More on the Katrina response...

This cartoon came about mainly because I finally got a chance to view a tape of Spike Lee's "When the Levees Broke." As expected, this documentary was tough to watch in some spots, but, needless to say, this is not due to a lack of quality filmmaking. I'm no "film cricket" (as Homer Simpson once said), but this has to go down as one of Spike Lee's best pieces ever. While it is more a straight-forward retelling of events than his regular films (as it should be), it bears a lot of the familiar Spike Lee artistic signatures that are common in his work: dramatic music, over-exposed images, "portrait" shots, uncompromising storytelling, etc. It's a must-see if you feel as strongly as I do about the injustices that have been perpetrated by our government during the Katrina aftermath.

See also Noam Chomsky on our missing leaders, Isaiah J. Poole on the "catastrophic conservatism" that truly made this tragedy possible (it's certainly not just about a hurricane), and an interview by Alan Maass with a couple of very eloquent Katrina survivors.


I debated with this week's toon whether to have the doctor leave a dying Bush's hospital room, and spray-paint the now-familiar urban marking used by searchers in New Orleans on the door, indicating that there was "1 body" inside. I decided that this was a little over-the-top, or maybe just too un-funny.

It's a decidedly un-funny thing that's happening down there, though...