April 10, 2020
It's another week of lockdown. Time to take a look at a pod about another disaster, natch (but don't worry, if you read far enough you'll also find some latinx music history and the fascinating social dynamics of wolves - not in the same podcast).
SOMETHING NEW
SOMETHING NEW
I lived through the time when Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath played out, but I certainly didn’t understand it. My sophomore year of high school had just started, and my main memory from the moment is that “Walking on Sunshine” by Katrina and the Waves may not have been the most sensitive piece of music our show choir could’ve performed. In the intervening years I’ve come to absorb the familiar beats: an overcrowded Superdome, the levees bursting, the botched FEMA response, Kanye calling out the president on live TV leaving Mike Myers to pick up the pieces. You know what I didn’t really grapple with? The human cost. Cue Floodlines, a retrospective podcast from The Atlantic that examines the disaster with the benefit of 10+ years of hindsight.
A major theme of the show is misinformation and miscommunication. The third episode “Through the Looking Glass” underlines how the response to and perception of the reality on the ground was poorly represented by media organizations desperate to fill programming blocks. The media landscape was undergoing a change in the mid 2000s, having entered the era of 24 hour cable news without the ubiquity of smartphones and with no real social media to speak of. Few resisted the urge to embrace a chaos narrative. Even prominent people on the ground - including the mayor of New Orleans - perpetuated scenes of apocalypse porn. The racial tinged distinction between looting and surviving comes into play several times throughout the show, and Floodlines is careful to emphasize that a majority of those caught in the middle of the storm were simply scared and endangered.
Despite their negative contribution to the national perspective, clips of broadcast news coverage are really effective in evoking the cacophonous maw. There are also some really strong interviews that build out characters to serve as touchstones in the larger historical picture. Lieutenant General Russel Honoré, who bursts onto the scene in “Exodus” (part 5), remains the most memorable. As a no-nonsense militant swearing up a storm and pushing people to action, Honoré provides a cipher that kind of pulls through the politicizing of the events - albeit with a theatricality that makes him inherently a bit hard to trust. New Orleans resident Le-Ann Williams occupies a more empathetic corner of the show, providing a personal narrative thread throughout the 8 part series. Williams shares her account from the focal point of how the hurricane effectively ruined her life, and there are some truly devastating moments. Her story makes it easy to imagine hundreds of thousands like it, and one of the last things we hear from her is how fleeting her existence in New Orleans still feels even 15 years later.
In the show’s final episode, we meet a new character - Michael Brown, head of FEMA when Katrina hit. Floodlines host Vann Newkirk notes that Brown was the only high level official from the time (including George Bush) who agreed to an interview, and that Brown wanted to talk in person.This sets the stage for "The Wake", the final and longest episode of the series, which runs the gamut in tone from borderline gotcha journalism to dusty platitudinal reckoning. Thankfully neither extreme is occupied for too long, and for the uninitiated (like myself) there are some compelling moments. Ultimately the conversation doesn’t feel extremely additive for gaining any nuance to the disaster and how it was handled, and as a series-ending cornerstone it left me wanting for something more conclusive. But I guess that parallels the mood many critics felt about the Bush administration's response to Katrina, so perhaps it’s fitting.
While the lack of response from leaders isn't unsurprising, this series-capping interview episode served as a reminder of the more analytical approach the show might've taken if more officials at the local and federal level could've been corralled into speaking with Newkirk and his producers. The show that we get isn't striving to be an exhaustive commission on bureaucratic competencies, but rather a check-in on the residual human suffering that continues to emanate in the hurricane's wake. This comes up in the Brown interview, when there seems to be an impasse about exactly what Floodlines stands to gain from featuring this now rather infamous figure. There is a hint of longing for reparations, but no direct case is presented in a way that another piece from The Atlantic did quite effectively. I definitely felt the pain of Williams and a few other New Orleans residents featured as minor characters in the show's run, and so on that front Floodlines is fairly successful. The show has a lot of valuable insights, and I can see the value in this show for anyone who was much younger or not at all attuned to the news in the mid-2000s. If, however, you've delved into type of other longform Katrina coverage, sampling a couple episodes with subjects that strike your interest will probably suffice.
