I know it's ghoulish, but for some reason I became very attached to the idea that New Orleans was going to get the absolute shit kicked out of it by Katrina. The more I heard about the depth and breadth of destruction that was about to be unleashed upon the Crescent City, the more concerned I was becoming that something might intervene to spare it from a catastrophe of biblical proportions.
Mind you, this lust for carnage is not borne from a deep-seated hatred for New Orleans, or from some metaphysical need for the city to get its kharmic comeuppance; rather, it comes from a desire for something truly horrific to happen, where we're completely powerless to do anything about it. And it's not good enough for it to happen anywhere; it has to happen in a place where the people have the means and the technology to brace for the hit, but still get their asses totally kicked just the same. For some reason, these hurricanes always seem to give their worst to countries that are already jacked, like Haiti, or Honduras--was it Dennis a few years ago that spun over Honduras for about 5 days, and put nearly everything shy of Tecuhigalpa's altitude under a fetid almagam of carrion, sewage, rain, sea and squalor, killing some 20,000 or so? It's not exactly a feeling of vindication when the First World gets hit by calamity, but when it does happen, it certainly brings home the point that some things out there are still really big, and out of our control, and all we can do is flee or perish.
9/11 evoked some of that same, ghoulish magnetism, but that was so out of the blue (an unfortunate pun) that it was more of a slap in the face--or, more accurately, a slap on the forehead, as in "Oh, Shit! I left the oven on!" kind of way. I mean, if you dig down really deep--hell, you don't have to go that deep at all--was there anything all that surprising about 9/11? I remember my first thought was "I can't believe it took this long for something like this to happen." My second thought, by the way, was "W is one lucky bastard. This has just salvaged his moribund presidency."
Nature has a way of always cutting us Americans a little bit of a break. We get it bad from time to time, but never as bad as other places that can't really afford to have it so bad. Maybe that's just the way it is. Maybe that's why America is richer and stronger than its neighbors: the bad shit always hits the neighbors, and not us.
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Update: Um,never mind. Seems like New Orleans wasn't spared after all, and now that it's happened, it's not nearly as exciting as it is horrifying. But there's still something seductive about the enormity of the tragedy. I'm not proud of being wired that way, but I'm pretty sure I'm not alone. It's the same impulse you have to look at a terrible car accident, and the letdown--however fleeting--we feel when we're unable to see a terribly injured or dead person in the wreckage. As much as we'd like to think we're all in this together, most of us are unashamed voyeurs of other people's misfortune, and the more profound their suffering, the more aware we are of the distinction between our existence and theirs.
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