The current scene in our national disaster porn movie revolves around carnage and looting in New Orleans and its submerged environs. Indeed, you would think the entire city had devolved into Lord Of The Flies, or at least The Omega Man.
And perhaps in some of the more desperate pockets, it has. Who knows what you might do if you were neck deep in polluted swamp water for days on end, no food or water, you couldn't escape the city, and your so-called leader wasted three precious days playing with birfday cakes and pretending to play a git-tar with the preznitential seal on it, instead of getting his worthless ass back to work and helping your sorry ass out.
So the media right now are pre-occupied with several largely inconsequential things, in the midst of some enormous events. The framing of all this has been enabled by the uniform characterization of Bush generously truncating his precious workin' vacation. This is nonsense; as everyone has pointed out, the whole world knew when Katrina would hit and how hard, and Bush dicked around more. He made a point of high-tailing it to Warshington in the middle of a Sunday night to attempt extraordinary (and questionably legal) measures to prolong Terri Schiavo's misery, yet could not be diverted from doing nothing for two solid days in Arizona and San Diego, while tens of thousands of his fellow Americans futilely counted on someone to do something. How many people do you think suffocated or drowned in their attics, dying excruciating deaths, while Chimpy played grab-ass with John McCain?
And while I certainly don't regard looting lightly, I think that rather than sensationalizing the opportunistic theft of merchandise that is going to be written off as an insured loss in the first place, the media should lend some perspective. It could point out just how badly New Orleans' disaster preparedness had been deliberately gutted by careless politicians, who always have somewhere else to go when the shit hits the fan, unlike the vast majority of Americans. Perhaps poor folks should just shut up and be grateful for the opportunity to be shuttled from one football stadium to another, to be holed up en masse indefinitely, with nothing to do and nowhere to go, their lives and prospects blown and washed away by someone else's inattention and carelessness.
Instead we are repeatedly treated to the sight of desperate people wading through foul water to steal diapers, or food, or even guns and drugs -- which in this milieu, may very well mean protection and currency. It is only a matter of time before some self-styled vigilante group strings themselves up a thievin' varmint, maybe in the process of preserving white Christian chaste virtues. Or not. Maybe some people, as the prophet John Cougar Mellencamp once observed, just ain't no damn good.
Of course, once the chaos and anarchy has been squashed by any means necessary, more looters will show up. They will not be bearing weapons and menacing glares; they will be wearing neckties and shit-eating grins, and bearing pens and clipboards. Probably they will have some sort of governmental subcontract.
And we have the looters who refine and sell gasoline to us. The oil companies have scored record profits the last several years running, as the price of a barrel has increased sixfold since 1999. Americans are dying in part to protect our (which is really the oil companies') access to oil. Is it too much to ask that maybe they suck it up and sell it to us at cost for a couple months until things stabilize? Would it be too terrible to insist that maybe Bush impose reasonable temporary price caps, if appealing to the companies' sense of patriotism doesn't work? I don't want to enable idiots to drive their Hummers, but I also know that a lot of hard-working people are taking it in the shorts just for the privilege of commuting to work. They're stuck, and this is one of those cases where Big Gubmint should step up and lean on the right people. If they're not gonna help out little guys like us, what the fuck are they good for?
The pre-eminent question that has occupied my mind this week is more of a meta-question. Again, this disaster was predictable and should have been easily prepared for. Instead, it has exposed the soft white underbelly of "homeland security". This was no drill -- the powers that be had a full heads-up and still dropped the fucking ball, badly.
Based on what you have observed of the response capabilities to predicted emergencies, how prepared do you think we are to handle the next terrorist attack? You can't track al Qaeda with a fuckin' Doppler machine.
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