Honesty time, for the public good, please. How many of you, with the best of well-caffeinated post-brunch intentions, began on the Kaiser Foundation's 13,000 word Hurricane Katrina story on the cover of the Times magazine yesterday? And then how many of you finished it? I ask because sometimes things that look like they should be very good for you, like some horrible foreign vitamin-less all-fiber vegetable, just aren't. (And sometimes they are!) As of Monday morning, the piece sure isn't on their most-emailed list. Or their most-blogged list. But even though the magazine is still sitting by the couch, taunting me, only you can tell me if it should be on my clip-and-save list. Because I was, like, busy.
Monday, August 31, 2009
19
A reader writes: "Busy is NO EXCUSE. I read it and it only took me 30 min. DO IT."
Will it make you feel better to know I didn't even try because I know myself that well? (But yes, yes, grumble, grumble your Dear Reader makes a point beyond refute. Damn it.)
It's not laziness that kept me from reading the article - it was the fear that it would push me into a crippling depression.
Selfish. Also, ever since the Times started treating me like they're Twitter, telling me how many Times followers I have, asking me to look at activity on 'my network'...and then publishing hit articles on Facebook and Twitter...well, I just want to read a paper. It creeps me out.
Plus, I feel like I read most of that in the initial coverage. Am I wrong? I heard about the euthanizing years ago. It was horrible then. I have to read about it again? In novelistic detail?
I mean, that is the Times' plan, right? To kill off Facebook and Twitter and replace them?
If by "selfish" you mean caught up in the time-suck that was a ridiculously obsessive "compare and contrast" of the week's volley of Bryan twin articles, yes.
Final Destination 3-D wasn't just going to watch itself, was it?
I didn't read it, but only because I thought you were gonna.
It's number 16 on the extended most-emailed list right now. I'm actually surprised as it makes no mention of food, Paris, or law school, but there you go.
It was a pretty amazing read. Best to spread it out throughout a workday, but it really does move quickly. Very frightening investigating, and perfectly haunting b&w photographs.
Read it. It was easily 3-4,000 words too long. Could save ProPublica like $120K. But seriously, it was a little heavy on the moralizing against Pou, so I think she was fishing for anecdotes to offset what were exceedingly grim realities. What would have really helped was a better timeline structure (either as a graphic or narrative device). The story opens with some broad claims that led me to believe that Pou was wandering around the hospital dispensing deadly eight-balls like a clown at a Dead show, when in fact most of the dire decision making happened at a very late point when, retrospectively, we can say 'oh, but the calvary was just minutes away', but I remember the awful confusion and anger, and reading that webmaster guys blog and I don't know that anyone can say at this remove that it was immoral or unprofessional. If anything, finding out how hard it was to physically evacuate people from that building made me more sympathetic to how the breakdown occurred. If anything, the writer is guilty of making a conclusion before writing, but the facts she was trying to fit just didn't.
That's what I was trying to say!
I'm halfway through it. I had to get through Styles and its doorman-fantasy wedding first.
Dear Mr. Sicha,
The local (white) professional elite here in New Orleans nearly unanimously rallied to Angel of Death Dr. Anna Pou's defense in the same way they rebuke blacks for coming to the defense of a black person of ill-repute. The metro NO area has been suffering from a mass delusion about Anna Pou and the cops you shot those evacuees on the Danziger Bridge and the vigilantes of Algiers Point and their cop-enablers. I relished Dr. Fink's take-down of Pou and the other arse-holes who worked at Memorial Hospital.
Read it just to see how doctors can be big freakin' jerks in an emergency.
Sorry, I should have written this:
"...and the cops who shot those evacuees..."
Ninety-nine,
Did we read the same story? Heavy moralizing against Pou? The report was actually dry and matter-of-fact. I don't know how anything the doctors at LifeCare did can gain anyone's sympathy.
Goodness.
Well, I read all of it, and let me check, but the doctors who made most of the decisions were employees of Memorial, and not Life-Care. The two LifeCare employees that would seem to have some legal culpability are Robichaux and Menedez, one of whom did testify that they believed Pou's statements assumed authority over their patients.
Also not addressed ANYWHERE in the story is the oft cited 'greater numbers of dead' in the makeshift morgue. 45 bodies were taken out -- author of the story says as many as 17 may have been euthanized, even though by her reporting, she indicates that a good portion of them may have been very near death (curiously, she doesn't detail how many, if any of the seven people on ventilators died, and how many of them had the morphine cocktail), and later in the story admits that the poor care at the next stop along the evacuation route might have not helped. So does that mean that 28 bodies would have been considered 'normal'.
Based on how this article is reported (and nothing else), it looks like the original number of 4 is low, but not by much (all factors being accounted for). That's morally a really nasty situation to be in, but, you know, the Preznit flew overhead and didn't see much of a problem, and if he (with Landrieau) couldn't muster a National Guard unit to help carry the sick to the helipad, blaming one doctor seems heavy handed to me.
Yes, Choire, read it.
If only because it's a great exercise in watching your sympathy rise and fall and rise again and fall again into a weird pit in your stomach, all in the space of eleventy billion words.
It actually goes faster than you would think.
Ok, LifeCare and Memorial. Wrote too quickly. You seem to forget that other hospitals had flooding problems, yet they did not suffer a body count as high as Memorial's.
Your last paragraph --especially your last sentence-- is extraordinarily fatuous.
"Blaming one doctor seems heavy handed..."?! Goodness. Fine. The article blames more than one!
Your role here seems to absolve everyone at LifeCare and Memorial.