Karl Klockars

It was, I believe, a year ago exactly that the song “Walking on Sunshine” by Katrina and the Waves (irony?) died a terrible death for me. I was at that time trapped in a hellish internship, as Executive in Charge of Ordering Lunch, Oh – and Writing Show Logs Too for a radio station. The show I was working for considered it the height of humor to reuse one particular gag again and again, every hour on the hour (or half hour, 20 minutes, after every commercial break, whatever). See if this garners a chuckle:

“Hey, it’s X minutes past X o’clock, how’s the weather outside? (plays “Walking on Sunshine”) Now how is it in New Orleans?! Hundred mile winds! Rain! Hurricanes! How is it here! (plays “Walking on Sunshine”) Yeah! Hey! Yeah! All Right!” And then the co-host would chuckle a bit, because that was her job. Sometimes in radio, laughter is attached to a paycheck because no one laughs at some of these jokers for free.

I heard the chorus to that song somewhere in the vicinity of a dozen times in the span of that 4 hour show. All the while, I was trying to get in contact with anyone down there that still had a phone. Try and talk to someone at a news station down there, would you, intern? Oh, yeah. Easy. Inside my head I was thinking that these people probably have something more important to do than talk to some shitbag midday radio host right before he goes into a dirty-joke bit. But then, that’s why I was the intern and not the host, I suppose.

Oh, for the record – the unnamed radio host got fired a few months after this. The firing and this particular incident aren’t related in any way, aside from a general lack of humor and relevancy contributing to some shitty ratings. But, because I am a small-hearted and terrible person, reading that particular Feder column did make my day.

Maybe I’m not necessarily being fair. How were any of us to know that this particular storm was going to be the worst in American history? Were we supposed to know about levees and 9th Wards? Or were we still in the mindset that New Orleans only had the French Quarter, some oyster po’boys, and a yearly outbreak of naked breasts for plastic baubles. Oh, and what did any of us think about New Orleans cops a year and a week ago? Yeah, pretty bad.

So I’ll rescind my judgement of the terrible radio gig for the time being, despite my continued hatred for “Walking on Sunshine.” Somethings won’t change, and if you karaoke that song, god help you.

But as the days went on, and things got worse and worse, it got more and more painful to listen to people call in, frustrated and angry at the way things were going in our own country. And it was terrible to listen to this particular host, one who appeared deathly afraid to take a stand on anything despite the rampant ineptitude practically punching all of us in the face, hem and haw and shuffle around things when people (read: truck drivers) called in to yell and scream and vent about what a piss-up the municipal, state, and federal government had made of the whole mess.

Ignore all the ranting from godheads about divine retribution for sin, put aside all the theories about blasted levees and just try to forget the look on Mike Myers’ face when Kanye spouted off standing next to him. Just try to remember how it felt when the pictures kept coming back, day after day, from a place that’s a 15 hour straight-line drive to the south. I don’t think I heard much “Walking on Sunshine” after that first day, but I do recall spending an inordinate amount of time talking about Bears pre-season drivel with a fake backup quarterback. Oh, and someone probably said something about breasts once or twice.

But as the haze started to clear and the new pond became the old city again, was I the only person to think that maybe this could be one of the few times in American history where shit ran uphill for a change? Literally and figuratively, as the water levels dropped (and all the detritus within it) it seemed like everything pushed higher and higher to pinpoint on the administration’s cronyism.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who thinks “They did a heck of a job” would be a good tombstone for FEMA. People point to Katrina as a microcosm of American culture and where the news media regained its humanity. I prefer to think of it as a blatant example of what happens when a meritocracy became a who-you-knowcracy, and I have to wonder how many bodies one has to have on their conscience before you start losing sleep at night.

Something of an aside: We took a lot of road trips to Florida as kids, and one of the movies we’d watch in the van was a documentary about Hurricane Andrew. Now Andrew is the second most costly storm in American history, but coincidentally there was another Bush in office during that storm. However, supplies were brought in at a semi-fast response, and to say that there’s any sort of bias towards the current administration is goddamn ridiculous. If you go back to South Florida now, the trees are still small but people were cleaning up and moving back in pretty much as soon as the storm dissipated.

What’s the difference here?

I fail to understand how there can still be filth in the streets, how there still can be collapsed houses sitting on foundations, how we worried about Mardi Gras and the where the Saints would play. But I can understand why people wouldn’t want to go back. I can remember looking out the window and seeing sun glinting over Lake Michigan, and being able to see Gary, Indiana from the show producers’ office. Incenced caller after incenced caller would talk the pictures of “looting” vs. “finding” and about how Barbara Bush had said they were better off, and host in question being forced to finally admit that yes, that was pretty dumb.

I remember wondering how this could happen in America. I remember wondering how long we had known it was coming. I remember the feeling of knowing for sure that right now, someone was lying dead on a streetcorner, in an attic, and in a football stadium. I remember hearing about sniping at cops and childrend dying of hunger, and I remember emails going around where people blamed the welfare system, and they just knew “black people would act like this.”

It’s been a pretty shitty year, hasn’t it? The more I think about it, the more and more regretful I am that I had the misfortune of living through my twenties in this particular decade. For a while, America was a dead woman under a quilt in a chair on the side of the road. Now we remember her for a couple days, and maybe remember how for a week in August and September, there was a bleeding artery in a part of America mostly no one cared about. Now there’s a scar, and it aches when it rains. It’s numbed a bit, but I don’t think we’ve forgotten that it’s there.