Rootsie

"Hey, Shoot that Black Guy Running Off with the Bottled Water from Wal-Mart!"
by Bryan Newbury
reprinted from http://counterpunch.org/newbury08312005.html
     
"Louisiana, Louisiana
They're trying to wash us away,
They're trying to wash us away."

It isn't my custom to watch the network or cable news channels. CSPAN's Book TV is fantastic, as is the gavel-to-gavel; but the standard fare of CNN, MSNBC, Faux News, &c. aren't conducive to digestion. After seeing pictures of New Orleans on The New York Times last night, I decided I'd better get some television coverage.

I forgot what "official reality" looked like. Let's run down the list:

1. The Weather Channel: I watched about an hour of coverage from the Mississippi coast. Their resident "storm chaser" was Mr. Macho All American Love the Kids, Proud to Know That Kid Guy. Really very little "weather" especially when most of the scientists (LSU Hurricane Center, Meteorologists from regional universities) have been trying to make a point about reestablishing the wetlands to avert further catastrophe. (Which, by the way, they won't be doing.) And, naturally, not word one about global climate change.

2. The Faux News Channel: Okay, I didn't watch any of this nonsense.

3. MSNBC: Why watch Faux when you can see the same bloody thing on the Network formerly known as news? I love Keith Olberman. After that, the channel is pretty much shit. You have Joe Scarborough looking for the real killer of his intern, followed by the inimitable F... Tucker Carlson (who could ruin the bowtie singlehandedly!) whose pioneering journalism focused on... brace yourself...

Those awful black people!

Oh, yeah, some poor whites too.

While I must admit the footage of two NOPD ladies looting a Wal-Mart was priceless, the sanctimonious and unmistakably racist tone of the correspondent (and Tucker himself) was apalling. This was certainly not confined to MSNBC, though.

A sidenote: During the shot inside the Wal-Mart, the correspondent hounded the looters, who were loading up on supplies and a few choice gifts for their children, one man said to him that no one was worried about their lives, so why in the bloody hell would he worry about Wal-Mart's profit-loss ratio. Though I don't endorse looting, he has a point there. Cable news focused sharply on the forgotten and abandoned of New Orleans while not mentioning once (I withstood it all for around 3.5 hours) that these were folks of our very own Third World, the most economically disenfranchised class in the States. Where was the bus convoy to guide them to safety. In state government and FEMA terms, that would've been a pennance.

3. CNN: The bulk of my time last night was spent watching CNN, mainly because my choices were limited to it and the aforementioned sources. If the fact that Larry King was the most balanced and informative program on the television last night isn't an indictment on the uselessness of mainstream news, I don't know what is. I almost sent a fruit basket to Kathleen Blanco. The dread in her eyes was palpable! Naturally, Aaron Brown's show made up for it.

During the course of last night's news peruse, I witnessed the same seven young black males walking out of stores with T-shirts, beer and other assorted booty at least fifteen times. The story of the night seemed to be not "New Orleans is Sinking (And I'm Too Poor to Swim)" but rather "Looting in the Streets of N.O."

One has to wonder: if looting is so widespread, why only thirty seconds of loop footage? The answer came quickly. As one CNN reporter shared, once the "looting and rioting" (those seven guys get around!) started in the Quarter, they were instructed to get out of Dodge. In other words:

"Well, Anderson, Hurricane Katrina was scary. I stayed in the hotel through it and my windows were shaking, I was praying the rosary I tell ya' what."

"Glad to hear you're safe."

"Not for long, Anderson! That was just a Category 4. The producers and NOPD have informed me that there are black people everywhere! We've got to get out of here!"

Thanks for the report. How many days until Book TV?

Bryan Newbury is a writer and musician living in Lawrence, Kansas. He can be reached at: farka@sbcglobal.net

Black people loot.....

(http://www.rootsie.com/images/APloot.jpg)

AP Caption: A young man walks through chest deep flood water after looting a grocery store in New Orleans on Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2005. Flood waters continue to rise in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina did extensive damage.

White folks just do what it takes to survive....


