Dispelling Myths

Another Katrinaversary is upon us and with that comes, of course, a fair amount of heavy personal reflection for everyone. In a city of rituals, it's no surprise that a multitude of public happenings are planned around this time of year to commemorate the events of five years ago that changed everyone's lives. One such ritual happening I've become accustomed to attending is the Rising Tide new media conference which drops tomorrow morning at the Howling Wolf. (Yes, the very same "hallowed ground" which recently hosted the Airsex Championship. I hope we can come together as a nation and forgive RT for presuming to build their event there after all that venue has been through.)

The conference aspires to foster the opportunity internet media presents to citizens to better inform themselves and one another about the challenges their community faces. The front page of the Rising Tide website reads

We come together to dispel myths, promote facts, highlight progress and regress, discuss recovery ideas, and promote sound policies at all levels. We aim to be a "real life" demonstration of internet activism as we continue to recover from a massive failure of government on all levels.

I very much like that little block of text. It says an informed, engaged public can debunk and overcome damaging untruths which emerge either through general laziness or from powerful institutional malefactors. This is, in my opinion, the very best of what internet media offers us. And, as everyone living in New Orleans for the past five years should know, that tool can often seem like a Godsend.

In a recent Times-Picayune column Jarvis DeBerry described New Orleanians' fanatic obsession with dispelling myths.

It’s simple, really: We stand up for ourselves. We stand up because often the criticisms of this place seem as misinformed as they are unrelenting. We stand up for ourselves because we figure that speaking the truth — in all its complexity and all its ugliness — is better than keeping quiet after pretty-sounding lies.

Rising Tide presents a program of speakers and discussion panels relentlessly bent on speaking the truth "in all its complexity and all its ugliness". 2008 RT keynote speaker, author John M Barry maintains a document entitled What You Need to Know About Katrina-- and Still Don't -- Why It Makes Economic Sense to Protect New Orleans on his website. 2009 keynote speaker, actor Harry Shearer, recently published this article in Vanity Fair listing Five Myths About New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina The panelists and honorees have been among the best of examples of New Orleanians unwilling to, as Jarvis puts it, keep quiet in the face of pretty-sounding lies.

In 2010 the keynote speaker at Rising Tide is author and journalist Mac McClelland. McClelland is currently the human rights reporter at Mother Jones Magazine where she maintains a blog entitled The Rights Stuff McClelland has spent this summer dispelling the massive spew of myths coming out of BP and various governmental authorities concerning the progress of the Deepwater Horizon oil gusher.

This week McClelland wrote a post in which she responded to various national media outlets including this especially stupid piece of work by Dan Baum who have largely papered over the city’s numerous lingering problems in favor of a happier narrative.

McClelland concluded

Seventy percent of New Orleanians say that America has forgotten about their struggle to recover from Katrina. This Sunday, President Obama's coming to pay attention to it for a day. Last time he spoke at Xavier here, a year after the storm, he said that "lessons can be just as easily unlearned as they are learned." Or, if the post-disaster, everything-is-fine-now headlines now coming out of the Gulf are any indication, they can also never be learned at all.

I hope to see you tomorrow at Rising Tide where we'll do our best once again to sort out the lessons from the lies.