Four Years Ago Today

by digby

Peggy Noonan wrote this:

As for the tragic piggism that is taking place on the streets of New Orleans, it is not unbelievable but it is unforgivable, and I hope the looters are shot.

A hurricane cannot rob a great city of its spirit, but a vicious citizenry can. A bad time with Mother Nature can leave you digging out for a long time, but a bad turn in human behavior frays and tears all the ties that truly bind human beings–trust, confidence, mutual regard, belief in the essential goodness of one’s fellow citizens.

There seems to be some confusion in terms of terminology on TV. People with no food and water who are walking into supermarkets and taking food and water off the shelves are not criminal, they are sane. They are not looters, they are people who are attempting to survive; they are taking the basics of survival off shelves in stores where there isn’t even anyone at the cash register.

Looters are not looking to survive; they’re looking to take advantage of the weakness of others. They are predators. They’re taking not what they need but what they want. They are breaking into stores in New Orleans and elsewhere and stealing flat screen TVs and jewelry, guns and CD players. They are breaking into homes and taking what those who have fled trustingly left behind. In Biloxi, Miss., looters went from shop to shop. “People are just casually walking in and filling up garbage bags and walking off like they’re Santa Claus,” the owner of a Super 8 Motel told the London Times. On CNN, producer Kim Siegel reported in the middle of the afternoon from Canal Street in New Orleans that looters were taking “everything they can.”

If this part of the story grows–if cities on the gulf come to seem like some combination of Dodge and the Barbarian invasion–it’s going to be bad for our country. One of the things that keeps us together, and that lets this great lumbering nation move forward each day, is the sense that we will be decent and brave in times of crisis, that the fabric holds, that under duress it is American heroism and altruism that take hold and not base instincts born of irresponsibility, immaturity and greed.

We had a bad time in the 1960s, and in the New York blackout in the ’70s, and in the Los Angeles riots in the ’90s. But the whole story of our last national crisis, 9/11, was courage–among the passersby, among the firemen, among those who walked down their stairs slowly to help a less able colleague, among those who fought their way past the flames in the Pentagon to get people out. And it gave us quite a sense of who we are as a people. It gave us a lot of renewed pride.

If New Orleans damages that sense, it’s going to be painful to face. It’s going to be damaging to the national spirit. More damaging even than a hurricane, even than the worst in decades.

I wonder if the cruel and stupid young people who are doing the looting know the power they have to damage their country. I wonder, if they knew, if they’d stop it.

Noonan sure had the right culprits pegged, didn’t she?

Not that she was entirely wrong. Our national spirit was permanently damaged all right, by the cruel and stupid people who failed to do their jobs, at least partially because of hyperbolic fantasies such as this one. They flew all over the national media as overstimulated wingnuts like Noonan got excited at the prospect of “cruel and stupid” young men rampaging about in New Orleans like animals — where, oddly, cameras were everywhere but nobody got any pictures of it.

We will never know what would have happened if the authorities hadn’t been hesitant to enter the city with less than an army to help them shoot the non-existent rampaging mobs of young (black) men, as Noonan casually said needed to be done. But it isn’t hard to imagine that they would have at least let the Red Cross into the city before thousands of people were left stranded for days without food and water.

The people who went crazy weren’t the victims of the hurricane. They pretty much kept it together. It was the febrile wingnuts with night terrors of marauding gangs destroying civilization as we know it who lost their minds.

It later turned out that most of those left in the city were poor young mothers, their children and old people, not that it mattered. By the time everyone figured that out, they were living in a breakdown of civilization of another kind altogether.

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