Reporting Live from the Astrodome

If you are a freelance television crew there is no better luck than having a major disaster occur in a neighboring state. It is almost as lucrative as having a President who takes five weeks vacations at a ranch up the highway, or an angry mother who camps out on the side of a country road to protest the war – we call these kind of things cash cows.
As I have often said, “If the space shuttle is going to blow up it might as well blow up over Texas.”

We have crews in New Orleans and Houston and Houston, where I am now, is by far the better gig. I get sporadic calls from our guys in downtown New Orleans and they tell me first hand that it is frightening and miserable. One crew spent three days sleeping in their car only to end up in a hotel without running water. Crime is rampant and at night it gets worse. They tell me the Superdome is a toilet and they have heard believable accounts of preteen girls being raped inside. What you’re seeing and hearing on television is true. The last time I spoke to one of our guys his parting words to me were, “Enjoy having toilet paper.”

But enough about where I’m not, and more about where I am. I’m in Houston, working for ABC at the Astrodome. Specifically we’re shooting for Nightline, a show some people may actually be familiar with. In a nutshell, this place is fucked. I don’t just mean the Dome, which I will get to in a moment, but the city itself has opened itself up for a whole mess of trouble. While I do not doubt that Jesus would have done what the Mayor here did, I think it safe to say that Jesus probably wouldn’t have been a great politician (Have you read the bible? The guy couldn’t speak in sound bites). It is very clear that the only people who couldn’t get out of New Orleans were poor, sick, old, homeless, addicted to drugs, or all of the above. Houston is experiencing something very similar to the Cuban exodus of 1980 when Castro sent all his criminals and lunatics to Florida on rafts. An entire influx of underclass citizens has been added to a city that probably could have done without them. I’m not saying they are all criminals – they aren’t. In most cases these people are only guilty of being poor – they couldn’t flee the storm because they had no means and so they were doomed from the start. What little they had is gone, and as bad as it was for them before this, it is now much worse. We are asking questions like, “Do you think the response would have been different if it had been wealthy white people at the Superdome?” The answer is irrelevant because it will never need to be asked. Wealthy people, white or black, don’t live in the areas hit hardest and they have the ability and means to leave. Houses are built near levees and in flood zones are cheap – that’s why poor people live in them. One could argue that racism is the reason these people are poor but that becomes a cyclical argument because one could also argue that racism is simply another means of class warfare. In the end the only thing that matters is that there are a bunch of people stuck in a fucked up situation and they are citizens of this country and they deserve the full power of their government to help them. Nothing less.

The hardest part is seeing all the little kids who are guilty of nothing and have been failed by a system and country that doesn’t care about them. Last week it was announced that 12.7% of the U.S. lives in poverty and that we saw a net increase of 1 million people to the poverty roles over the last year. Outside of Russia, we have the highest percentage of people living in poverty of all G-8 nations. More importantly, if you are poor in America you are much worse off than you are in any of those other countries. This disaster only drives that point home even further.

Furthermore, if Houston was hoping to shed its image as one of the fattest cities in the country, it may have wanted to seriously consider bussing what has to be the largest number of fat women I have ever seen into its city limits. Are there any women in New Orleans who don’t weight three hundred pounds? If my first hand experience with the refugees is any indicator, I would have to say no.

If you watched Nightline last night you saw some footage that we acquired that is getting a lot of buzz. Chris and I snuck into the Astrodome and shot footage of families trying to get their lives together under old Oilers banners and giant spotlights. It was Chris’s idea and it turned out to be a good one. Sneaking in is a bit of a misnomer however since we just walked in a side entrance – something no other camera crew had apparently considered. The only footage coming out of the Astrodome prior to this has been wide shots from far away of the people down on the old field. An interview I conducted ended up making up a large part of the final edited segment along with Chris’s tremendous video. Let’s face it – we’re amazing and we deserve every Emmy award we have. No one exploits a tragedy like we do.

Tomorrow we’re going to be hanging with Al Sharpton as he visits the evacuees. Let’s just hope we don’t catch TB inside.

Good times.