Smells Like Dead Elephants

by Matt Taibbi

  “We want to have that kind of godlike effect,” I said.

  “Right,” Bill said, nodding.

  “Secondly, Sean, when he travels,” I said, “he brings his own Nautilus equipment. He pumps iron before he goes on.”

  “Does he really?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “We get a lot of demonstrators when Sean does his show, and so what he likes to do, when he finishes the broadcast, he takes his shirt off and flexes his muscles for the crowd. You know, rrrr . . .”

  “Is he really built like that?”

  “Oh, man, he’s huge,” I said.

  We went on like this for a while. Fifteen minutes later, we wrapped up the negotiations.

  “Again,” I said, “we’d like to use the bell, the Ten Commandments, that backdrop, some horses, and if you have those good-looking Christian girls, we’ll take them, too.”

  “Whatever you want, we’ll do it,” Bill said.

  We shook hands. From there, I went to the inevitable conservative counterdemonstration, which was organized by Dallas right-wing talk-show reptile Darrell Ankarlo. Sheehan’s transformation in the right-wing media from anonymous war mom to the great horned pinko Satan was unusually rapid, even by their standards.

  The chief talking points were established within four days after her vigil had started. Sheehan was a fame-seeking narcissist, an anti-American traitor who dishonored her dead son (Bill O’Reilly questioned her motives and suggested people might see her actions as treasonous), and a stooge for Michael Moore. This Dallas jock Ankarlo chipped in with a claim that he’d received a series of death threats, some of which, he implied, had come from Sheehan’s peaceniks.

  There are times when American politics seems like little more than two groups in a fever to prevent each other from trespassing upon their respective soothing versions of unreality. At one point at Camp Casey, an informal poll taken around a campfire revealed that six out of a group of ten protesters, selected at random, believed that the United States government was directly involved in planning the 9/11 bombings. Flabbergasted, I tried to press the issue.

  “Do you know how many people would have to be involved in that conspiracy?” I said. “I mean, start with the pilots . . .”

  “The planes were flown by remote control,” a girl sitting across from me snapped.

  Things were no better at Ankarlo’s counterdemonstra­tion. Aaron Martin, thirty-one, had never heard the administration say that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, but Martin did remember one thing about Iraq that he said he’d heard “prior to 9/11.”

  “They had a fuselage,” he said. “It was like a seven-­forty-seven fuselage that they use for training purposes for terrorism.”

  Was there any other reason he believed Iraq was connected to 9/11?

  “It’s just a general feeling,” he said.

  Another group I spoke with asked me why I believed Iraq wasn’t connected to 9/11. I answered that Saddam Hussein’s secular government was a political enemy of the Islamic ­fundamentalists.

  “Well,” said Raymond Smith, forty-two, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

  He laughed, and the group nodded at me triumphantly.

  It was like a scene from Spinal Tap. Three seconds passed.

  “But,” I said finally, “that doesn’t make any sense, does it?”

  Everyone shrugged impatiently. Who gives a fuck? We believe what we believe—and fuck you if you don’t like it. The Iraq war is like the sun: no one wants to stare at it too long.

  By the time I finally sat down with Sheehan I was deeply frustrated with all of this, and I was ready to blame her for what had become, in my mind, a noisome exercise in blind chest-puffing on both sides. By the eighth day of her vigil, practically every anti-Bush movement under the sun had wiggled into Crawford to get a piece of the action, and it seemed to me that all had been lost and that Sheehan had allowed the illogic of a media hurricane—noise for noise’s sake—to take over her protest. Particularly irritating was the sight of a giant school bus bearing the inscription “Free the Cuban Five” parked in front of the Peace House. Jesus, I thought. The Mumia people can’t be far behind.

  “What’s the Cuban Five?” Sheehan asked when we finally sat down, alone.

  “They’re on the front lawn here . . .”

  She shook her head helplessly. She had no idea who they were.

