So you think so.
ArtyFO, your quoting of Fox saying that jobs even blacks won't do. Was that necessary?
If you want a Google GMail account, FReepmail me.
Posted on 09/05/2005 5:14:07 PM PDT by saquin
Readers may recall my words from a week ago on the approaching Katrina: "We relish the opportunity to rise to the occasion. And on the whole we do. Oh, to be sure, there are always folks who panic or loot. But most people don't, and many are capable of extraordinary acts of hastily improvised heroism."
What the hell was I thinking? I should be fired for that. Well, someone should be fired. I say that in the spirit of the Mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, the Anti-Giuliani, a Mayor Culpa who always knows where to point the finger.
For some reason, I failed to consider the possibility that the panickers would include Hizzoner the Mayor and the looters would include significant numbers of the police department, though in fairness I wasn't the only one. As General Blum said at Saturday's Defence Department briefing: "No one anticipated the disintegration or the erosion of the civilian police force in New Orleans."
Indeed, they eroded faster than the levees. Several hundred cops are reported to have walked off the job. To give the city credit, it has a lovely "Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan" for hurricanes. The only flaw in the plan is that the person charged with putting it into effect is the mayor. And he didn't.
But I don't want to blame any single figure: the anti-Bush crowd have that act pretty much sewn up. I'd say New Orleans's political failure is symptomatic of a broader failure.
I got an e-mail over the weekend from a US Army surgeon just back in Afghanistan after his wedding. Changing planes in Kuwait for the final leg to Bagram and confronted by yet another charity box for Katrina relief, he decided that this time he'd pass. "I'd had it up to here," he wrote, "with the passivity, the whining, and the when-are-they-going-to-do-something blame game."
Let it be said that no one should die in a 100F windowless attic because he fled upstairs when the flood waters rose and now can't get out. But, in his general characterisation of "the Big Easy", my correspondent is not wrong. The point is, what are you like when it's not so easy?
Congressman Billy Tauzin once said of his state: "One half of Louisiana is under water and the other half is under indictment." Last week, four fifths of New Orleans was under water and the other four fifths should be under indictment - which is the kind of arithmetic the state's deeply entrenched kleptocrat political culture will have no trouble making add up.
Consider the signature image of the flood: an aerial shot of 255 school buses neatly parked at one city lot, their fuel tanks leaking gasoline into the urban lake. An enterprising blogger, Bryan Preston, worked out that each bus had 66 seats, which meant that the vehicles at just that one lot could have ferried out 16,830 people. Instead of entrusting its most vulnerable citizens to the gang-infested faecal hell of the Superdome, New Orleans had more than enough municipal transport on hand to have got almost everyone out in a couple of runs last Sunday.
Why didn't they? Well, the mayor didn't give the order. OK, but how about school board officials, or the fellows with the public schools transportation department, or the guy who runs that motor pool, or the individual bus drivers? If it ever occurred to any of them that these were potentially useful evacuation assets, they kept it to themselves.
So the first school bus to escape New Orleans and make it to safety in Texas was one that had been abandoned on a city street. A party of sodden citizens, ranging from the elderly to an eight-day-old baby, were desperate to get out, hopped aboard and got teenager Jabbor Gibson to drive them 13 hours non-stop to Houston. He'd never driven a bus before, and the authorities back in New Orleans may yet prosecute him. For rescuing people without a permit?
My Afghanistan army guy's observations on "passivity" reminded me of something I wrote for this paper a few days after 9/11, about how the airline cabin was the embodiment of the "culture of passivity". It's the most regulated environment most of us ever enter.
So on three of those flights everyone faithfully followed the Federal Aviation Administration's 1970s hijack procedures until it was too late. On the fourth plane, Todd Beamer, Jeremy Glick, Thomas Burnett, Mark Bingham and other forgotten heroes figured out what was going on and rushed their hijackers, preventing the plane from proceeding to its target - believed to be the White House or Congress. On a morning when the government did nothing for those passengers, those passengers did something for the government.