A major theme of the show is misinformation and miscommunication. The third episode “Through the Looking Glass” underlines how the response to and perception of the reality on the ground was poorly represented by media organizations desperate to fill programming blocks. The media landscape was undergoing a change in the mid 2000s, having entered the era of 24 hour cable news without the ubiquity of smartphones and with no real social media to speak of. Few resisted the urge to embrace a chaos narrative. Even prominent people on the ground - including the mayor of New Orleans - perpetuated scenes of apocalypse porn. The racial tinged distinction between looting and surviving comes into play several times throughout the show, and Floodlines is careful to emphasize that a majority of those caught in the middle of the storm were simply scared and endangered.
Despite their negative contribution to the national perspective, clips of broadcast news coverage are really effective in evoking the cacophonous maw. There are also some really strong interviews that build out characters to serve as touchstones in the larger historical picture. Lieutenant General Russel Honoré, who bursts onto the scene in “Exodus” (part 5), remains the most memorable. As a no-nonsense militant swearing up a storm and pushing people to action, Honoré provides a cipher that kind of pulls through the politicizing of the events - albeit with a theatricality that makes him inherently a bit hard to trust. New Orleans resident Le-Ann Williams occupies a more empathetic corner of the show, providing a personal narrative thread throughout the 8 part series. Williams shares her account from the focal point of how the hurricane effectively ruined her life, and there are some truly devastating moments. Her story makes it easy to imagine hundreds of thousands like it, and one of the last things we hear from her is how fleeting her existence in New Orleans still feels even 15 years later.
In the show’s final episode, we meet a new character - Michael Brown, head of FEMA when Katrina hit. Floodlines host Vann Newkirk notes that Brown was the only high level official from the time (including George Bush) who agreed to an interview, and that Brown wanted to talk in person.This sets the stage for "The Wake", the final and longest episode of the series, which runs the gamut in tone from borderline gotcha journalism to dusty platitudinal reckoning. Thankfully neither extreme is occupied for too long, and for the uninitiated (like myself) there are some compelling moments. Ultimately the conversation doesn’t feel extremely additive for gaining any nuance to the disaster and how it was handled, and as a series-ending cornerstone it left me wanting for something more conclusive. But I guess that parallels the mood many critics felt about the Bush administration's response to Katrina, so perhaps it’s fitting.
While the lack of response from leaders isn't unsurprising, this series-capping interview episode served as a reminder of the more analytical approach the show might've taken if more officials at the local and federal level could've been corralled into speaking with Newkirk and his producers. The show that we get isn't striving to be an exhaustive commission on bureaucratic competencies, but rather a check-in on the residual human suffering that continues to emanate in the hurricane's wake. This comes up in the Brown interview, when there seems to be an impasse about exactly what Floodlines stands to gain from featuring this now rather infamous figure. There is a hint of longing for reparations, but no direct case is presented in a way that another piece from The Atlantic did quite effectively. I definitely felt the pain of Williams and a few other New Orleans residents featured as minor characters in the show's run, and so on that front Floodlines is fairly successful. The show has a lot of valuable insights, and I can see the value in this show for anyone who was much younger or not at all attuned to the news in the mid-2000s. If, however, you've delved into type of other longform Katrina coverage, sampling a couple episodes with subjects that strike your interest will probably suffice.
From: The Atlantic
Recommended for: People who weren't alive during Katrina or people who remember it but were just blithely unaware (aka high schoolers)
Drop Schedule: Seasonal:One-Off (All episodes now available)
Average episode length: 25 minutes
Rating: Make It Work
THE LIST
It is rare that my cultural proclivities from the turn of the last century find vindication anywhere; I won't really stand by any of my taste holding up until at least 2004. Chris Molanphy's dive into the evolution of latinx pop at the very least makes my love of Ricky Martin understandable. And I'm now pretty convinced that the puertorriqueño's self-titled LP is almost exclusively composed of straight bangers.
I like animals just fine, but I'm typically not really gripped by stories about them. This episode, though...it took me in before I had a chance to dismiss it. Phoebe Judge could probably make the phone book sound arresting, but there's even more at play here. The thing that really sold it for me is to note how unaware of the human onlookers these creatures are likely to be.
Haunting in the timeliness of its release (which Green swears was not intentional), this may be the remedy for anyone pondering existence inside or outside a global pandemic.
Part psychological thriller, part experimental journalism, this episode is wholly satisfying.
This is not about medical/lab tests for the virus, but rather how the virus is testing us. So sad - listen if you’re psyche isn’t too fragile at the moment, and/or if you want to let yourself cry.
I’d never heard of the Johnstown Flood, and so maybe part of the appeal of this episode was the shock value. Something about listening to this while walking around town made it really sink in, gazing upon buildings that suddenly didn’t seem quite so permanent.
HONORABLE MENTION
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