  We met in a trailer parked outside the Peace House that someone had volunteered for her use. The trailer-sanctuary added to the movie-star vibe that followed Sheehan around everywhere in Crawford; I half expected to see a director’s chair marked parked out front.

  For all this, Sheehan seemed a very lonely woman. Tall, lanky, and clunkily built, with the most common and therefore most tragic of faces—the forgotten housewife whom life, with all its best joys, has long ago passed by—Sheehan had begun to move around the compound with a preternatural slowness, like a ghost. She floated, rather than walked, into the trailer. Following a week of media madness, she was like a super­hero unable to return home after falling into a vat of ­disfiguring acid. Her past—the middle-class family life in Vacaville, Califor­nia, with her four kids and the yellow station wagon they nicknamed the BananaMobile—all that was gone.

  She had been through so much in the past week. In still more proof that red-blue politics often comes before family in this country, her in-laws had released a statement cruelly denouncing her. Her estranged husband, perhaps a coward and perhaps unable to handle the stress, filed for divorce. Revelations about her personal life were spilling into print, and all around the country, heartless creeps like Drudge and Ankarlo were casting themselves as friends and protectors of her fallen son and criticizing her for dishonoring him.

  In return for all that, what Sheehan got was this: her own trailer, a couple of weeks’ worth of airtime, and a bunch of people who called themselves her friends but were really just humping the latest cause. They would probably be moving on soon, and Sheehan would be left with nothing. Meeting her now, I was struck by one more thing. At the end, when it was all over, her son would still be gone. I felt very sorry for her.

  “I never knew,” she said, sighing. “Not only that I would become the face of the antiwar movement but also that I would become the sacrificial lamb of the antiwar movement.”

  I asked her if she was referring to all the personal attacks. She nodded.

  “But I’d still do it again,” she said. “Because it’s so ­important.”

  Sheehan’s political sincerity has been questioned, and in almost every case the charges against her have proved monstrous, calculating, and untrue. An example of the kind of thing that’s been pinned to her: Matt Drudge blasted her for being a flip-flopper after digging up seemingly pro-Bush Sheehan quotes from a California newspaper after she and other war parents had met with the president.

  Among those were “That was the gift the president gave us, the gift of happiness, of being together.” Drudge implied that Sheehan was referring to the meeting with the president. In fact, what Sheehan was saying was that the real gift Bush gave the families was the opportunity to meet each other, not the president.

  Things like this are what Sheehan’s detractors are using to describe what they call “Cindy’s political agenda,” but I didn’t observe any agenda from Sheehan, just a very tired woman. Like everyone else in antiwar circles, Sheehan does sometimes speak in the clubby language of Camp Bush Hater—but when she does this, she sounds like a follower, not a leader. In the end, the movement might overtake her, but while she is still at its center she seems genuinely to be trying to do the right thing.

  “This thing,” she said, “it’s bigger than me now.”

  Sheehan believes that no matter what happens, one thing she accomplished was the returning of the Iraq war to its rightful place at the forefront of the national con
sciousness. She describes an experience earlier in the week when a TV producer offhandedly mentioned to her that her timing was perfect, that Sheehan had been lucky to hold her vigil on what was otherwise a slow news week.

  “And I said to her, ‘A slow news week? Didn’t thirty soldiers die in the war this month?’” She shook her head. “It’s crazy. Iraq should be the lead story every day.”

  Late that night, a car pulled up at the campsite. There was a woman at the wheel and she was crying.

  She was a Bush supporter who lives in the area, but her son was about to be shipped off to Iraq. She had made a special trip out here to complain about the long row of white crosses the protesters had planted along the side of the road—each cross bearing the name of a fallen soldier. “Y’all are breaking my heart!” she cried. “My son hasn’t gone yet, and I have to see those crosses every morning.” She collected herself, wailed, and cried again, “You’ve broken one woman’s heart!”

  She drove off.