On 9/11, the federal government failed the people; last week, local and state government failed the people. On 9/11, they stuck to the 30-year-old plan; last week, they didn't bother implementing the state-of-the-art 21st-century plan. Why argue about which level of bureaucracy you prefer to be let down by?
My mistake was to think that the citizenry of the Big Easy would rise to the great rallying cry of Todd Beamer: "Are you ready, guys? Let's roll!" Instead, the spirit of the week was summed up by a gentleman called Mike Franklin, taking time out of his hectic schedule of looting to speak to the Associated Press: "People who are oppressed all their lives, man, it's an opportunity to get back at society."
Unlike 9/11, when the cult of victimhood was temporarily suspended in honour of the many real, actual victims under the rubble, in New Orleans everyone claimed the mantle of victim, from the incompetent mayor to the "oppressed" guys wading through the water with new DVD players under each arm.
Welfare culture is bad not just because, as in Europe, it's bankrupting the state, but because it enfeebles the citizenry, it erodes self-reliance and resourcefulness.
New Orleans is a party town in the middle of a welfare swamp and, like many parties, it doesn't look so good when someone puts the lights up. I'll always be grateful to a burg that gave us Louis Armstrong and Louis Prima, and I'll always love Satch's great record of Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans? But, after this last week, I'm not sure I would.
So you think so.
ArtyFO, your quoting of Fox saying that jobs even blacks won't do. Was that necessary?
If you want a Google GMail account, FReepmail me.
As another FReeper pointed out, if the looters who were carrying plasma TVs through waist-deep water had been paid to do that, they'd have complained about the working conditions...
The incomparable Steyn...
ping
The published and approved Louisiana state emergency plan spoke to the use of busses to transport those New Orleanians unable to transport themselves.
So far as I can tell, it did not address a.) where to take them or b.) what to do with them once they arrived.
Which could, of course, explain why they didn't follow "the plan"...
Kids, don't try this at home. Mark Steyn is a trained professional!
Ping. Well put.
Naggin' Nagin is a disgrace. Let us hope some of the displaced see how the other side lives and abandon liberalism.
Hey, you know the rules...you mentioned Ann Coulter! Here, let me help out:
All with special emphasis on Ann's legs...
I'll bet a pretty good percentage of "the rest" were NOT looting and raping, but doing what most of us would do in that situation. The looters and the rapers were most likely a minority -- but like garlic, a little bit of them go a long, long way. Really, there's no call to er ... whitewash ... (for lack of a more apropriate term?) all "the brothers" for the acts of some monsters.
Actually, you're the one who knows the rules. Nice scenery on the thread, even if it's a Steyn column :)
NYT quote today:
President Fox said his country shared the pain of the hurricane... he said the contributions of Mexican workers could be more important than ever. "The reconstruction of that city and of that region is going to require a lot of labor. And if there is anything Mexicans are good at, it is construction."
http://72.14.207.104/search?q=cache:kVQlOUZRNJMJ:www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/09/03/katrina/main814627.shtml+mexicans+in+new+orleans&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
I am pleased to have edumacated you. :)
Thanks for the ping, Pokey! The magnificent Steyn puts the blame squarely where it belongs: incompentent local government that has created a welfare state where people's ability for self-sufficiency has been completely eroded.
Then why didn't they act like men and take care of the situation? They should have hung the criminals on their own.
"God, I wished I had this much talent as a writer."
I wish I had *half* as much talent as Steyn -- and I am a published author.
Ah, yes! Certainly wonderful to look at. And a fine second to Steyn in the pantheon of conservative writers :)
I'll bet some of them did, or at least tried. But put yourself there -- would YOU, or would your husband (if you're female) go after a bunch of young, tough, ARMED kids in a situation where you already had your hands full trying to make right? I know enough black folks to know that just because a kid is young and black, doesn't make him a gang-banger, and I know enough black folks to know a LOT of black men who would do just what my husband or brothers would do in that situtation if they could -- KICK ASS if possible, but again ... gang kids are mean, tough, and armed, unlike most average good guys. I'm all for passing judgement when the info is in, but it's early days yet. And from what I know of human nature, I'll bet that there were folks who did try to "act like men" and take care of the situation. We just haven't heard about them.
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