It’s official, Hurricane Katrina has raised holy hell with the Gulf States, especially Mississippi and Louisiana. MSNBC is now reporting more than 80 deaths in the Biloxi area alone, and much of New Orleans is under water. States of emergency have been declared from practically one end of the Gulf to the other.
Looks like Mother Nature has brought a little bit of Iraq back to the USA.
Gangs of mostly black youth, arms and shopping baskets full of looted goods, skirting from one demolished store front to another, oblivious to the cameras and even to onlooking National Guardsmen, remind me of the early days of the siege of Fallujah.
Disintegrating societies it is said bring out the very best of some and have the opposite effect on others. The very worst is characteristically displayed by Governor Haley Barbour, certainly one of most vile representatives of the human species ever to darken the Christ-cursed state of Missisisippi. He is on television right now, his revolting physique grown even larger and more vulturous as he urges the police to be “absolutely ruthless” with the “scum” who are taking what they have been taught to believe are the talismen of wealth and happiness.
Will they ever get such a chance again, I wonder, in Freedom’s Land and Bravery’s Home, which enslaved one race and all but exterminated another? Where there are, really, no tenable jobs to be had by the mass of looters or their peers or their fathers and mothers or their sons and daughters, where there is no health care, where textbooks lie in mildewed heaps in schools abandoned by a society that no longer has the need or desire to educate its own children?
There are some, I suppose, who just love a big, strong politician (has this guy Barbour ever held a real job that did not involve submerging his grotesquely ugly snout in the public trough?) who is fearless in showing how tough he can be with impoverished women and children. With such a hellish talent, why isn’t he in Iraq?
Maybe he could do something about the “looting” by Halliburton and Brown and Root. So far, the largely white and certainly affluent class of gawking tv anchors have failed to make the connection.
On the other hand, there are the millions of people who will, outside of our televisions, quietly and genuinely help their neighbors and their friends and people they have never seen before and never will again, united as they are in this one brief tragedy that proves again the truth of our culture.
We are ruled by those neither wise nor good.
I enjoy your contributions in GL_Discussion and agree with much of what you say.
As for the flight from New Orleans, here in Australia on TV we saw the crowded highways heading outof town. I didn’t see any buses. Did the residents without cars get offers of transport out or were they obliged to stay behind and be condemned as fool-hardy?
My sentiments exactly. We will never be permitted to see the devastation in Fallujah as we saw it in New Orleans.
In fact the early pictures of the devastation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki with the dead men walking were only just released. No one was allowed to see them until 50 years later and even then they have not been widespread.
You know, with all the reports of hurricanes and such, I was trying to remember what the aftermath of the one I went through was like. It’s weird how time and age distort memories.
I’m pretty sure we were under martial law, but I can’t remember any looting. Surely there must have been some. I remember the National Guard presence very strongly, though.
Hi j, John and Ted;
I heard some disturbing news tonight (Wed); this guy Nagin has ordered 1500 police officers to stop looking for survivors and instead concentrate on hunting down (mostly black) looters. It is easy to forget that New Orleans had one of the most racist and brutal police departments for many many years (there were several 60 Minutes segments on this gang of thugs back in the 1970s and 1980s). The business establishment is desperately racist. The sight of young black men and women taking sneakers and diapers and tv sets must set their teeth on edge. And you can tell just by looking at him, Bush doesn’t give a shit (he was *smirking* during his news conference this afternoon). He knows that the focus must remain on really *important* issues like gutting social security, cutting taxes further for the very very rich, and making the middle east safe for the Christian/Zionist project. Who cares what happens to a few hundred thousand poor people? Plenty more where they came from. This attitude just reeks from the words of these politicians crying crocodile tears about the plight of these homeless devastated depleted people. But, I believe something could can come out of this; the people will be dramatically exposed to the brutalities of this criminal system, and, hopefully, will join with others everywhere to someday put it out of business.