have anyone paying me to be quiet. I’m going to save this neighborhood.”
Eventually we fall asleep; I sack out on the floor, amid mice and various other creatures. We are all tired, and despite the heat and the mean conditions we are all deep asleep not long after midnight.
Sometime in the middle of the night Willie wakes us up.
“They’re here,” he shouts.
“What?” I say. “Who’s here?”
“They’re kicking the doors in,” he says.
I get up. Willie is standing at the back door, his gun drawn. He is silhouetted by the light from a helicopter spotlight, which for some reason is trained on the swamp behind the church.
“They’re coming. I knew it,” he says.
“I don’t think so, man,” I say. “I think he’s just hovering.”
“If he comes,” Willie says, “I’m shooting.”
“I don’t think he’s coming,” I repeat.
Finally the helicopter flies away. Willie puts the gun down and goes back to sleep. The next day, he goes back out on the water.
America is a country that has been skating for ages on its unparalleled ability to look marvelous on the outside. We’ve long had things arranged in such a way that our public exterior is always shimmering and clean—our airports, our food courts, our anchormen, our chain restaurants, our fleets of bombers, and our warehouses full of nick-free products in polymer-coated packaging. For most of the uglier things that are under the surface—the bitterness, the rancor, the greed, the selfishness, the loneliness, the isolation we feel from each other, our inability to communicate and empathize—we’ve found ways to keep these things out of sight. They can be heard, maybe, and read all over the Internet and elsewhere, but not seen—and in any case they have always been subordinate to our legend of supreme competence and efficiency. We may be many things, we Americans, but we always get the job done.
But what happens when we stop getting the job done? What are we left with then?
September 11, the first great paradigm-shifting event of our new century, was a disaster that the American psyche was prepared for. As horrible as it was, it spoke directly to our most deliciously satisfying persecution fantasies: it was Independence Day, Deep Impact, War of the Worlds. Stinky Klingons attack Manhattan; America straps it on and kicks ass. We knew the playbook for that one.
No one was ready for Katrina, though
. He was ridiculed for saying it, but George Bush was absolutely right—painfully if unintentionally honest—when he said that “I don’t think anyone anticipated” this disaster. New Orleans falls into the sea; whose ass do we kick now? When that isn’t an option, we’re left just staring at one another. And that’s what really hurts.
Ms. America
Abu Ghraib irreparably damaged America’s reputation,
but Lynndie England’s trial proved the nation will try
to sweep anything under the rug
October 20, 2005
What a pathetic ending it was for Private Lynndie England, that little hillbilly twit with the rabbit cheeks and the upturned thumb who made the words “Abu Ghraib” infamous.
When she came out for her final curtain call last week—a dreary court-martial at Fort Hood, a hot little armpit in the middle of Texas—there was almost no one there. The courtroom gallery, just three rows deep to begin with, was less than half full. Her mom was there, holding the seemingly normal-looking baby Lynndie managed to squeeze out after All That Terrible Stuff came out last year. There were a couple of expert witnesses who came to say nice things at the sentencing hearing, a friend or two, and maybe a half dozen yawning reporters, all on standby for Hurricane Rita duty. And what they all turned up to watch, ultimately, was little Lynndie up on the stand, pulling a fifth-rate courtroom-beggar act like an immigrant personal-injury plaintiff in a neck brace.
Lynndie’s whole trial strategy had centered around mock-retard Method acting of the Sling Blade or My Left Foot school—with the defendant staring off into space like a coma patient while her overmatched young military counsel tried to sell the five-member military jury on the idea that Lynndie was an “overly compliant personality” with “extraordinary deficits” who was not completely responsible for her actions in Iraq.
Accordingly, Lynndie spent most of the court-martial sitting with a stunned look, like she’d just been whacked in the face with a piece of plywood. The few times she did move, she’d pick up a piece of paper or a pen and stare at it quizzically for minutes, as though trying to figure out what it was.
When she finally took the stand, in the sentencing hearing, she spent most of her time trying to make the jury understand how hard life had been for a backward little dumb shit like herself.
Picked on by the other kids for being slow. Picked on for having a tomboy haircut. Picked on because she chewed funny in the school cafeteria. “The muscles in my jaw and my eyelids was different than other people, ma’am,” she told her stammering attorney, Captain Katherine Krul, during testimony.
Finally, in a last plea for mercy, Lynndie reminded the jury that she was now a mother—she’d been knocked up in Iraq, after all, by fellow Abu Ghraib sadist Private Charles Graner. She was dumb from birth and didn’t have none of that book lernin’, but she did manage to get banged in a latrine somewhere in Iraq in between prisoner extractions, and now, backward as she was, she was at least in the society of mothers.
Watching Lynndie’s defense team play the baby card in her sentencing hearing was like listening to a zoologist explain why Koko the gorilla can’t be separated from her pet kitten. Even a crippled life-form such as this, they seemed to be saying, can experience strong maternal emotions. And in their very last appeal they swung for the fences, asking Lynndie to explain for the benefit of the jury a certain picture of little Carter.
“Why’d you pose him in front of the American flag?” Krul asked, holding up the photo and smiling in the jury’s direction.
Lynndie looked at her lap. “I guess,” she whispered, “I’m still patriotic, ma’am.” Then she swallowed and went back to I Am Sam land, drooping her eyes and fiddling with an imaginary something or other in her lap.
