Nature's Fury vs. Famous People

In the weeks and months ahead, the US will be consumed with the task of finding and apportioning blame for the grotesque failures of the Hurricane Katrina rescue operations. Even as the dead are buried and the survivors begin to scrape together new and hopelessly uncertain lives, politicians, experts and media pundits will round on a wide range suspects. Bush, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Governors of Louisiana and Mississippi, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, all will be cited as chief architects of the colossal failure that cost tens of thousands of lives. With news that Bush has recalled FEMA head Michael Brown, this process is clearly already well underway.

The Fake McCoys, whatever our merits as comedians, are not as highly skilled in the fields of disaster relief, logistics and meteorology as is often assumed, so we won’t be offering any verdicts here. For all we know, using the pretext of national tragedy to fight a morally repugnant, open-ended war of conquest built on bald-faced lies and done purely to line the pockets of your petro-buddies might be a perfectly sensible way to apportion your national resources. And just because a massive hurricane wiping out New Orleans with massive loss of life has been a standard textbook scenario in disaster management studies for some decades, that doesn’t mean amateurs like ourselves can draw any conclusions about how ready the agencies supposed to stop that sort of thing could reasonably be expected to be.

So we aren’t qualified to demand, for instance, that Bush should be impeached for his breathtaking criminal incompetence, but we ARE qualified to pass judgement on Sean Penn:

"Movie star and political activist Penn, 45, was in the collapsing city to aid stranded victims of flooding sparked by Hurricane Katrina, but the small boat he was piloting to launch a rescue attempt sprang a leak.

"The outspoken actor had planned to rescue children waylaid by the deadly waters, but apparently forgot to plug a hole in the bottom of the vessel, which began taking water within seconds of its launch.

"When the boat's motor failed to start, those aboard were forced to use paddles to propel themselves down the flooded New Orleans street.

"Asked what he had hoped to achieve in the waterlogged city, the actor replied: 'Whatever I can do to help.'

"But with the boat loaded with members of the Oscar-winner's entourage, including his personal photographer, one bystander taunted: 'How are you going to get any people in that thing?'"

Nice, Sean, nice. So selfless was this gesture of help that you took along your personal photographer to immortalise it. Congratulations: your ex-wife once put out an expensive coffee-table book that was mostly photos of her masturbating, and yet you are now more of a self-aggrandising wanker than she was.

Apart from the fact you’ve used a national tragedy to whore yourself for publicity, it doesn’t take a Masters degree in Assholeometrics to work out that the space in the boat taken up by the photographer alone is one less person you can pluck from the swirling waters of death. Not that it would have been that great an experience for anyone you’d managed to rescue:

RESCUED PERSON
[Cough, splutter] Thank God you’re here, Sean Penn! I’ve been clinging to my rooftop for three days, I thought I was going to die!

SEAN PENN
Anything I can do to help, fellow American. Now, I need you to sign this release and we might need you in Toronto for some pick-up shots next week. See, unfortunately, New Orleans doesn’t look like New Orleans on film. By the way, do you know what Residuals are?

RESCUED PERSON
No.

SEAN PENN
Excellent. Hop in.

“Well, at least he tried,” I hear you say (oh yeah, I bugged your house. Sorry about that). “At least he went down there and rolled up his sleeves and tried to make a difference.” Sure, but the thing is, Sean Penn wasn’t watching the news from his trailer home and feeling helpless: “If only there was some way I could help those poor souls. But I am just one man, with no resources, what could I possibly- of course! The dingy!” No, this is a guy who’s prepared to cough up a reported $56,000 to take out a near-full-page ad in the Washington Post to tell us that- shock! - he doesn’t like President Bush. So his one-act farce on the water probably cost a fraction of what he’s prepared to spend on advertorial. That kind of money can do a lot of good if you give it to the right people. Just ask Al Gore, who put up $100,000 of his own money to fund two planes that rescued 270 people. And even though Gore must have known it’d make the news, so one way or another he was going to get a publicity dividend, he’s refused to be interviewed about it. Penn, by contrast, is evidently quite happy to write out big cheques for worthy causes, so long as he gets his name on it. But why ship in bottled water or blankets or generators or other boring stuff like that, when instead you can make a big, messianic show of how brave and strong you are? And I get to ride in a boat! Yippee! And then we get to go to McDonalds afterwards!

At least Sean Penn brought a boat. Some other celebrities were even less helpful, even the ones that claimed to be there in the service of a Higher Power (why that Higher Power couldn't just refrain from levelling the city in the first place remains unexplained as of press time). If I remember my Catholic education correctly, Jesus says somewhere "Be careful not to parade your uprightness in public to attract attention [...] when you give alms, do not have it trumpeted before you; this is what the hypocrites do." However this was clearly interpreted by His servant Revd. Jesse Jackson to mean “when you give alms, make sure you take a Me-dammned film crew with you at all times.” It’s not clear what Jackson hoped to accomplish by turning up, talking to some people who hadn’t eaten in days, and then saying some angry things to camera. But surely it can’t have been to make himself look good, can it?

And finally, a big shout out to Barbara “[these people were] "underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them" Bush. It’s nice to see that, in a time of national trauma and soul-searching, someone can still find time to be a total bitch to the poor.