  In the sixties, the antiwar movement was part of a cultural revolution. If you opposed Vietnam, you were also rejecting the whole rigid worldview that said life meant going to war, fighting the Commies, then coming back to work for the man, buying two cars, and dying with plenty of insurance. That life blueprint was the inflexible expectation of the time, and so ending the war of that era required a visionary movement.

  Iraq isn’t like that. Iraq is an insane blunder committed by a bunch of criminal incompetents who have managed so far to avoid the lash and the rack only because the machinery for avoiding reality is so advanced in this country. We don’t watch the fighting, we don’t see the bodies come home, and we don’t hear anyone screaming when a house in Baghdad burns down or a child steps on a mine.

  The only movement we’re going to need to end this fiasco is a more regular exposure to consequence. It needs to feel its own pain. Cindy Sheehan didn’t bring us folk songs but she did put pain on the front pages. And along a lonely Texas road late at night, I saw it spread.

  Apocalypse There

  A journey into the nightmare of New Orleans

  October 6, 2005

  It’s a little before midnight on Friday, September 2, and I’m sitting in a hotel bar in Houston. Somewhere to the southeast, the worst natural disaster in American history is unfolding in the darkness, with an entire city shrouded in death, panic, and disease—and here we are, a bunch of half-drunk, affluent white people quaffing eleven-dollar foreign beers and planning what appears to be a paramilitary mission to rescue two cats and a maid in the wreckage of New Orleans.

  I’m in the lounge of the Four Seasons with Sean Penn and other assorted media creatures, debating the merits of rescuing animals instead of humans in a disaster area. To my left is the eminent historian Douglas Brinkley, a friendly academic whose careful diction reminds me of Bob Woodward’s. Brinkley is my contact in Houston. He’s friends with Penn, and when he evacuated his home in New Orleans earlier in the week he left his cats and his maid behind in the flood zone. Now he and Penn are talking about commandeering private jets, helicopters, and weapons for a grand mission into hell that begins tomorrow.

  I have no idea what the fuck is going on. At this point, five days into the disaster, I’m as clueless as President Bush. To those of us who didn’t know any better, Katrina by her early satellite portrait looked like just another one of those watery curlicues that runs up the gulf from time to time, turning gap-toothed hayseeds out of their trailers on live television, titillating Middle America just long enough to inspire the odd few days of canned-food drives or teddy-bear vigils.

  But then Katrina snuck up on America, smashing it right in the breadbasket when not a soul anywhere was paying attention. For most of the country it was like going to bed one night with a mild toothache and waking up the next morning to find your balls smashed with a sledgehammer. Instead of leaving a little twisted timber and a few bodies behind, Katrina blew absolutely everything to shit and wiped an entire NFL market off the map. The standard television-entertainment formula for the meteorological catastrophe has been hopelessly disrupted, for in place of the Swift Government Reaction and the inevitable Inspirational Reconstruction and Recovery we have instead goodness knows what—some kind of gruesome existential horror story in which a mighty empire is transformed in a single night into a Hobbesian jungle, with taxpayers turned into wraiths and zombies, and not only no order but no clear idea of who is responsible for restoring it.

  At the Four Seasons, Penn listens as a giggly Fox TV producer with big tits explains why she supports a mission, supposedly launched by Siegfried and Roy, to save the abandoned pets of New Orleans.

  “I just have a soft spot for cats!” she gushes. “I can’t stand to see them suffer—the little cuties!”

  As she speaks, she tosses her hair back and brushes a tit against Penn’s elbow. He shrugs.

  “The way I see it,” he says, “when in doubt, go human.”

  In the morning, Sean, Doug, and I fly in a small four-seater plane from Houston to Baton Rouge. The flight is without incident but also our last brush with normalcy.

  The instant we land in Baton Rouge it is clear we are at the far edges of an extraordinary, cataclysmic event. The airport gates are clogged with military helicopters of every stripe, refueling and unloading, while the terminals and parking lots are spotted everywhere with stacks of food supplies and bottled water, a sight that will become increasingly familiar. There being no rental cars available, we hire what appears to be the last cab in Baton Rouge, an ancient minivan that lists badly to one side and makes knocking sounds at speeds over thirty-five miles per hour.

