Getting Back to Business

Although I’ve been reading a LOT, my last few books weren’t really blog worthy.

I finally read Burr in the interest of completing the Gore Vidal American history series, and although it was slightly interesting, it was what it was. A book about Aaron Burr. There were some new insights on Washington, who apparently was a super crappy general, but I honestly have nothing more to say about it. The duel with Alexander Hamilton really wasn’t that saucy.

Then there was Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, which was good fun, especially for the Halloween season. Basic plot here is that vampires are everywhere in America, and they are responsible for the murder of Lincoln’s mother. This spurs a lifetime dedicated to vampire hunting. Vampires, apparently, are also the cause of the Civil War, as they align themselves with slave owners in order to have a buffet of victims without fear of criminal action – provided they pay for them first. And, of course, John Wilkes Booth was a vampire, too. Fun, but that’s really all there is to say about that.

But now, it’s time to get serious again with Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers.

Now, I can’t say enough about Dave Eggers and my unending well of adoration for his work. Although I can take or leave his fiction, he is the most gifted memoirist in the history of the genre. I’ve been raving about Eggers since A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius – which is on my all-time personal favorites list. And if you find that self-indulgent (which you should because it is…brilliantly so), What Is the What is far more restrained and beautiful, with none of the self congratulations. It is just an amazing, rich personal story of a Sudanese immigrant who had to go through hell and back to escape a brutal civil war only to find himself in a refugee camp for the better part of a decade, waiting for a chance to immigrate to the United States.

Closer to the tradition of What Is the What, Zeitoun tells the story of a Syrian American building contractor and his family (with the surname Zeitoun), who are living in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hits. For my part, I’m pretty tired of the endless parade of Katrina sympathy stories and, frankly, of New Orleans for continuing to bellyache about it six years after the fact. But this book is not about bellyaching. It’s a simple narrative of what happens to this family – there’s no screed against Bush, no winks to the “heckuva job, Brownie” or the “just tip the wing” comments. There’s no commentary about the Superdome. No complaining about the Army Corps of Engineers.

There’s no mention of these things, because they were never seen by the Zeitoun family.

What they did experience was a city that became completely flooded in the days after the storm so that the most reliable form of transportation became a simple aluminum canoe. In the wake of this devastation, Zeitoun sees no emergency responders or public officials. His only encounters with “help” are a couple of National Guard fan boats, who merely blow by Zeitoun in his canoe even though there are dozens of desperate people in the area in need of assistance. In the absence of any “official” response to the neighbors who remain trapped in their homes, Zeitoun starts making the rounds, rescuing elderly or infirm residents by himself or with the help of neighbors. Zeitoun even takes to helping the area’s abandoned animals, feeding his neighbors’ dogs with his own freezer full of meat.

After about a week of this community-organized assistance, Zeitoun is at one of his rental properties with a few friends who have also been helping out in the neighborhood. Out of nowhere, the property is raided by a makeshift band of law enforcement officers packing machine guns. Zeitoun and his friends are all imprisoned in an outdoor kennel-style jail hastily constructed by convict labor on a Greyhound parking lot. The charge? Terrorism. And with no evidence against them, they are held for over a month, without rights, a court arraignment, lawyers, or even phone call to tell someone, somewhere that they have been incarcerated.

The human rights issues aside, the book is most effective when detailing the totally screwed up priorities Americans had at the time of the storm. Or at least elected Americans, because the city’s residents seemed to have their hearts and minds in the right place.

What other conclusion can there be when you learn that the responders who came to New Orleans, under the auspices of helping help storm victims, spent their first days after the destruction building a new prison facility, before providing any food, water or medical aid? How much of what we heard about looting, baby rapes and roving gangs of murderers was exaggerated to fit within a salacious and sensational pre-determined storyline that would “sell” in white suburbia: That poor black people in New Orleans, faced with bad circumstances, would quickly devolve into post-apocalyptic banditos until the city looked more like Mogadishu than the United States? Obviously, officials went to New Orleans with that idea in mind first, and wild media reports kept adding fuel to the fire. And in a climate like that, what’s surprising isn’t that Zeitoun was arrested – it’s that more Zeitouns weren’t.