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To whom can you turn my disposable child
When heaven and earth have left you forsaken
To whom can you turn my disposable child
When the winds of neglect
Leave you tattered and shaken
Where the refuse of humanity is piled
They don’t shed a tear if
You’re just a disposable child

They wave to us from rooftops with hand-scrawled signs that say, "Please help us." They turn and look to the camera while they struggle through an ugly brown poison that covers them to their hips. We pan their faces along broken interstate highways, in non-functioning stadiums, on bridges, and always in masses. Each face, in its own way, reflects the ugly rage of the dispossessed and forgotten.

"We've got people dying out here - two babies have died, a woman died, a man died," said Helen Cheek. "We haven't had no food, we haven't had no water, we haven't had nothing. They just brought us here and dropped us." (Associated Press)

Several days before Katrina unleashed hell on the bayou, national commentators had warned of an impending catastrophe. Several years before that, scientists and engineers had warned that New Orleans’ levees could not protect it from a powerful hurricane, something upward of Category 3. Homeland security, whatever that is, turned its back on the bayou. The Bush administration delayed improvements to the levee system and actually cut back flood control funding.

When the mayor ordered the evacuation of the Big Easy, there was no possibility that tens of thousands of inner city residents, primarily poor and black, would be able to get out. Tens of thousands would be forced to ride it out, the national media told us. Nobody told us what that would mean. We thought they would sit there in their homes, wait patiently for help, and give thumbs up as they and their rescuers mugged for the camera. There would be some inconvenience, but everything would be okay, because everything was always okay, eventually, and, after all, this is not the tsunami and even if it is, this is America, and we will get our people out. We kept telling ourselves all those things until the bodies began to float by.

David L. Brooks, a conservative columnist for the New York Times, said this about the angry gaze from the bayou: "(T)ake a close look at the people you see wandering, devastated, around New Orleans: they are predominantly black and poor." They are the ones American society decided could be left behind when the Big One came.

They are angry because they suspect, or possibly know, that they were doomed. The under funded levee system was designed to hold up to a category 3 hurricane and its side effects. Katrina crashed the shoreline designated as a category 4 storm, after brewing into category 5 strength over the abnormally warm Gulf waters. A category 4 storm bulled ashore with category 5 momentum. The under-designed levees never had a chance. Neither did the tens of thousands consigned to the watery hell that inevitably would show up. They are angry because they are America’s disposable underclass and they know it.

They’ll move on, through open-air triages, domed stadium hostelry, and near starvation circumstances. The government will give them just enough to get away but not come back. Here, the government will say, this will get to you California. Here, the government will say, this will get to Arizona and Nevada. There are jobs there. Refugee from Mexico, meet refugee from Katrina. First one to clean this toilet gets the job.

This is why America loves the illegals. America loves its disposable underclass. Nationality really doesn’t matter when the national is discardable. When much of the national economy is a service economy, employees become disposable parts. Every corpse in the bayou has five potential replacements near Sasabe.

As I write this, the national media is raining scuds on the Bush Administration and its lack of response to the disaster everybody knew was coming. Bush, whose presidency was slipping into life support status in any event, has finally been fatally undercut by his unguarded smirk and inability to construct a coherent sentence. In a desperate attempt to appear relevant, he appointed his Daddy and Bill Clinton to reprise their tsunami road show. The New York Times described his public reaction as "casual to the point of carelessness." The "War President" has been downgraded to a piñata.

But, in fairness to Bush, whose biography reveals relentless cluelessness, the disposable underclass has been America’s dark secret for generations. The "Other America" discovered in the enlightened Sixties remained the "Other" for another half a century. Many of the "Other Americans" aren’t even Americans. They are disposable residue from Mexico and other countries. They have been there though administrations Democratic and Republican, through liberal governments and conservative governments.

This lesson of Katrina is the saddest: after all our grand ambitions, pronouncements, and schemes, this reality abides: America has a disposable underclass. The evidence is bobbing in the water near the French Quarter.

All content on this page © by Mike Tully