Leonard Witt, writing yesterday in the Atlanta Constitution-Journal, unearthed a chilling quote from a July 24 story in the New Orleans Times-Picayune: “City, state and federal emergency officials are preparing to give the poorest of New Orleans’ poor a historically blunt message: In the event of a major hurricane, you’re on your own.” (See Witt’s weblog also.)

In scripted appearances being recorded now, officials such as Mayor Ray Nagin, local Red Cross Executive Director Kay Wilkins and City Council President Oliver Thomas drive home the word that the city does not have the resources to move out of harm’s way an estimated 134,000 people without transportation.

Today, Philadelphia Daily News writer Will Bunch provides more details from the Times-Picayune story at his weblog.

Their message will be distributed on hundreds of DVDs across the city. The DVDs’ basic get-out-of-town message applies to all audiences, but the it is especially targeted to scores of churches and other groups heavily concentrated in Central City and other vulnerable, low-income neighborhoods, said the Rev. Marshall Truehill, head of Total Community Action.

“The primary message is that each person is primarily responsible for themselves, for their own family and friends,” Truehill said.

In addition to the plea from Nagin, Thomas and Wilkins, video exhortations to make evacuation plans come from representatives of State Police and the National Weather Service, and from local officials such as Sen. Ann Duplessis, D-New Orleans, and State Rep. Arthur Morrell, D-New Orleans, said Allan Katz, whose advertising company is coordinating officials’ scripts and doing the recording.

Five days after the storm hit, some of the people at whom that message was directed are still dying amid a rescue effort that president Bush, who appointed an estate attorney to head the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and who had earlier lauded the man’s marathon press conference performance, described, in an apparent effort to distance himself from the Bush administration, as “not acceptable.” The National Guard, already crippled from the deployment of large numbers of troops and equipment to Iraq and elsewhere — nearly 80,000 nationwide, more than 10,000 from Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama alone — is still struggling to deploy those members not on active duty and to assemble the equipment they need to police the streets and save lives.

(As I write, I’m listening to a National Public Radio reporter describe watching a young woman dying from an asthma attack on the sidewalk outside either the convention center or the Superdome yesterday (I didn’t catch which) as National Guard troops loaded refugees on to buses for transportation out of the city. The Guard were unable to provide medical assistance and didn’t know where to find someone who could. )

It isn’t only the poor affected by the storm; Bush noted that Mississippi Senator Trent Lott lost one of his homes (and said later he understands “the devastation requires more than one day’s attention,” which is an encouraging sign). But when the dead are transmogrified from bodies into numbers, the data will show that those who had the least — no cars, no hotel money, no friends in high places — were far more likely to lose everything, including their lives.

People are quick to note that as often happens, the disaster has brought out the best in all but a few. The typical representatives of that few are the New Orleans looters. But the very worst is surfacing in other, more damaging places: FEMA head Michael Brown (the estate attorney) and Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff both took it upon themselves to criticise those who remained in New Orleans — the ones who were given DVDs in lieu of shelter or transportation out of the city — for not heeding the evacuation orders, and CNN’s Pentagon correspondent, Jamie McIntyre, reported that some Pentagon officials were questioning why reporters “had so much sympathy for the victims, and not as much sympathy for the challenges that the government met in meeting this challenge.”

Chertoff, of course, is in charge of handling the federal response to disasters that strike without warning; his response to one the time and place of which were known well in advance isn’t particularly encouraging. But if a lot of people die on his watch, at least he’ll know there’s someone got his back:

Rev. Bill Shanks, pastor of New Covenant Fellowship of New Orleans, also sees God’s mercy in the aftermath of Katrina — but in a different way. Shanks says the hurricane has wiped out much of the rampant sin common to the city.

The pastor explains that for years he has warned people that unless Christians in New Orleans took a strong stand against such things as local abortion clinics, the yearly Mardi Gras celebrations, and the annual event known as “Southern Decadence” — an annual six-day “gay pride” event scheduled to be hosted by the city this week — God’s judgment would be felt.

“New Orleans now is abortion free. New Orleans now is Mardi Gras free. New Orleans now is free of Southern Decadence and the sodomites, the witchcraft workers, false religion — it’s free of all of those things now,” Shanks says. “God simply, I believe, in His mercy purged all of that stuff out of there — and now we’re going to start over again.”

Stuff, things, people, whatever … all gone now. Imagine his ecstasy if God motivated some equally devout, equally despicable scumbag to blow up Las Vegas. It’s a sentiment no different than one reported by a Louisiana National Guard member who wrote in to describe his frustration at being trapped in Iraq while Katrina bore down on his home: “Some Iraqis have openly stated we are feeling Allah’s rage.” Well, Jason, you can add Jehovah to the list of vengeful deities, and you might want to drop the Reverend Shanks a note of thanks for his sympathy.

Everyone knew the hurricane was coming; a lot of people knew that tens of thousands of residents would be unable to leave New Orleans and other stricken areas, and that many of those who were trapped would die, and nobody did much about it. And at least at the federal level, the impulse to blame the victims seems to have taken deep root.

Maybe murder is too strong a word. Maybe it isn’t. I should ask a lawyer. Do you suppose an estate attorney would know?

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