  Actor, historian, and journalist pile into this ridiculous vehicle around noon on Saturday with no real concrete plans beyond a determination to find passage into New Orleans. We do have one definite order of business in Baton Rouge: visiting a black family that had just evacuated the city and is staying in a cramped room of a roadside hotel. Penn had seen the Browders on CNN and had called them to ask if he could help. They were hoping that he, being a celebrity, could get into New Orleans somehow and track down a lost relative.

  Specifically, one Lillian Browder, the elderly mother of a frantic, gesticulating woman named Dorian Browder. Lillian had stayed behind to protect her home in a waterlogged neighborhood, and now the rest of the family doesn’t know where she is.

  “We can’t get back to her, there’s too much chaos,” Dorian says, covering her eyes. “The last time I talked to her, the ­water was up to her waist . . .”

  In her frenzied accounts of clashes with the rescue bureaucracy, Dorian describes an apparatus of police and National Guardsmen that is smug, callous, totally disorganized, given to lapsing into acronym-speak and military mumbo jumbo, and more focused on preserving their dubious situational authority than on using common sense. Even the only grown man in the room with us, who identifies himself as a New Orleans policeman, has been turned away, badge and all, in his attempt to reenter the city—the highly suspect reason being that he should not have left his jurisdiction in the first place.

  Before this trip is over we’ll hear a lot of complaints like this, and I’ll see plenty of this kind of bureaucratic insanity myself, but the frantic scene at the hotel is the first place we encounter it.

  “They’re trying to keep it on the hush-hush,” says Dorian. “But people are dying . . . People are dying all around you down there, and they’re not doing anything about it.”

  The family gives us the address of Lillian’s home, and when we leave everyone in the room embraces each of us in turn—even me, though I have done nothing but stand mute in the back of the room while Sean and Doug talk to Dorian. When Dorian hugs me there are tears in her eyes; she grasps me so hard I drop my notebook.

  “God bless you!” she says. “You have to find her. Please!”

  “Okay,” I say, looking at Sean and Doug in
a panic. Anyone who places her life-and-death hopes in the hands of a journalist is in a very desperate situation indeed. We all three of us seem to realize this, and we are all affected and even frightened by the raw fear and emotion in the room. There is no more talk about cats. Leaving the hotel, we each independently memorize the address of Lillian Jones—621 South Alexander. Reaching this place becomes the whole purpose of the trip.

  We still have the problem of getting there though, and this is no simple matter. Our first thought is to simply hire the cab to drive all the way to New Orleans, but signs are posted on the interstate announcing the closure of all routes into the city. We spend the rest of the afternoon, almost until nightfall, searching out state and local agencies that might be charmed into giving us a ride into the city, before finally making it to the right place: the headquarters of the state Office of Emergency Preparedness, or the OEP.

  Located across from the headquarters of the Louisiana State Police, the OEP headquarters has been transformed into a sort of chaotic intra-agency zoo, with uniformed personnel from every conceivable governmental agency—from the army to the police to the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, which was handling boat convoys up the Mississippi River—rushing back and forth in a panic to acquire vehicles, weapons, and other “assets.”

  From the moment we arrive it is clear that the now famous bitter dispute between state and federal rescue agencies has already reached an advanced stage. What is even more evident (and more troubling) is that no one really knows who is in charge—not only of the New Orleans operation but of the OEP building itself. We are standing in the middle of a historic, and historically lethal, bureaucratic fuck-up.

  Congressman Charlie Melancon, a Louisiana Democrat, is standing outside the entrance to the OEP building with a red face and gritted teeth, telling anyone who will listen that the federal government had senselessly dicked around for days after Governor Kathleen Blanco’s original request for troops and aid. The federal response was so weak, Melancon says, that when he himself visited Plaquemines Parish (the New Orleans county that covers the mouth of the Mississippi) the day before, he was the first federal presence in the region since the day of the storm.