Well, there you have it: the media is coming to find that a lot of the chaos reported during the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina simply didn't happen. Natural chaos? Sure. Criminal chaos? Not so much.

The NYTimes reports, in a Sept 29 story titled "Fear Exceeded Crime's Reality in New Orleans," that a lot of the coverage of extreme hostility, violent looting, and rapes was wholly inaccurate. To be sure, people were looting the local businesses, taking things necessary for survival and, in some cases, pilfering some shit they'd been wanting for a while anyway. But the bottom line is that the media gave us a picture of dark savages unleashed on the unpoliced streets of New Orleans, and this picture, predictably, had no foundation in reality.

Let me give you a few pieces of the NYTimes piece:

--[Police] Superintendent [Edwin P] Compass said that some of his most shocking statements turned out to be untrue. Asked about reports of rapes and murders, he said: "We have no official reports to document any murder. Not one official report of rape or sexual assault."

--For military officials, who flew rescue missions around the city, the reports that people were shooting at helicopters turned out to be mistaken.

--A contingent of National Guard troops was sent to rescue a St. Bernard Parish deputy sheriff who radioed for help, saying he was pinned down by a sniper. Accompanied by a SWAT team, the troops surrounded the area. The shots turned out to be the relief valve on a gas tank that popped open every few minutes.

And I'm totally not making up that last one.

The piece frames the paranoid coverage as a product of the rumor mill and of fearful imaginations. What it doesn't mention is the true underlying mechanism driving the representations of a city gone criminally insane: racism.

It's easy to see that this whole scenario--once the white people left town and before the National Guard showed up (fashionably late, of course)--was cast to be the manifestations of whites' fears of black 'savagery.' This is especially the case with the rape stories that circulated so widely in the media. In the absence of the rule of law, the black man, in accordance with his primitive nature, immediately reverts to his bestial behaviors.

It's almost like our nation's media took Birth of a Nation and rescripted it for the setting of post-Katrina New Orleans. And what's worse is that now that some branches of the media are coming to realize their poor handling of the situation, they still can't see how race dominated the coverage itself.

Tonight I followed Michael's link to Flow, where I found an article entitled "Bring the War Home" by Aniko Bodroghkozy. The article neatly links FX's new series Over There, publicity for which claims it is the first TV series to portray fictional US soldiers in the same context in which their real-life counterparts are fighting and dying in a real-life war (M*A*S*H, you'll recall, was set in the Korean War and broadcast during Vietnam), and the media coverage of Cindy Sheehan.

The basic thrust of Bodroghkozy's article is that Over There and the Sheehan story allow the American public--those who oppose the war, at least--to feel as though they are engaging in the issue without, of course, doing anything about it. One might watch Over There with moralist approbation at the US's lack of casus belli or watch Sheehan bemoan the loss of her son, all without having to leave the safety of one's home. To 'bring the war home,' then, is to engage in something like passive resentment, which bears no likeness to active resistance.

But there is another meaning for the phrase 'bring the war home,' and Bodroghkozy is right not to mention it because it is completely absent from today's political landscape.

To get to that other meaning, we can look at Bodroghkozy's bibliography. It's telling that he references Todd Gitlin. A professor of journalism at Columbia U, Gitlin was president of Students for a Democratic Society, the national New Left conglomeration of student activists, in the early 60s. Gitlin presided over SDS during its phase of nonviolent resistance, before the organization was overtaken by an internal sect calling itself The Weathermen.

The Weathermen abandoned SDS's methods of nonviolence, instead opting for a violent means of calling attention to the war in Vietnam. Their goal was to end the war by giving the American public a small taste of the experiences that the US was inflicting on Vietnam and its neighbors. For a little less than a decade, The Weathermen evaded FBI manhunts while bombing some dozens of public institutions that they felt symbolized imperial oppression. Their slogan was, simply, "Bring the War Home."

