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.
The predators, of course, were self-sufficient, didn't wait for someone to take care of them, and knew exactly what to do. That their application of these principles was anti-social, illegal and despicable is another story.
I think it's far too facile to claim that the problem is that the welfare state stifles individualism. It's true as far as it goes, and I believe that was the original point of public schooling according to Dewey et al.: the docile citizen.
The problem is that the welfare state doesn't succeed in stifling individualism; it just ends up forcing it into devious channels. Many people on welfare (corporate as well as individual) and many people not on welfare officially (I count politicians here) are extremely resourceful and energetic in gaming the system.
Regarding the even more anti-social and violent results, R. Emmett Tyrrell had a nice piece in his book Public Nuisances years ago. I no longer have my copy, so this is from memory and incomplete. He explains -- half in jest, whole in earnest -- the advantages of a life of crime: you make your own hours, no training requirements, no government certification or registration, no taxes or regulation . . . Well, you can make your own list.
If I were on the jury I'd sentence him to go to jail for one minute.
Great article!
I would venture to guess that the looting women cops were hired to fill an Affirmative Action quota, and not for any talent or ability they might have had to be police officers. When the opportunity came, they reverted to what they were before they got the job.
Catastrophe brings out of you what was in you to begin with; like a jar full of unseen contents, when catastrophe turns you over the world finds out what was in you all along.
If those cops are your mothers, I hope you have been transported to a stable home in another state where you can learn that this behaviour is not only illegal, it is abnormal. The knowledge could save your life.
bttt. Once again, very well said.
It's just beyond me that you wouldn't want to help out in a situation like that, rather than contribute to the problem.
Great as always. Thanks.
Someone needs to recruit that boy. He'd make a hell of a contribution to our military and teach some people a thing or two!!
Plenty of folks did something. A co-worker is playing host to fifty of his closest relatives who left the New Orleans area well ahead of the storm. Right now they have apartments and are getting jobs. We're kickin' in for them, giving them the stuff they couldn't bring away with 'em, like bedding, cookware, etc.
There may be a 'culture of passivity" among some folks from New Orleans, but not these people. The problem with New Orleans is that good folks are mostly gone and making headway elsewhere. The bad news is that a lot of 'em won't be comin' back.
</i>Funny how NOLA is making noises about going after a kid that rescued a lot of people by commandeering a bus, yet consider looters to be 'victims'.</i>
needs to be repeated.
Thanks! Another great one by Steyn!
BTTT
Indict Jabbor Gibson?
They oughta give the young man a friggin' medal!
He showed more courage than the mayor & governor combined!!!
Steyn....a man after my own heart who says what it is!
Govt dependency turns people into slaves.
Slaves always depend on Massa to do everything, including save their lives.
Tragic. How many lives were lost due to the Mayor's incompetence? He sure is good at blaming others though. Listening to him talk one would think he was just a bystander who volunteered to help!
Me too!!!!!
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.
Steyn is right on as usual.
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