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also available online at:
www.cumberlink.com/articles/2005/09/08/editorial/rich_lewis/lewis01.txt
MODS: This is my column; I have reprint permission
Flood washes up crackpot theories
By Rich Lewis, September 8, 2005
Some people say this is not the time for what they trivializingly describe as "the blame game" for the initially ineffective response to the devastation of New Orleans.
They are wrong.
Local, state and federal agencies were all shamefully unprepared to deal with a disaster repeatedly predicted, and even foretold in detail. Questions must be asked while the American public is still paying attention — and assigning responsibility for the deadly failures won't hinder the ongoing efforts at rescue.
But in this debate over blame, one particularly scurrilous argument has received widespread attention and apparently gained some credibility. It was made by Robert Tracinski, editor and publisher of a magazine called The Intellectual Activist.
I saw Tracinski's poisonous rant the day it was published, and normally would be loath to spread awareness of it, but a friend I admire and respect later e-mailed it to me. He said it was "provocative." I confess I got angry because, perhaps wrongly, I took the word "provocative" to mean "worth considering."
It is provocative — but in the sense of "infuriatingly stupid."
Tracinski claims the destruction of New Orleans "is not a natural disaster" but "a man-made disaster." The real story is not about "rain, wind, and flooding, but about rape, murder, and looting."
The horror in New Orleans, Tracinski insists, was not the result of a hurricane, or the breakdown of emergency planning and response, but was "the psychological consequences of the welfare state.... and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and encourages."
This explains "the moral ugliness that has swamped New Orleans."
The city, he asserts, was left in the hands of "large numbers" of people who were not "normal" but were "criminals... and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness."
Of course, the vast majority of those trapped in New Orleans were black — many lacking the money or vehicles to flee or anywhere to go if they could.
Tracinski's cruel eye is not on the tens of thousands of dead, injured and displaced — but on the handful of people who engaged in violence and looting before government provided meaningful help.
We do not yet know how widespread the violence and looting were. The news media seized on it in the first few days, and perhaps inflated its significance, as part of its need to create conflict and drama.
The Associated Press, for example, was castigated for writing photo captions that described white people carrying bags of goods as "finding" or "shopping" while blacks were said to be "looting."
In fact, many desperate people were taking food, water, diapers and medicine from abandoned stores. Do you really find that so shocking? Sure, a few ripped off TVs and clothes — but aren't your local stores robbed now and then too?
Isolated incidents of residents shooting at emergency personnel were heavily publicized, but they were rare occurrences.
And most cases of rapes and beatings seem to have taken place in the hot, stinking, lawless chaos of the convention center and Superdome where people had been herded like cattle and abandoned.
Tracinski was actually forced to retract his claim that "New Orleans police let criminals out of the jails" and that these criminals ("welfare parasites" who "used to live in the housing projects") were the "real story." He lamely said he had "not been able to confirm it."
But Tracinski's core assertion — that "welfare" drained the people of New Orleans of their decency and turned them into rampaging animals — is gaggingly ignorant.
Looting?
What about the Enron executives who systematically looted the company, lining their pockets with millions stolen from their trusting workers?
What about Halliburton's looting of the American public? As Jeffrey St. Clair wrote in Counterpunch, that company's fatcats have made billions from the war in Iraq amid charges of massive overbilling, shoddy work, bribery and political influence-peddling. The U.S. treasury nailed Halliburton red-handed for bilking the government for $108.4 million in overcharges on just "one task order."
I don't suppose many of those well-educated, sharply dressed executives had grown up in the projects or cashed a lot of welfare checks. So what explains their criminal appetites?
Violence?
What about the nice, middle-class folks in Boston, Detroit, Los Angeles and other cities who engaged in violent rioting after their baseball, football or basketball teams won championships? Had they been molded into "abnormal" savages because they lived in public housing or cashed a few AFDC checks?
And Tracinski overlooks the multitude of examples of patience, courage and generosity exhibited by the residents of New Orleans. Why didn't they become depraved "abnormals"?
People of every class, color and income level are prone to violent and greedy behavior when they sense an opportunity or are engulfed in chaos. The people of New Orleans behaved remarkably well given the way they were abandoned by their governments.
The purpose of Tracinski's obscene assault on Katrina's victims is to dull our willingness to assist them, and to convince us to deny poor people everywhere what meager public assistance government now provides.
How could he engage in such "moral ugliness"?
I guess he must have been raised on welfare.
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