New Orleans coroner ordered to release reports on deaths

Jailed in New Orleans Two Weeks Before Katrina, Fmr. Corrections Officer Held for Four Months Without Charge

[....]

RODERICK DEAN: I was on the first floor of the jail's medical unit, tier -- Templeman I, cell one, I think, A-1, B-1. I don't know the numbers. But anyway, I was on front and center.

And on that particular day, the morning, Sunday, I think it was August the 28th, 2005, we woke up early that day. And I was lying in the bed on the third -- the lowest bed of three-stacked-high bed bunks. And the two guys above me woke up that morning on Sunday and felt the concrete wall beside the bunk and noticed that the wall was wet with sweat, sweating like. And, you know, they proceeded to tell us in the cell, “Hey, my walls are sweating,” at which point I felt the wall beside my bunk, which was still completely dry. However, at that point, I reached down to the foot of my bed and grabbed my blanket. Well, my blanket was completely soaked with water.

Shortly thereafter, sometime early on in the day, Sunday, the electricity went out. Power failed. The TVs went off. And no circulation, no air-conditioning in the room, the air became stagnant. The toilets in the bathroom, about six stalls, were full of excrement, and they were not working. They backed up and stopped working. The cell quickly became hot, steamy.

And shortly thereafter, water entered the cell. It first entered the cell from a corner in the room, and it just quickly raced across the floor. And it was a manurish brown-colored water. It quickly rose. And after it reached the depth of the toilets, the toilets actually floated out into the cell. The water continued to rise at that time.

Because I take a variety -- I had been given an intravenous injection of pig interferon on Friday before the hurricane, which causes flu-like symptoms, which basically leaves me bedridden or wheelchair-bound for three or four days after that injection, so that was the condition, physical condition, that I was in at the time of the hurricane. I was seated in my wheelchair that day.

Well, the water quickly rose and covered my wheelchair. It also covered my lower bunk of the three stacked beds. As the day bore on and progressed, we had no electricity. And upon the approach of darkness, the cell was completely pitch black. You were unable to --

AMY GOODMAN: And the water was now…?

RODERICK DEAN: The water was above -- the water was above the first bed. My bed was completely submerged. I had climbed to an empty bunk on the third bunk.

AMY GOODMAN: Where were the guards?

RODERICK DEAN: There were no guards visible in sight. The last time I saw the guards was around -- well, they came at 6:00 a.m. on Sunday. And we got our last meal in OPP, which was grits, around 6:00.

[...]

Quite Moving. Worth video streaming.

Some of the Kinds of Pornography the Right says is okay

Sea Levels and Stuff

Wonder what these people did, or these, when the sea came to swallow their cities?

We know what the good folk of New Orleans, Louisiana did. They starved and dehydrated trapped on their roof tops. They died from treatable disease, though even under normal conditions such death is increasingly common in Amerikkka. They whirled away in the rushing waters to drown.

Or they simply drowned while waiting, like the old people awaiting federally coordinated rescue from national guard troops, troops who were unavailable because they were themselves busy dying in Iraq in the BushCon, greed driven, preemptive, illegal invasion and occupation for oil and power.

So, awaiting a rescue that never came, the old folks drowned inside nursing homes while Brownie emailed about his wardrobe and ate a real meal, one to sustain a workin' man, and Bush played Night Ranger records on his dude ranch, because he isn't smart enough to fiddle, and Chertoff hissed while trimming his goatee.

Of course, regarding NOLA, the racist reports blaring across the telescreen night after night, the racist misrepresentation of actions there, further dulled the dim response of rescuers, who were afraid of being killed by looting, shooting, pillaging, savage, southern po-dark folk, who were really just people trying to survive.

Though I'm convinced hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes and other energetic expressions of nature's opinion played a part in many coastal mass drownings, I'm even more convinced previous abrupt increases in sea level may have been helped along by rapidly melting polar ice caps, but not ones liquefied by the waste of human over consumption of petrochemicals, like ours are being, as we become the methane planet.

