New Orleans Blues

The city I called home for ten years is dying: a slow, agonizing,all-too-terribly public death, before the eyes of the nation and the world.

It is dying, as are far too many of its people, because our national leadersonly have the stomach, or the talent (or both) for killing, as in Iraq orAfghanistan, but not for rebuilding eroding levees, nor rescuing people, as isdesperately needed now. Fallujah? Oh yeah, we can do that. We can drop bombs andbreak things. New Orleans? Well, now wait a minute, we can't go in there. Itmight be dangerous.

And while New Orleans will certainly be re-born, let there be no doubt of herimminent demise at present. The Birthplace of Jazz, home of the nation's bestfood, most amazing architecture and many of its kindest people is headed for thestatus of a graveyard, in which will be buried not only tens of thousands ofhuman souls, but businesses, entire neighborhoods, even a culture. Gone.

If you thought New Orleans was haunted before Hurricane Katrina, stickaround. The dead will soon own every inch of it.

Children and old folks are perishing on national television; on streets Ihave walked a thousand times. People from the poorest sections of New Orleansare hanging on by the slimmest of threads: people from communities I have beenin hundreds of times. People I know.

Bodies are floating in the streets; others are laid out on dry land, coveredby blankets to provide them with what little dignity one can salvage in timessuch as this. Babies are dying of thirst; the elderly for lack of medicine.

Yet Congress took four days to come back from their vacation to arrange foran emergency aid bill. People who rushed back to work late one night not toolong ago so they could save the life of Terry Schiavo--who couldn't even feelpain--because life is so precious to them, couldn't manage to hustle it back toD.C. for four days to help save the dying in New Orleans, who unlike Schiavo canindeed feel their own pain: every ache, every infection, every single bit of it.People who, unlike Schiavo are mostly poor and mostly black, and who provideless political capital one supposes for the so-called pro-life movement, thanthe persistently vegetative or the run-of the-mill fetus.

And even when they did return, they only allocated a little more than $10billion to relief efforts. Ten billion dollars: merely a fraction of what ournation has spent to bomb and strafe and occupy Iraq, and a mere drop of piss inthe ocean compared to what this nation forked over to bail out the Savings andLoan industry when it was looted by rich white guys.

Oh, and speaking of white people and looting.

To hear an awful lot of folks tell it--like several on forum boards like theone at nola.com--looting is a black thing, what with supposed gangs of armed menroaming the streets of the city, stealing big screen TVs and guns, all due totheir savagery, their lack of values, their moral depravity. Apparently, intheir world, white people don't loot. Not the S&L bandits, not Ken Lay andhis buddies at Enron, not the crooks at Halliburton: never. Only the black andpoor, and this they know because Fox News, and for that matter CNN, the networksand most every other media outlet told them so, by way of image after image oflooters demonstrating a so-called break with civilized norms of behavior.

In the chat rooms you can spend only a few minutes before being assaulted byyet another bloodthirsty know-nothing, calling for the shooting of looters onsight. And not only those stealing so-called luxury items, but even food, water,diapers, medicine or clothes to replace the soaked and largely ruined ragsremaining on their backs.

But anyone who can't understand why someone would break into a store and takethings in the midst of this kind of tragedy clearly isn't trapped in the middleof it. They are the ones who had the means to get out of the flood zone beforethe hurricane hit. How nice for them.

And now they sit back, comfortable, wherever they may be, in an airconditioned room, filling up chat boards with vicious diatribes, in which theyseem to take an almost sadistic pleasure at referring to looters as"sub-human scum," "cockroaches," "vermin,""animals," "slime," and any number of other creative anddehumanizing slurs. Others openly call for the building of a separation wallbetween Orleans Parish and the much whiter Jefferson Parish, if and when thearea is reconstructed, so as to "keep the animals out" of the areaswith "decent people."

The media's role in stoking this kind of bigotry and hysteria has beenprodigious. It hasn't been enough to simply note that looting has taken place.Rather, reporters are discussing the activity as if it were some coordinatedattack, planned by gangs even prior to the storm. As one CNN reporter put it,the citizens of New Orleans were apparently, "looking for any reason tobreak windows," while gasbag Bill O'Reilly actually wondered aloud if the"criminal element" had made a conscious decision to rebuff evacuationorders, all so they could stick around and loot.

This is what we choose to believe, some of us, apparently: that people wecall animals, whose humanity we refuse to recognize even in the midst oftragedy, actually conspire to stick around in a rotting cesspool, all so theycan score some candy bars from the Rite-Aid, or Nikes from Foot Locker.

We choose to believe that folks look for any reason to break windows, as ifdoing so to get water or diapers for your kid, who is sitting on an overpass,possibly dying of dehydration, isn't a damned good reason to loot. As if any ofus wouldn't do the same were we in such desperate conditions. I would kill formy children. Do you hear me? Kill for them, if push came to shove. Sowould any parent. So excuse me if I can't get bent over people trying to getHuggies wipes and insulin.

