Are You Ready for Some Propaganda?

Monday Night Football has had a tagline for some time now: "Are you ready for some football?" Well, tonight you might want to change that to: "Are you ready for some propaganda?" Because tonight’s Monday night game is about a lot more than football as the game is taking place in the Louisiana Superdome. It is a reopening of the site that came to symbolize so much of our failure to take care of our own last year during the crisis in the Mississippi/Gulf Coast area after hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

And that failure continues. Not that you would be aware of that from following most of the stories in the mainstream media. The now famous Ninth Ward is still in shambles, and New Orleans East still is far from full recovery. But our administration, big business, and many in this country do not want us to focus on the failure, instead they want us to watch Monday Night Football in the Superdome and believe that everything is alright.

Here is a very telling quote from the general manager of the Superdome: "When people come in here and see what's been done in less than a year's time, they are going to say, 'If the Superdome can be rebuilt after that tremendous destruction, my house can be rebuilt, my neighborhood can be rebuilt and my city can be rebuilt.' So much of this recovery is about confidence and belief. You've got to want it to happen. You've got to believe it. This is symbolism."

This makes me sick. Is he actually saying that all the people of the Ninth Ward and N.O. East are to blame from their still-devastated neighborhoods because they really don’t want it to be fixed? I am sure that after a year of living in FEMA trailers they no longer believe, but that is hardly their fault. And certainly not the reason it hasn't happened.

I agree with him on one point, this is symbolism. It is, however, false symbolism. It is symbolic of business as usual. As is so often the case in disaster situations, the rich get richer, and the poor stay poor. Somehow the $94 million of FEMA money of the total $185 million cost needed to repair the Superdome sped right through the bureaucratic morass that has held up far more important projects.

Does this somehow mean the system is working? Sure -- if you are rich, connected, and important to tourism. Unlike this private venture, the public water and sewage damage was estimated at $446 million, so far the city has received just over $100 million. The list of neglected and underfunded projects could go on and on. It simply doesn't make for good television.

So, if you want, please do tune in to ESPN tonight to watch Monday Night Football. At halftime, you might want to take a little break from the propoganda machine and take our One Year After: Hurricane Katrina Anniversary Quiz. But please, don’t believe the hype ESPN is selling. And most importantly please don’t forget about the thousands of U.S. citizens who are still waiting for the return to normalcy that our government and big business is so eager to sell us on.