A Confederacy of Dunces**

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses… Oh, wait. We have enough of our own in New Orleans and Mississippi….

Life is pretty good here in Seoul. I’m sitting at a red plastic table on a busy tree-lined street outside a women’s university front gate having a whole fried chicken and two draft beers...to myself. The weather is unbeatable. A typhoon is on its way from the Pacific so the usual smog and haze has been blown away, probably somewhere out over the Yellow Sea making it yellower. The clouds have not yet arrived and it’s about 10 to 15 degrees cooler than last week’s swelter. The wind is picking up making it feel like fall has fell even though it's just the storm on the way. But back in the U.S., just a couple of hours from my hometown of Mobile, Alabama, people are dead, dying, starving, dehydrated, sick, dirty, homeless and hopeless.

Life is good here but this is still South Korea, where making fun of the nation’s safety standards is a favorite pastime for many North Americans, including myself at times. Collapsed bridges and department stores, fires in the subway or kindergartens, and one of the world’s worst traffic-related death rates are easy to scoff at when you come from the United States of AMERICA, the world’s supposed most powerful and developed nation. Those days seem to be increasingly distant. Now it's the U.S. government that is pitiable when the rest of the world looks at how we take care of our own.

Not that we haven’t been laughed at from abroad in recent years. There was plenty of that when we invaded Iraq to fight terrorism, I mean WMD.. uh, I mean to spread democracy.. er, I meant to depose an evil dictator, oh wait, I mean because terrorists are gathering on Iraqi soil so we have to stay. Hopefully Americans will care enough about the government’s pathetic response to this disaster on the Gulf Coast to finally demand some accountability. The disgrace of going to war under false pretenses wasn’t quite enough for some. When faced with the prospects of losing a little popularity in the rest of the world during the invasion of Iraq, more than a few Bush supporters told me they didn’t give a damn what the rest of the world thought. We have to look out for our own, they said. Well, here was a chance to do just that and look how well we did. (When I say "we," I don't mean the thousands of people who have opened their homes and checkbooks and hearts to the Katrina refugees. They are heroes. I'm talking about the official agencies that responded five days too late.)

Is it important what the rest of the world thinks about us? Many people don't think so, but consider my humble opinion: If the U.S. is going to promote it's ideology around the world, and take action to change it according to our ideals -i.e. wage wars in foreign lands, install democracies, etc - then shouldn't we be able to stand as a shining example of what's right to the world? When we tell the rest of the world we know what's right for them, as we often do, then I think it is important what they think... People of the world are losing their faith in us and if we want to be a moral guide for the world we have to earn their faith back. If we are really doing what's right, most of the world will stand behind us. Can't their opinions sometimes serve as a barometer that tells us when maybe we are doing something for the wrong reason? Or is the U.S. never wrong?

Maybe you still don’t care what the rest of the world is saying about us, but take a look at a few things being said by people in southeast Asia, which just nine months ago suffered a catastrophic tsunami during which relief efforts even on remote beaches and islands kicked off much faster than what we saw after Katrina. If this doesn’t make you ashamed of the U.S. government, nothing will. (These quotes and reprints come from the International Herald Tribune/New York Times, Sept. 5)

“America sends troops to try and maintain order in distant places, but it seems to have difficulty to do it in their own back yard,” said one journalist in tsunami stricken Indonesia. What a polite understatement.

“It’s so heartbreaking to see how helpless America has become. You’re not strong anymore. You can’t even save your own countrymen, and there you are out trying to control the rest of the world,” said one Philippine government official. “Why are people so hungry? The first thing you do is feed them.”

“Americans seem to have this attitude that they are invincible and nothing bad can happen to them,” said a college dean in Thailand. I haven’t even seen what the Europeans are saying yet but I cringe to imagine how scathing that will be. The quotes above are spoken in the usual diplomatic politeness that you will always find in Asians.

In any case, the college dean was right. We Americans – Bush mainly – must think ourselves invincible. “I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levies,” Bush told Dianne Sawyer. He should have talked to my ex-girlfriend’s father, a retired tugboat captain who plied the waters of the gulf coast and the Mississippi River. He mentioned this exact disaster scenario to her over 20 years ago because he knew what could happen if those levees broke by force of nature or terrorism.

Not that we expect Bush to ever mutter anything even remotely linked to reality. To reprint an excerpt from the Maureen Dowd article in the same paper: “Michael Brown, the blithering idiot in charge of (FEMA) – a job he trained for by running something called the Arabian Horse Association – admitted he didn’t know until Thursday that there were 15,000 desperate, dehydrated, hungry, angry, dying victims of Katrina in the New Orleans Convention Center. America’s tone-deaf president hailed him in Mobile, Alabama, on Friday ”Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.”

Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff had this to say about federal response to the disaster: “Really exceptional.” He also said on NPR that he didn’t know about the refugees in the convention center even though there had been reports about them on news programs for at least one day. (From the Frank Rich article)


New Orleans has long been one of my, if not the, favorite American cities and even though most Koreans don't know it, the city's culture and history is present in their lives daily . If you could ask any student from any of my classes in Korea in the last 5 years, I guarantee that they would tell you that at some point or another I gave them a lecture on the music they love, and how just about all of it – hip hop, rap, rock, blues or jazz and more, could trace its roots back to New Orleans (and beyond of course to the slave trade routes in the Caribbean and on back to Africa.) They'll also probably tell you that I bore them to death with a lecture about New Orleans culinary traditions. There's a Popeyes on every corner here and Cajun chicken salad on just about every bar menu in Korea but no one has any idea what the word "cajun" means (nor will they ever if they rely on Popeyes or the local version of cajun chicken salad, which resembled sweet and sour pork the last time I tried it).

(Check out Anne Rice’s poignant editorial in the same papers about what’s lost if we lose New Orleans)

The desperate faces that I see over and over on the Internet are the faces born of that rich cultural heritage. They’re mostly black, but I’m guessing they also include an equally unfair number of mulattos, Cajuns, and Creoles. Too bad this is the thanks they get from our country. Sure, they’re not the only ones who suffered but they certainly suffered the most. The lack of white faces in the news reports hasn’t gone unnoticed in Asia either.

I decided tonight that it’s time to reread one of my favorite books of all times, A Confederacy of Dunces. It’ll be one of my little ways of keeping the spirit of New Orleans and her voodoo brew of race and culture alive, if only in my mind over here in Korea. This time though I’ll be thinking about the real confederacy of dunces, the one in Washington D.C.

** For anyone who thought the reference to confederacy has anything to do with the American south, my intention is to use the word in the context of its original meaning: a league or compact for mutual support or common action My comments are no reflection on the south or American people, as some of you have implied was your (mis)understanding. I am talking about the confederacy of elected officials who have spread our resources so thin around the world that we can't respond to a disaster at home. What happens if another major hurricane hits this summer, or another terrorist attack, or an earthquake wreaks havok on that other city I love so much, San Francisco? And if you read the word "conspiracy" between the lines somewhere in there, go back and read the whole thing again then show me where you saw it.