In the end, The Weathermen's methods for halting the war had no effect on public policy. They were handily marginalized as criminally insane miscreants, and their political objectives were largely overlooked by the mainstream media.

But the notion of truly 'bringing the war home,' of jarring the public into a profound understanding of how our foreign policy affects the Middle East, seems to carry some (at least theoretical) potential. Could a campaign to 'bring the war home' work today?

Last night as I was going to bed, I had an idea for reinvigorating the left. Actually, it's more an idea about destabilizing the right: take a few plays from the FBI's COINTELPRO playbook and use them against right-wing hackery.

In case a brief reminder is in order, COINTELPRO comes from our good old McCarthyist friends, and it was designed to foster factionalism within leftist radical groups so they would either implode or take violent enough action that the government could crack down on them. The feds have disavowed the methods of COINTELPRO, but there's a strong likelihood that those methods are in use against contemporary peace activists--remember that brief story in Fahrenheit 9/11 about the peaceniks who found that they'd been infiltrated by a local sheriff's deputy?

Anyway, it's rather inconceivable that we could infiltrate a radical right organization and bring about internal disorder with any efficiency. What we could do, though, is embed ourselves in such an organization to make a negative impact externally. What I'm suggesting is that we could create PR nightmares for these people, much like their own leaders (Pat "Rob the Katrina Fund" Robertson, for example) do sometimes, but with more precision.

Imagine this scene: some rather polite students are holding signs on campus to support, say, the nomination of Alberto Gonzales to the Supreme Court. Their signs are reasonable, though misguided: "Support a Real 'Minority Opinion' on the Court," "Gonzales is a Patriot," etc. Off to the side stands a man who seems to fit in with the rest of the pro-Gonzales crowd, but his sign is more extreme: "Torturers Make the Constitution Proud." So long as it's not too over the top, a COINTELPRO II operative can pass himself off as an insider, causing significant trouble for the organization he infiltrates.

The ultimate goal here is not parody or sarcasm. It's the exposure of these righties' true motivation. Consider this potential COINTELPRO II slogan at one of Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform speeches: "No Way I'm Payin Fer Them Yeller Folks' Medicine." Or this one for a NRA rally: "I'll Favor Gun Control When You Favor Segregation."

Isn't it time that somebody unveils just how truly dangerous these groups' true motives can be?

It should come as no surprise that I've been mulling this over since the event: was God finally drowned in the floodwaters of Louisana and Mississippi?

We've all seen the dramatic photos from the first Sunday after the storm: a few congregation members and their pastor gathering on the concrete foundation of what used to be their church to praise the Lord for his generosity. Really, it's a pretty powerful display of faith--and of course of the need for comfort--that some of those who were most directly affected by Katrina could sustain their belief in a God worth praising. Where's the Joban outrage? Why can't this raise some dissonance for believers?

Of course, it's easier to avoid that dissonance when you're not experiencing the loss--just as Job's peers couldn't understand his questions and scolded his doubt. It's just this kind of unwillingness to question one's own beliefs that I witnessed over Labor Day weekend. I sat with Courtney's family in a hospital waiting room, awaiting news on her ailing grandfather. We passed the time telling stories about their patriarch and talking about the Katrina news that was pumping in from the continuous CNN coverage. Then, when a doctor came in to say that Papa only had a few hours left, a certain member of Courtney's family made a remark along these lines: "Well, praise be to God that we've had this time to gather ourselves, that it didn't happen immediately, that we can brace ourselves."

In a word, I was incredulous. How could this person really believe that God would intervene to buy the family time to prepare for the worst of news, but that God wouldn't intervene to save the lives and lands of thousands of people?

Some people may never be capable of self-interrogation, but perhaps the fallout from the hurricane will lead some others to realize that progress is only going to come from earth-bound, collective action. If anything good can come of Katrina, maybe it's the emptying of some church pews across the country as people withdraw their energies from hymns and chants and redirect them to the business of looking after their brothers and sisters.