Duelling Pageants

The NY Daily News' David Hinckley writes this on the duelling pageants of the Katrina and 9/11 anniversaries...

The merging memories of Katrina & 9/11

...For most of us, 9/11 is history.

Yes, we still wrestle with its ongoing implications for national security, and no, we don't have a Ground Zero memorial yet.

But while we vow never to forget 9/11, just as our parents vowed not to forget Pearl Harbor, the event itself is over.

We want 9/11 in the rearview mirror, and that presumably is where much of television's anniversary coverage will place it.

The message of Katrina coverage is just the opposite: Friend, this one ain't even close to over.

When 40% of New Orleans doesn't have power, 60% of its schools aren't open and miles of its residential streets are piles of dead lumber, that's naturally going to shape the coverage...

...In a few days we will be encouraged to remember 9/11 because remembering honors the victims and reminds us there's a meanness in this world with which we still must deal.

We're being asked to remember Katrina because hundreds of thousands of lives still must be physically put back together.

It's the same story, and it's not.

What he said.

As Tim Grieve said in Salon recently, "We're coming up on dueling anniversaries -- 9/11 plus five, Katrina plus one -- and it's hard to know which one the GOP ought to be anticipating less." Except that the former will be spinned heavily in their favor, though that is only because the myth has trumped reality. As the gang at Wonkette snarked, "the truth is that Sept. 11 wasn’t all that great a day for an administration that was widely seen as a bunch of old Nixon-Reagan Era crooks who had managed to slither into the White House one last time... Americans were so desperate for some kind of leadership that they turned to an opera-loving New York mayor with gay roommates."

Grieve has another great post on this topic: A tale of two presidents?

He states, "Bush may have peaked in popularity after 9/11, and Katrina may have added to his steady slide in the polls... [T]he White House and the Republican National Committee hope that as you head to the polls in November, you'll forget about the president who led his country into a phony and failed war and fiddled while a great American city drowned. They want you to remember the president you saw just after the United States was attacked and just before he actually did anything about it. There was glory in that moment, and the GOP wants it back."

All they have is the bullhorn moment a few days later. It was all downhill from there.

[PS- The Village Voice has a gallery one year after the levees broke.

See also previous entry: Not Learning The Lessons]