Review: Spike Lee’s “When the Levee Broke”

Spike Lee’s new HBO documentary, ostensibly about Katrina’s tragic impact on New Orleans, achieves several ambitious goals: stimulating the viewer with hot, interracial sex scenes; indicting every white man in America in the tragedy, and convincing the viewer of the intellectual and sexual superiority of the black male, specifically Mr. Lee himself.

In this HBO doc, Lee offers up multiple fascinating theories that paint the New Orleans tragedy as anything but accidental. The guilty parties encompass all manner of white celebrities, all of which had much to gain from the Katrina tragedy. Some interesting hypotheses as to what started the flood in the Lower Ninth Ward:

• The Couric Conspiracy: After the sympathy generated from her husband’s (faked) death failed to propel Katie Couric into the 6:30 pm NBC night news anchor slot, she and her very much alive husband decided to create their own scoop by forcing underprivileged black children to destroy the levees.

• Dr. Phil’s Levee Molestation: Dr. Phil rounded up hundreds of underprivileged black children in the Lower Ninth Ward, piled them up against the levee wall, and molested them so forcefully that the levee shattered, flooding the city. Conveniently, Anderson Cooper helped gather and hold down the children (see “The Couric Conspiracy” for his motivations)

• The President’s Role: Mr. Lee posits his most credible theories towards Mr. Bush, a man so mentally disabled that he still has no idea of what happened in New Orleans, much less the ability to understand elaborate concepts like “levee”, “hurricane”, or even “water”. Although Lee credits Bush with no enmity, he does propose that the president, among other things:
- was born with a condition that can euphemistically be referred to as “profound retardation”, and institutionalized from birth right up until 2 days before the Feb. 1999 Republican primary elections.
- does not even possess the intelligence to control his own bodily functions – and in fact requires the assistance of three McKinsey consultants, using instruction with sock puppets, simply to achieve a bowel movement
- regularly looses consciousness when he “forgets” to exhale, which apparently happens up to sixty times a day

But despite the machinations of whitey, Lee offers hope that New Orleans, and black America, has what it takes to ultimately recover. And what viewer could doubt the natural self sufficiency of the black man, especially after seeing the director himself performing admirably in an orgy populated by a bevy of voracious white bitches? This is indeed the Katrina that you didn’t see on The Weather Channel .

Lee closes his poignant elegy with the modest suggestion that reparations be made by granting every black man in America a “skinny white bitch” to service his needs in perpetuity. My vote is that said first white bitch be Ms. Couric herself, followed by the Olsen Twins, Nicky Hilton, and Jon Benet Ramsey, all of which, Lee insists, conspired in some way to destroy The Big Easy.