The environment altering dependence on and over consumption of petrochemicals that contributed to the unusually active season of enormous hurricanes in the gulf will bring the would to it's knees sooner rather than later, yet little is being done to tap energy from alternate sources because the capitalist market place doesn't work that way.

Oil companies have the bucks, bought the white house, the congress, wars of choice and make policy on what to do about the decline in avaialbity of cheap energy. Heat from war, from fossil fuel consumption, from greed, turn up the greenhouse effect and accelerate the other environmental processes and events that are likely to pound us back into an ice age or drown us.

Much has already been lost to the maw of the sea. The earth does, after all, have a primarily fluid surface. It is, no doubt, our point of origin, or at least the soup we cooked in, if we, say, came from outer space on a comet, as aggressive, snarling, little microbes marauding the universe at the behest of the true overmind, DNA, then evolved slowly into the fine, environment destroying primates we are today.

Maybe the sea simply wishes us back, though I know the remaining whales and dolphins must be mighty nervous about our presence.

Did the ubiquitous flood myth emerge from a sudden rise in sea levels, one that wiped out coastal cities in cultures that had not yet invented writing? The story of the flood is told in mythologies from all around the world, a ubiquity that alone serves as confirmation to lunk headed, sexually suspicious, suppressed Christians that the jealous, angry Phallus god invented the world 7000 years ago, had Adam walk around with Sauropods and Raptors and Eve on a leash, mind you, then wiped out his invention by flood, in typical father god overkill, shortly there after.

How will we mythologize the drowning of New York? Or Hong Kong? Or all around the Mediterranean? If we allow Pat Robertson to be our story teller, or myth maker, it will be a story of punishment for sodomy and racial mixing, a story that includes assassination and instructions for a proper place for women.

With so many people enabled to participate in such a narrative of mass cultural experience, since we are a literate, technologically sophisticated, "advanced" society that can write and film and videotape, and since we know it's coming, how will we tell it? Will we pack it with truth or will we lace it with lies like the ones we told about the presidency of Ronald RayGun when he died?

Who has control of the story?

How could the wide spread natural events of the past be spun by Judeo-christian culture into a confused tale of Noah and his ark and his sons and pairs of animals, when the average reader doesn't even realize there are two tales woven into one there, when the average reader can't tell a raven froma dove, and the average religious Amerikkkan thinks these events literally occurred?

It is a result of who got control of the telling.

But now all our stories are run through the machine of a vast corporate media with a right wing agenda, a media that has repeatedly failed to tell the truth, find the truth, check the fact, ask the question, report the story; a tampered with media that still has the capacity to reach and influence more people than at any other time in history.

We are falling through the Winston Smith's memory hole.

How are we mythologizing the drowning of New Orleans? Who even thinks about that anymore? Does anyone talk about it in terms of ethnic cleansing, Halliburton's no bid contracts, suppressing wages, toxic quagmire, global warming, etc.?

When we tell the tale of the drowning of New Orleans will it include the simple truth that the republican party destroyed the federal emergency management agency by subsuming it under the do nothing department of homeland security, then appointed a blobby little titmouse, Michael Brown, to run FEMA, and a shady, sibilant snake, Michael Chertoff, to run DHS, when running DHS means nothing more than a job handing out pots of government money to Bush friends while doing absolutely nothing to secure the nation, because nothing can be done, since it is bad policy that brings terrorism upon it.

Will our mythic version of NOLA include the republican idea of making the federal government so small you can drown it in a bathtub, ala patriarchal felon, Grover Norquist, and bloating the military so big, we can't pay for it? Since messianic George Bush claims god told him to invade Iraq, will he hear god's message in Katrina, saying, "George, you're a no good, do nothing, mindless piece of trash and truly a son of a bitch! GET OUT!"?

Our telling, the one that becomes part of our national history/myth, needs to include at least these simple truths: A parasitic government, such as the one the republicans desire and strive for, is a danger to us all, our dependence on petrochemicals is delusional folly and we need to manage our behavior so as to live within the constraints of our environment if we are to survive.