Saturday, September 03, 2005

the current myth

There has been some discussion about various comments made by Bill O’Reilly and the like – including the head of FEMA – about the culpability of those who did not evacuate. Usually, LI could care less about any comments made by Bill O’Reilly – we don’t have to look around for talking heads to be outraged at, screw em - but this is an issue that is so clear cut that we are worried about the myth that is building before our eyes. The response of the liberal community has been has been that those who are poor and elderly, having no transportation, couldn’t get out.

No. Please, do not censor what happened. This is a half truth. The truth is that those who had no transportation but public transportation had no choice but to stay. They were left behind as an INTENTIONAL act of the government, which located shelters in the city and took the people it could to those shelters. Now, supposedly the traffic jam going out of the city was such that the complete bus system of New Orleans would have added an incalculable delay to the evacuation – but it should be emphasized again and again that the moral responsibility for those people lies with the government that directed them, forcibly, into those shelters and then abandoned them. We know they were abandoned by every proof, including statements from Brown and the head of Homeland Security that they did not know, until four days later, that there were thousands at the Civic Center – and this doesn’t even address the hospitals. We have every proof, in other words, of mass negligent homicide. FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security are as guilty of murder as Union Carbide was, when it killed 25,000 people in Bopal India. That is the long and short of it. I would actually have every sympathy with a person who shot and killed the armed gangbangers that ravaged parts of the city, and I would feel similarly for those who punished the state. But in both cases, sympathy should not be extended into advocacy. There should definitely be trials. Not impeachment, fuck that – trials for manslaughter.

Of course there won't be. Fantasy baseball, fantasy justice, fantasy all the way -- what else is the Web good for?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have been thinking, myself, of the Ukraine famine. It's not the same scale, obviously, but it does seem to have some of the same qualities.

Roger Gathmann said...

Winn, you are right that there seems to be a mixture of vast incompetence and obscure intention driving the disaster. I don't think that this is a terror flood, as the famines were terror famines, simply because I can't see any advantage to be accrued to crushing NOLA under the heel of this government. If there is one, what is it? I am bewildered. You know, it is people like me -- people with little capital or possessions -- that this is aimed at, in terms of malign neglect. But the malign neglect takes in the good Republicans of Algiers and Chalmette too. I am just at my wits end.

And, as is obvious from my posts, I am not thinking very straight at the moment, at least about the big picture. I feel like my blood has been exchanged for viper venom -- I am blindly angry at the government of this country, and I would like to bite it.

Lovecraft

“If Lovecraft was an odd child,” his biographer L. Sprague de Camp writes, “his mother showed signs of becoming even odder. In fact, she gav...