Catastrophic lie: Harry Shearer’s new film about New Orleans comes to Taos

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Catastrophic lie: Harry Shearer’s new film about New Orleans comes to Taos
April 1, 2011
By Rick Romancito
The Taos News

Harry Shearer got mad. During a speech delivered Oct. 9, 2009, by President Barack Obama, the disaster of more than five years ago that struck New Orleans was still being blamed on Hurricane Katrina — and that pissed him off big time.

What? Haven't we been told by countless stories in the media that the flooding, destruction and more than a thousand tragic deaths were the direct result of a massive hurricane that slammed into the Gulf Coast that August of 2005?

No, Shearer says.

All of that was a colossal lie that continues to be perpetuated.

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So, anger turned to work and Shearer decided to make a movie.

His film, titled "The Big Uneasy," will be screened this week as the Movies at the TCA feature, Sunday through Tuesday (April 3-5) at the Taos Community Auditorium, 145 Paseo del Pueblo Norte.

Even better, Shearer himself will appear in person Monday (April 4) for the 7 p.m. showing to introduce his documentary.

Shearer, if you haven't guessed already, does the voices of several characters on the hit FOX Network TV show, "The Simpsons," including but certainly not limited to Mr. Burns, news anchor Kent Brockman, Rev. Lovejoy and Ned Flanders. He also appears as Derek Smalls, bassist for the mock heavy metal band "Spinal Tap," along with numerous other film and television appearances.

He's also a resident of New Orleans.

Shearer contends that the disaster was entirely man-made and was the result of major design flaws committed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. If the Corps had done its job, Shearer says, all anyone would have gotten was wet ankles.

He knows it.

Residents of New Orleans know it.

But, in a telephone interview with Shearer last Sunday (March 27), he says the president had "the audacity to stand in front of a city full of people who knew better and to say it was a natural disaster. And, it was only his personal charisma and the fact that people in New Orleans did vote for him, that let him get away with it.

"And, he's done it twice, by the way. He did it again, I think using the same words when he came down for the fifth anniversary. So, it was not an accident. And, one thinks to oneself, 'This is a smart person. This is a well-informed person. This is a person whose political rise was fueled by the failure of the Bush administration to respond to this disaster. This is a person who has New Orleans natives in his administration. Every reason to pay attention to this and get it right, so it's pretty confounding and pretty astounding — I sounded like Clyde Frasier there for a minute — when he gets it so blatantly wrong."

Shearer and his wife, Judith Owen, have lived in the Crescent City since the late 1990s. He said that a late writer friend of his used to say there was a category of people called 'The 'Never Left,' namely, people who came for a weekend and never left.

"I'm sort of a milder version of that. I came for a Jazz Fest weekend in '88 and just fell in love with the place. I just searched for any excuse to come back after that, for work, pleasure, and then by the late 1990s my wife and I looked at each other and said, 'You know, we're subsidizing the hotel industry here, why don't we just get a place?' (He reportedly has attended every New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival since 1988).

In his "Filmmaker's Statement," Shearer writes, "When 80 percent of the city flooded at the end of August 2005, I was in Los Angeles, getting ready to act in a movie. Like the rest of the country, I was glued to the TV and the Internet, and like the rest of the country I assumed that the obvious explanation was correct: Massive hurricane, city below sea level, natural disaster."

"When the film wrapped, I flew back to New Orleans on the first plane out. Arriving in the city on Nov. 5, I had the first meal in one French Quarter restaurant not served on paper plates: The hot water had just been turned back on. The sidewalks were still lined with thrown-out refrigerators, and the only vehicles you saw on most streets were National Guard Humvees. But already the local newspaper and radio talk shows had interim reports from two independent teams of investigators looking into the flooding, and already the story they were telling was diverging from the obvious explanation."

Shearer says he remains astonished by the staying power of the "natural disaster" scenario in the media. "I spent about 20 minutes at the National Press Club last week talking about this," he said in the phone interview with Tempo magazine.

"I've had a couple of experiences when I worked in journalism that taught me that there is this habit that the New York-based media have where editors and producers get sort of a first impression of what a story is, what the story is, in any particular case. That's what I call the 'first dusting effect,' and once they get that, they are very stubborn about maintaining that that is for all future time the story. And subsequent facts, when they're developed by their own reporters or by independent investigators on the public record, just can't break through that. To me, that's much more powerful than any political bias ... I think they're biased in a couple of ways. They're biased toward the executive's very first notion of the story and they're biased towards whatever it is logistically easier to cover. And that latter one is equally powerful."