(http://www.rootsie.com/images/APwhite.jpg)

AP Caption: Two residents wade through chest-deep water after finding bread and soda from a local grocery store after Hurricane Katrina came through the area in New Orleans, Louisiana.

http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/lakshmi/24870/

The Storm After the Storm

By DAVID BROOKS
Published: September 1, 2005

Hurricanes come in two waves. First comes the rainstorm, and then comes what the historian John Barry calls the "human storm" - the recriminations, the political conflict and the battle over compensation. Floods wash away the surface of society, the settled way things have been done. They expose the underlying power structures, the injustices, the patterns of corruption and the unacknowledged inequalities. When you look back over the meteorological turbulence in this nation's history, it's striking how often political turbulence followed.

In 1889 in Pennsylvania, a great flood washed away much of Johnstown. The water's crushing destruction sounded to one person like a "lot of horses grinding oats." Witnesses watched hundreds of people trapped on a burning bridge, forced to choose between burning to death or throwing themselves into the churning waters to drown.

The flood was so abnormal that the country seemed to have trouble grasping what had happened. The national media were filled with wild exaggerations and fabrications: stories of rivers dammed with corpses, of children who died while playing ring-around-the-rosy and who were found with their hands still clasped and with smiles still on their faces.

Prejudices were let loose. Hungarians then were akin to today's illegal Mexican immigrants - hard-working people who took jobs no one else wanted. Newspapers carried accounts of gangs of Hungarian men cutting off dead women's fingers to steal their rings. "Drunken Hungarians, Dancing, Singing, Cursing and Fighting Amid the Ruins" a New York Herald headline blared.

Then, as David McCullough notes in "The Johnstown Flood," public fury turned on the Pittsburgh millionaires whose club's fishing pond had emptied on the town. The Chicago Herald depicted the millionaires as Roman aristocrats, seeking pleasure while the poor died like beasts in the Coliseum.

Even before the flood, public resentment was building against the newly rich industrialists. Protests were growing against the trusts, against industrialization and against the new concentrations of wealth. The Johnstown flood crystallized popular anger, for the fishing club was indeed partly to blame. Public reaction to the disaster helped set the stage for the progressive movement and the trust-busting that was to come.

In 1900, another great storm hit the U.S., killing over 6,000 people in Galveston, Tex. The storm exposed racial animosities, for this time stories (equally false) swept through the press accusing blacks of cutting off the fingers of corpses to steal wedding rings. The devastation ended Galveston's chance to beat out Houston as Texas' leading port.

Then in 1927, the great Mississippi flood rumbled down upon New Orleans. As Barry writes in his account, "Rising Tide," the disaster ripped the veil off the genteel, feudal relations between whites and blacks, and revealed the festering iniquities. Blacks were rounded up into work camps and held by armed guards. They were prevented from leaving as the waters rose. A steamer, the Capitol, played "Bye Bye Blackbird" as it sailed away. The racist violence that followed the floods helped persuade many blacks to move north.

Civic leaders intentionally flooded poor and middle-class areas to ease the water's pressure on the city, and then reneged on promises to compensate those whose homes were destroyed. That helped fuel the populist anger that led to Huey Long's success. Across the country people demanded that the federal government get involved in disaster relief, helping to set the stage for the New Deal. The local civic elite turned insular and reactionary, and New Orleans never really recovered its preflood vibrancy.

We'd like to think that the stories of hurricanes and floods are always stories of people rallying together to give aid and comfort. And, indeed, each of America's great floods has prompted a popular response both generous and inspiring. But floods are also civic examinations. Amid all the stories that recur with every disaster - tales of sudden death and miraculous survival, the displacement and the disease - there is also the testing.