What bullshit, I thought. This girl goes off to fight a war but instead bangs some creep who she sees torturing people by the dozen every night. She’s stupid enough to get her picture taken in the act of humiliating a whole race of people, inspiring an entire generation of martyrs for Allah and causing an international scandal—and now we’re supposed to go easy on her because she wraps her demon love child in an American flag? As if!
The jury—a panel of five older male officers—apparently disagreed. They came back with a sentence: three years. The over/under in the press pool had been nine. It was a slap on the wrist.
It would have been an outrage, if anybody had been watching. But nobody was, of course.
The Abu Ghraib scandal hit America like the worst kind of surprise, like a long-dreaded psychosexual nightmare or closet phobia thrust suddenly into the open—like being caught in the office after hours jerking off to twink porn, or having to call an ambulance to get the proverbial frozen hot dog out of your snatch. This was the worst-case scenario come true, the gerbil-in-the-ass story—only it wasn’t apocryphal at all, but cross-confirmed by a hundred sources in every newspaper and on every cable channel on earth.
At the center of the scandal was the discovery and release of scads of digital photos documenting the deeply twisted and oddly imaginative schemes of abuse of Iraqi prisoners by a squad of grinning hicks from the U.S. Army’s 372nd Military Police Company. The two images that stuck most firmly in the public consciousness were the human pyramid of naked detainees and a beaming tomboy private named Lynndie England standing with a cigarette dangling out of her mouth, smugly pointing at the exposed balls of a naked Iraqi prisoner.
The pictures meant different things to different people, but their meaning was most clear to the Muslim world. Nothing could have been more horrible than the sight of a “liberated” American female—a frighteningly ugly beast with short hair, pants, and boots, not to mention a gun—forcing Muslim men to play the bottom role in smarmy leash-and-whip S&M scenes.
As a compendium of cultural insults, this was unmatched in its offensiveness, a sort of perfect storm of bad PR. An equivalent response might have included a gang of sheikhs putting a leash on the neck of the Virgin Mary and leading her to be violated by a camel . . . but even that, perhaps, wouldn’t have inspired the outrage Lynndie England elicited in Muhammadan lands.
Non-Muslim foreigners saw in Lynndie another American prototype. With her “Get a load of me!” poses and her mania for picture taking, Lynndie reminded the whole world of the American tourist who stands holding a Schlitz in front of the Sistine Chapel. This was a new low, but also a sort of supreme achievement in Ugly Americanism:
At home, Abu Ghraib in very short order turned into a comic pissing match between two sides dedicated to missing the point. The right spent months insisting that a human pyramid wasn’t nearly as bad as a beheading, while the left just ate up the news without really knowing why. Both argued fiercely for half a year about how much play the pictures should get in the news and soon after forgot about them completely. In short, it was a textbook example of an American dialogue about a vital national problem.
By the time this year’s hurricane season rolled around, all that was left of the Abu Ghraib story was a formality. Sweep the last little bits of dirt under the rug. And they sure did a good job of it.
Why was Lynndie smiling in those pictures? Ask her expert witness! “American culture places a great emphasis on smiling,” pronounced Dr. Stjepan Mestrovic, one of the experts the defense called to the stand. The renowned sociologist is a gloomy-looking foreigner, all droopy eyes and bulbous nose, who for a week has made no attempt to hide the fact that he considers almost everyone on this army base a barbarian.
“People here are forever smiling in pictures, they are saying the cheese,” he goes on. “They see people smiling on the covers of magazines, on television shows. There is pressure always to be smiling . . . Put simply, Americans are smilers!”
The doctor folds his arms, thinking he has said something significant about Lynndie England’s famous grin. He has, of course, but what he’s mistaken about is in thinking anyone here gi
ves a damn.
The court-martial of Lynndie England early on evolved into a kind of low-rent comic allegory about the American political scene, and Mestrovic played the role of the pointy-headed liberal who is too busy being right to see what a pain in the ass he is.
When he first took the stand, he spent five long minutes pompously detailing his various Ivy League degrees and didn’t realize that by boasting of a guest lectureship at the Sorbonne to a bunch of Fort Hood army types, he might as well have confessed to buggering boys in sailor costumes.
The judge, an impatient blockhead named Colonel James Pohl, took an especial dislike to Mestrovic. His Honor looked like a man who takes his wife on dates to the Elks Club and yells at his children at barbecues; he winced visibly every time the effete foreigner opened his mouth.
Ostensibly the doctor was here to testify to the inevitability of the deviant behavior at Abu Ghraib, given the chaotic command structure and the army’s failure to send clear messages to recruits about prisoner treatment. Mestrovic compared the army to an abusive parent who sends mixed messages to a child.
“The deviation was inevitable,” he said.
Since Lynndie’s guilt was never really in question (“She can’t get off—she’s in the dad-gum photographs!” was how a reporter from Texas put it to me), the court spent most of its time going in circles over this same idiotic liberal-arts argument. Was the individual to blame or was it society? Accusers and accused butted heads over this question for days on end, with the low point coming when Mestrovic described Abu Ghraib as a “state of anomie.”
“A what?” Pohl snapped, frowning.
“A state of anomie,” the doctor repeated.
Pohl shuddered and sipped his coffee, seeming to wonder whether such a word was even legal in Texas.
Few recall it now, but the original thrust of the exposés that brought Abu Ghraib out in the open was that such behaviors might have resulted from a conscious Pentagon policy, approved by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, of taking the gloves off with terror detainees. But every hint that the scandal might have been under the direction of military intelligence officers stationed at the prison was carefully expunged from the government’s indictments and in the court-martial proceedings.
