Monday, May 17, 2010

The specter of rooftop rescues doesn’t rivet us like it did five years ago.

It was only rain until the swollen Cumberland River escaped its banks and killed 30 people in three states, including a woman drowned in her car trying to navigate a flooded street.

Mayor Karl Dean May 7 estimated damage at $1.5 billion.

Twelve thousand Tennesseans registered with the Federal Emergency Management Agency for disaster assistance.

Singer Taylor Swift, 20, who moved to Nashville at 14, helped Music City to the tune of $500,000.

Other country stars, such as Cass County Fair alumnus Vince Gill, played benefit concerts, even if they had to borrow instruments, like Keith Urban.

So plenty of good surfaced in the wake of devastation, as it routinely does in America, yet President Obama is catching scandal flak for offering little moral support to flood victims of areas surrounding Nashville.

The president is being criticized for not visiting the area or flying over it or holding a press conference to discuss the tragedy and the valor of those left to rebuild shattered dreams, as politicians routinely do.

Why? some demand to know.

Why is the Obama administration all but ignoring one of the largest non-hurricane disasters in American history?

They suggest the death toll was not high enough, or perhaps the citizens are too self-reliant.

Or worse, that there was “not enough rioting” or “suffering minorities.”

They cynically say his involvement hinged on not being able to mine a political payoff big enough to risk a “Brownie” moment which was the first chink in the perception of President George W. Bush’s administration as a competent, well-oiled machine before New Orleans.

Critics are quick to point out that Obama didn’t win Tennessee in 2008.

Or even that maybe he dislikes country music.

A likelier explanation is that we, particularly the national media headquartered in New York who can only beat one issue to death at a time, were preoccupied by the vehicle bomb found in their own backyard in Times Square after a botched terrorist attack, plus oil continued to gush into the Gulf of Mexico.

The Grand Ole Opry stage trod by country music legends is soggy after the Tennessee city’s worst flood in 80 years which destroyed a city as surely as a bomb or an oil spill.
But what a bomb it would have been had that green 1993 Nissan Pathfinder SUV exploded.

Anyone standing within five city blocks of the juncture of W. 45th Street and Broadway in midtown Manhattan would have been at risk of being struck by shrapnel and shards of flying glass.

A reporter familiar with Baghdad car bombs said victims appear naked because the fireball melts their clothing onto their skin’s surface.