Civic arrangements work or they fail. Leaders are found worthy or wanting. What's happening in New Orleans and Mississippi today is a human tragedy. But take a close look at the people you see wandering, devastated, around New Orleans: they are predominantly black and poor. The political disturbances are still to come.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/01/opinion/01brooks.html?th&emc=th

By DAVID BROOKS
Published: September 1, 2005

Hurricanes come in two waves. First comes the rainstorm, and then comes what the historian John Barry calls the "human storm" - the recriminations, the political conflict and the battle over compensation. Floods wash away the surface of society, the settled way things have been done. They expose the underlying power structures, the injustices, the patterns of corruption and the unacknowledged inequalities. When you look back over the meteorological turbulence in this nation's history, it's striking how often political turbulence followed.
 
In 1889 in Pennsylvania, a great flood washed away much of Johnstown. The water's crushing destruction sounded to one person like a "lot of horses grinding oats." Witnesses watched hundreds of people trapped on a burning bridge, forced to choose between burning to death or throwing themselves into the churning waters to drown.

The flood was so abnormal that the country seemed to have trouble grasping what had happened. The national media were filled with wild exaggerations and fabrications: stories of rivers dammed with corpses, of children who died while playing ring-around-the-rosy and who were found with their hands still clasped and with smiles still on their faces.

Prejudices were let loose. Hungarians then were akin to today's illegal Mexican immigrants - hard-working people who took jobs no one else wanted. Newspapers carried accounts of gangs of Hungarian men cutting off dead women's fingers to steal their rings. "Drunken Hungarians, Dancing, Singing, Cursing and Fighting Amid the Ruins" a New York Herald headline blared.

Then, as David McCullough notes in "The Johnstown Flood," public fury turned on the Pittsburgh millionaires whose club's fishing pond had emptied on the town. The Chicago Herald depicted the millionaires as Roman aristocrats, seeking pleasure while the poor died like beasts in the Coliseum.

Even before the flood, public resentment was building against the newly rich industrialists. Protests were growing against the trusts, against industrialization and against the new concentrations of wealth. The Johnstown flood crystallized popular anger, for the fishing club was indeed partly to blame. Public reaction to the disaster helped set the stage for the progressive movement and the trust-busting that was to come.

In 1900, another great storm hit the U.S., killing over 6,000 people in Galveston, Tex. The storm exposed racial animosities, for this time stories (equally false) swept through the press accusing blacks of cutting off the fingers of corpses to steal wedding rings. The devastation ended Galveston's chance to beat out Houston as Texas' leading port.

Then in 1927, the great Mississippi flood rumbled down upon New Orleans. As Barry writes in his account, "Rising Tide," the disaster ripped the veil off the genteel, feudal relations between whites and blacks, and revealed the festering iniquities. Blacks were rounded up into work camps and held by armed guards. They were prevented from leaving as the waters rose. A steamer, the Capitol, played "Bye Bye Blackbird" as it sailed away. The racist violence that followed the floods helped persuade many blacks to move north.

Civic leaders intentionally flooded poor and middle-class areas to ease the water's pressure on the city, and then reneged on promises to compensate those whose homes were destroyed. That helped fuel the populist anger that led to Huey Long's success. Across the country people demanded that the federal government get involved in disaster relief, helping to set the stage for the New Deal. The local civic elite turned insular and reactionary, and New Orleans never really recovered its preflood vibrancy.

We'd like to think that the stories of hurricanes and floods are always stories of people rallying together to give aid and comfort. And, indeed, each of America's great floods has prompted a popular response both generous and inspiring. But floods are also civic examinations. Amid all the stories that recur with every disaster - tales of sudden death and miraculous survival, the displacement and the disease - there is also the testing.

Civic arrangements work or they fail. Leaders are found worthy or wanting. What's happening in New Orleans and Mississippi today is a human tragedy. But take a close look at the people you see wandering, devastated, around New Orleans: they are predominantly black and poor. The political disturbances are still to come.

E-mail: dabrooks@nytimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/01/opinion/01brooks.html?ex=1126238400&en=228755ffb6f5ed9b&ei=5070&emc=eta1

I read about conditions inside the Superdome and I am reading about a space-age slaveship. I see footage of people streaming across the bridge to the West Bank and I think about the days in which the slaves were 'freed' and walked the roads of the South with nothing and nowhere to go.  People around here are expressing their horror and outrage. "I have been crying," one co-worker told me, "crying and crying..."

