Pine Belt Progressive

One of the reasons the recovery on the Coast, in terms of important things like housing, has been so slow in coming, is because Barbour and his supporters have been telling a story of Mississippi’s recovery from the hurricane that isn’t exactly true. Here is a pretty typical example of the way he talks about Katrina post-Mississippi, from his second inaugural address:

“Obviously, no one could have known we’d bear the brunt of the worst natural disaster in American history. And when it happened nearly two and a half years ago, I didn’t realize this awful catastrophe, something you wouldn’t wish on your own worst enemy, would actually do more to improve Mississippi’s image than anything that has happened in my lifetime; or that in the wake of the devastation, there would come more opportunity for our state to move forward than any living generation of Mississippians has known. But by God’s grace, that’s what is happening.

Pay attention to his logic: “the worst natural disaster” “improves Mississippi’s image” and presents “more opportunity for our state to move forward than any living generation of Mississippians has known.” He makes it sound as though we should all be glad Katrina wrecked our state.

And a couple of paragraphs later, he says:

“It was revealed that ours are a strong, resilient, self-reliant people – courageous and compassionate. Knocked flat, they didn’t look for somebody to blame; they didn’t whine or mope; Mississippians aren’t into victimhood. Instead they got up, and, with the help of God Almighty, they hitched up their britches and went to work – went to work helping themselves and helping their neighbors.

He talks about how strong we are. He plays the “victim” card. He invokes God. Then he paints a picture of us all picking up the pieces together.

This is a well-polished version of the message he started transmitting to to his followers, the media, and the Republican party within days of the hurricane. He has been transmitting it ever since. It’s a little story about how we all helped ourselves get over Katrina real quick and now we’re all doing so well we’re glad it happened.

The content of this story is important for a few reasons. First, it isn’t really true. It can’t be true when somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000 people are still living in FEMA trailers almost three years later. Second, because this is THE story that’s been told about Mississippi to most of the people who can’t actually see what’s happening here, they’re able to leave Katrina in the past. And the story of all those living, breathing people who are forced to live in those trailers because they have nowhere else to go only comes out around the edges, and only on the rare occasion that we see a big story like the one we had today.

Second, this story that the governor and his minions are telling the rest of the country is a part of a much larger story, and one that I think is carefully crafted by movement conservatives to control public perception of the real state of both Mississippi and Louisiana. The short version of this story is:

Mississippi’s doing fine because we all worked hard and overcame and Barbour led us so well. That must mean New Orleans is doing so bad because of its inept government and lazy people.

Scout Prime does an excellent job of demonstrating how this story works to allow both Mississippi and Louisiana to be neglected in this post I linked to yesterday. It is a must-read.

Analyzing the story that Republicans have been telling since the day after Katrina would make a great series of posts, in and of itself. I have to move on for now. The point is that, as long as this is the only story that the country is being told, this is the only story people will believe.

A lot of good people have been working very hard since the Hurricane to help Mississippians out. A lot of people here in Mississippi know the story isn’t true. But the problem as I see it is that the people who are doing real work to help people here are all working on different little pieces of the problem while the governor sits in Jackson with his Development Authority officers and his long-range plans and uses the centralized machinery of the state against them.

He steers most of the money that ought to be used to actually re-build our coast and get our fellow Mississippians out of those miserable conditions to his cronies and his family. All the while he tells his little story to cast doubt on the numbers and to allow people who don’t actually have to look at those FEMA trailers every day to believe that Katrina is in the past. Well, it’s not in the past.

No one is going to change the story for us. Not the media. Certainly not our politicians. If we want the true story to be told, we have to tell it ourself. We have to all get together and agree to tell the true story — that our governor is a cold-blooded liar who values money more than the lives of 40,000 of the people of this state. That tens of thousands of our people — people with families and dreams — wake up every morning in those FEMA trailers because he won’t use our re-building money to see that they have a decent place to live. And that those trailers aren’t the only issue.

So, how do we tell it? And, how many people do we know who we could persuade to pass it on once we figure out how to tell it? That is what I would like some help figuring out here.

I will be posting a list of questions that I think need to be answered about the use of our redevelopment money here soon. I will also be posting some thoughts about what might be done to increase the chances that Reps. Waters and Frank actually do hold the oversight hearing they’ve been discussing.

More to come. Sorry this post is so long and so rough, but I had to begin by talking about Changing the Story, and I am in a real hurry tonight.

Update:

This is the last post for tonite, I think. I’ll post that list of questions and more tomorrow. Here’s an MSNBC poll on how the money should be spent that you can vote in and an article at Media Matters. (h/t RiMo for both these links.)