In lieu of photos, send excuses.





Editor & Publisher:

AP/Reuters

How does one argue that bloated bodies of American victims belong plastered all over the tube and newstands for their families to see? I can't. Countries like India or Turkey or Sri Lanka don't have our compunctions about such things. Come to think of it, we don't have compunctions about such thingseither, if the bodies are Indian or Turkish or Sri Lankan. Why? Well, death is personal. I mean we take it personally here. For us, it seems, maybe it's a symbol that we lost. Unfinished business. Or we failed in some way (as if there was a winning hand that just eluded us.) It's strange, but New Orleans is perhaps the one city in America that allows raucous joy into the equation of celebrating the departed--you've seen the bands: Morose funeral processions that lope along, a dirge of sound. Then an eruption of horns and drums, gyration and dance. Suddenly, life. Animation. Maybe they know something we don't. Maybe they understand the Indian or Turk or Sri Lankan plane. Coastal American, or foreigner with even stranger ways, somehow similar? Perhaps because their exsitence is less shielded from the harsh reality of the thing. No modernistic pretense or frill, no muzak or plastic flowers to blunt the humanity of the thing.Mountains fall, waves consume, choices not our own happen. Death just is. The rest of us just do it differently. Quietly. Hushed. Not speaking ill.

But--

There's a reason that the $12-14 billion dollars required to avoid this now $150+ billion fix-it job wasn't spent. The words hundreds of thousands displaced, tens of thousands killed by a Category 4-5 storm just sit there on a page. They blend in with phrases like "alleviating bridge scour" or "vital industries decapitated" or "possible catastrophic damage." Look the same don't they? And they have for 40 years, in 400 different reports.

Yeah, a picture is worth a thousand words, bolded and underlined. We'll never know what thousands of pictures of thousands of bodies would do or mean to our decision-making. About life or death matters.

But these....


reuters

They'll be everywhere. You can safely mortgage the house betting on that. And FEMA will gladly hold your camera bag for these shots..