For myself, I have felt dizzy and off-kilter since Sunday.  And right now I realize that what I am feeling is shame, on behalf of myself and the people in this country, who know better but do not put their actions where their words are.

One of the great fictions of the past thirty years indulged in by whites is that all those nasty race problems are in the past. Now some of our best friends are black. I can't say how many times I've been in rooms where whites were displaying their friendships with blacks like badges of pc honor. I have indulged in the same thing myself.

It's clear from the stricken faces in that footage that on some level blacks bought into that deadly fiction too. They wander from spot to spot, waiting for the help they assume will come. It doesn't.

I don't see why any black, except out of sheer compassion, should give any white the time of day. It sure doesn't surprise or appal me that gun stores would be broken into. A lot of the 'armed thugs' are doing the real relief work on the ground.

It is like tearing off a bandage really fast, but it is good that this festering sore is exposed.  I vaguely and vainly hope that now at last there can be some truth-telling here, some redress here, some sort of initiative on the part of privileged people to get real about their racism and the part it plays in both their 'good works' and their evil deeds across this planet.

But the crippling inability to act in response to this crisis tells volumes about the diseased soul of the United States. These years of being spoon-fed unreality has ill-prepared us for the all-too real drama of 300 years of history playing out before our eyes.  This is the shadow-side of "spreading democracy across the world," of "they hate us for our freedom,' of "you're either with us or against us," because who, precisely is "us"?

We are forced to see how racism and imperialism and capitalism intertwine, how they really cannot be considered separately. If we are appalled by the non-response to the suffering of a city of blacks, how can we not also see Iraq as for the first time, especially since it is crystal-clear that resources are being drained away from this country in order for it to inflict untold unnatural disasters there? Maybe now we can see Fallujah and Baghdad as real cities populated by real people who have also suffered sweltering heat with no power, no food, no water, and the same acute psychological suffering we see on the faces of New Orleans orphans and refugees. Maybe all of our victims can become human to us at last.

Maybe this is like Emmett Till's open casket; maybe decent people will find themselves forced to respond, but these are different days.  Unless the media itself makes a turn, before too long people's attentions will be drawn elsewhere. The problem with pushing Bush and company too far is that we run the risk of another 'terrorist attack.' Maybe the ability to contemplate the unimaginable, that we may very well have a government fully capable of engaging in terrorism against its own citizens, will develop in time.

Meanwhile, there are hundreds and maybe thousands of people trapped in their attics, the water up to their necks as its been for days, dying. Certainly, the whole world is watching, and what they see is the blustering bullies exposed for the cowards they are. And I feel shame, not that my country's dirty underwear is showing, but something a whole lot more personal. I have written a lot of words about racism and privilege and this and that, but like most whites, fall far short in the integrity department. Well at least I know better. Time to put my flabby shoulder to the wheel.

by Jeff Wells
Reprinted from http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/

When it all comes down to dust, I will help you if I must;
I will kill you if I can. - Leonard Cohen

Maybe you think the worst is over, now Bush has had his photo op as the clockwork convoy of aid finally rolled into New Orleans. I thought, maybe so. Maybe that's enough death for them.

If you're like I was, you haven't seen this yet:

It's Geraldo Rivera, Friday night at the New Orleans Convention Center, where 30,000 Americans are locked down again with their piss and their shit and their dead. Rivera gets it, but he doesn't know what he's got. "What the hell, man - let them walk out of here!" If anyone tries it, if anyone reaches the perimeter, they're turned back.

From the website of the American Red Cross, their disaster FAQ:

Why is the Red Cross not in New Orleans?

Acess to New Orleans is controlled by the National Guard and local authorities and while we are in constant contact with them, we simply cannot enter New Orleans against their orders.

The state Homeland Security Department had requested--and continues to request--that the American Red Cross not come back into New Orleans following the hurricane. Our presence would keep people from evacuating and encourage others to come into the city.

This week, look for it: the "pacification" of New Orleans.