And while there is every reason to suspect whites are looting in heavilydamaged parts of the metropolitan area where they predominate, the televisioncoverage, by virtue of being concentrated in downtown New Orleans--an area thatis three-fourths or more African American on a normal day, and which is probably90 percent black now, given that most whites living downtown had the means toevacuate--gives the impression to the weak-minded who don't understand the lawsof statistical probability, that looting and blackness are inextricably linkedat the hip.

Then, as if this weren't bad enough, photos widely circulated on Yahoo.comwith captions yesterday, presented an image of a black man with a garbage bagfull of God knows what, side by side with a picture of two white folks wadingthrough waist-deep water with bags of food in their hands: the captions? Theblack man, according to the news, had "just looted" a store. The whiteman and woman had "found" food from a flooded store. White people findthings. Black people steal things. Got it?

In another photo, taken in an outlying area, one white man and one black manare pictured: the former is walking away from a clearly looted store, lookingthrough his stash, while the latter is jumping through the store's broken frontwindow. But instead of labeling the shot, as "two looters standing outsidea ransacked business establishment," AP tells us that the white man is"looking through his shopping bag." White people shop. Black peoplesteal things. Got it?

Food and water, as was made obvious in news footage this afternoon, issitting in storage at the Convention Center. The same Convention center outsideof which people are, as I write this, taking their last breath. And yet, when alocal seafood merchant, along with others of the hungry tried to get into theCenter's kitchen and prepare some of that food for the starving, the NationalGuard pulled guns on them and threatened to blow their brains out if they didn'tleave. Such is the state of American compassion.

Speaker of the House Denny Hastert, himself a representative from a statewhose largest city burned to the ground once because some old lady's cow tippedover a lantern or some such shit, said today that he didn't think it made muchsense to rebuild New Orleans, seeing as how it's under sea level and all. Suchis the state of American compassion.

This year, despite all of the expert opinion and computer models suggestingthat a catastrophe of this magnitude was likely, the President and Congressslashed tens of millions of dollars from the Corps of Engineer's efforts tostrengthen and fortify the levees around New Orleans, including the one thatgave way on Monday, ultimately triggering this apocalyptic nightmare. Such isthe state of American compassion.

And on Nola.com, there is this, from someone going by the nickname rachelcal,as she discusses looting:

"TO ALL POLICE AND MILITARY POLICE:

PLEASE KILL THESE INCENSIVE (sic) FOOLS! KILL THEM ALL! WE DON'T NEED THEM ON THIS PLANET ANYMORE...THEY DON'T DO US ANY GOOD.
THANKS FOR ALL YOUR HELP...
GOD BLESS AMERICA.

Or this, from someone nicknamed aronan:

"If I had my way, the National Guard would round these pieces of garbage up, make THEM clean up the mess Katrina left for us, and then machine gun the whole lot of them into the Gulf.
The only good looter is a DEAD one. There are no exceptions."

And then, from Jim Hassenger:

"My city is destroyed and what is left the bastards are looting...I don't like living here with this disease anymore. I HATE YOU from the bottom of my heart. It's times like these I have to fight racist thoughts."

After reading the lunatic ravings of Mr. Hassenger, I glanced up at the TV tonotice the commercial being run between coverage of the disaster: a 30-secondclip from the Club for Growth, calling for, what else? Permanent repeal of theestate tax: a tax paid only by the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans, and eventhen, only when they inherit large amounts of wealth from someone else upon thedeath of the original owner.

Tax cuts for the rich, because, you see, they are horribly burdened. They aredrowning, one might say, put upon by the federal government in ways one can'tpossibly imagine. The commercial over, reality set back in, as the footage ofthose whose experience with drowning seems just a bit more visceral filled thescreen again. Poor people dying. Rich people castigating them for trying tosurvive, all the while seeking to stuff their own pockets with yet more cash.

Such is the state of American compassion.

We dropped several hundred thousand packets of food to the people ofAfghanistan, even as we bombed them back to the Pleistocene era. Indeed, wepatted ourselves on the back for the magnanimity ostensibly evidenced by suchgenerosity. And yet, in New Orleans we drop nothing but vicious admonitions topoor and desperate people, about how looting is wrong. We drop nothing but clichédand empty platitudes, like "help is on the way," and "hold on,we're coming to the rescue."

Meanwhile, the President on at least two occasions that I saw today, saidthat it was important to help people "in this part of the world."

THIS PART OF THE WORLD!?!? This is your country! You even carried that state,though admittedly with no help from the teeming masses in the streets of NewOrleans. Did they not tell you, as you flew overhead from a safe distance, thatthis was an American city? Did they not tell you, when you left your preciousdude ranch to go first to San Diego for a fundraiser, that the town that hadbeen devastated was in the United States? Had you known would you have comequicker?

I know it's tough. This is a tragedy you can't exploit for political gain,the way you did with 9-11. There is no enemy to bomb, no Arab to blame, nomuscle you can flex. There is no pile of rubble upon which you can stand, andshout in to a bullhorn some rambling, putrid inanity about taking the battle tothe evil forces that brought forth this destruction.

But one thing you said back then finally makes sense to me, in a way it neverdid before. In the battle to save the people of New Orleans, you are either withus, or against us. And it is crystal clear which side you're on.

Courtesy, Znet