As each new piece of the puzzle was revealed, Shearer blogged about it at the Huffington Post, and he personally interviewed the lead investigators, as well as a whistleblower from inside the Corps of Engineers, on his weekly radio broadcast, "Le Show."

Then came Obama's town hall appearance and his reference to the flooding as a "natural disaster."

"My head exploded," Shearer writes in his Filmmaker's Statement.

"I realized that blogging and radio had failed to make a dent in the narrative of the disaster that had solidified into the national consciousness. That's literally the moment when I decided to make a documentary about this story, featuring the investigators, the whistleblower, and everyone else I could contact who actually knew what the hell had happened to New Orleans."

After all the investigations and court judgments, is there a smoking gun in all of this? "The smoking gun," Shearer said, "is the evidence found by the investigators both on the ground, like, for example, when Ivor Van Heerden (of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center) looked at the flood walls and said to himself, 'Wait a minute. The Corps of Engineers is saying these walls were overtopped and water, dirty water, especially during a flood, leaves a mark when it's at its high point, and the high water mark on those walls was nowhere near the top.' I think that really does qualify as the first smoking gun they found."

"Then, if they went back and looked, they saw, I think (Engineering Professor) Bob Bea's team found that there were people in the corps, high ranking people, who said, 'Change this definition of what you're designing for because the standard project (for a) hurricane is not what Congress told you to design for. They told you to design for the maximum possible hurricane — and that was in 1980. The corps was told to 'redefine this' and they didn't. That's a pretty major smoking gun."

"The judge in the MR-GO (Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet) case, there was an internal corps report that said, unless something is done, the Mississippi River- Gulf Outlet is going to be a disaster. That was from inside the corps itself and they ignored it. This thing is replete with smoking guns. It's not like, ooh, it's a close one here. Who does this hair belong to? It is full of the most remarkably damning evidence — found by investigators and by a federal judge in the MR-GO case. It's startling that it's so blatant, and it tells you, I think, of the hubris of these guys that they don't even bother to hide this. It's like smoking guns in plain sight with the sun glinting off them."

In his film, Shearer speaks to investigators and experts who poked through the muck as the water receded, and uncovers a courageous whistle-blower from the Army Corps of Engineers, the film's synopsis reads.

"His dogged pursuit of facts reveals that some of the same flawed methods responsible for levee failure during Hurricane Katrina are being used to rebuild the system expected to protect the 'new' New Orleans from future peril."

Shearer explained his film emphasizes that it's not just New Orleans.

"The Corps is more egregious in New Orleans than elsewhere but there are more than 100 cities around the country, Dallas and Sacramento being two of them, where the Corps has not come out and said 'our levees are not what they're supposed to be. Not good enough.' In Dallas, they're built on sand, the levees along the river. It portends bad stuff. The word inside the corps about Sacramento is quite disturbing and I just came back from there, showing the film there, and people who came to the first couple of evenings, some of them were very aware of that, very disturbed about it. We are facing more of this and it won't be blamed on a hurricane next time."

In his Filmmaker's Statement, Shearer says the reason he made the film is because the hurricane did not cause the flood, "despite what you may have heard on the news. However, poor science and even poorer management did.

So this film is not a 'Katrina documentary,' a documentary about the preparation or after-effects of Katrina, or an examination of the Bob Dylan song 'Hurricane,' nor the boxer who inspired it.

"Unfortunately, the looming myths and buzzwords that sprang from the tragic flooding of New Orleans have provided a rather large windmill to tilt against. But I thank you, New Orleans thanks you, Bob Dylan thanks you, and Derek Smalls is simply confused."

The film will be screened at 2 p.m. Sunday (April 3) and at 7:30 p.m. Monday and Tuesday (April 4-5).

For Monday's showing, Shearer will likely take the stage at around 7 p.m., so get there early. Admission is $7.50; $6.50 for Taos Center for the Arts members. Tickets are being sold in advance.

Call to reserve them at (575) 758-2062.

For additional details, visit www.tcataos.org.