Many of you have probably already read this report from two EMTs who ended up part of that group stuck on the freeway overpass for days in New Orleans. If you haven’t, read it. It’s amazing.
If the order to deny relief in order to keep people from resisting evacuation is true, then somebody has committed a horrible, cruel mistake. As these two emergency techs write:
When individuals had to fight to find food or water, it meant looking out for yourself only. You had to do whatever it took to find water for your kids or food for your parents. When these basic needs were met, people began to look out for each other, working together and constructing a community.
If the relief organizations had saturated the City with food and water in the first 2 or 3 days, the desperation, the frustration and the ugliness would not have set in.
This makes sense to me. The conditions we saw at the convention center were awful and I think much of the despair and helplessness was due to the fact that these people were told repeatedly that they were going to be taken out of there at any moment. If the Red cross had been allowed in to set up their usual relief, with help from the authorities, they could have calmed that situation right down. People can organize themselves and settle in for a wait when they have the basic necessities. It was the hell of feeling abandoned and then locked in the city when they became desperate to leave, that must have been the most horrible. And as these EMT’s showed, it wasn’t a matter of having personal pluck or being able to organize themselves, they were actually inhibited by the authorities from dealing with the situation in a civilized fashion. The authorities actively created chaos so that people would not be comfortable:
From a woman with a battery powered radio we learned that the media was talking about us. Up in full view on the freeway, every relief and news organizations saw us on their way into the City. Officials were being asked what they were going to do about all those families living up on the freeway? The officials responded they were going to take care of us. Some of us got a sinking feeling. “Taking care of us” had an ominous tone to it.
Unfortunately, our sinking feeling (along with the sinking City) was correct. Just as dusk set in, a Gretna Sheriff showed up, jumped out of his patrol vehicle, aimed his gun at our faces, screaming, “Get off the fucking freeway”. A helicopter arrived and used the wind from its blades to blow away our flimsy structures. As we retreated, the sheriff loaded up his truck with our food and water.
Once again, at gunpoint, we were forced off the freeway. All the law enforcement agencies appeared threatened when we congregated or congealed into groups of 20 or more. In every congregation of “victims” they saw “mob” or “riot”. We felt safety in numbers. Our “we must stay together” was impossible because the agencies would force us into small atomized groups.
In the pandemonium of having our camp raided and destroyed, we scattered once again. Reduced to a small group of 8 people, in the dark, we sought refuge in an abandoned school bus, under the freeway on Cilo Street. We were hiding from possible criminal elements but equally and definitely, we were hiding from the police and sheriffs with their martial law, curfew and shoot-to-kill policies.
This is the group that Shepard Smith was freaking out about on O’Reilly last Thursday night. I wonder if he knew what happened after he made that report.
I think we can all understand the overwhelming nature of this disaster. And there should have been more adequate planning and a better response, no doubt about it. But the decision to deny immediate aid to people in the city is the worst decision of all. Read that story. These tourists were treated like shit by the authorities everywhere they went, just like the locals. Whoever made the decision to deny those people relief and then deny them the ability to leave when they tried to save themselves has blood on his or her hands.
Chris Matthews is having an orgasm on national television. For days he has spoken of almost nothing but the necessity of Bush sending in a “big foot” like Powell or Giuliani to take charge of the situation. He has pounded on this issue over and over again.
Monday:
MATTHEWS: You know, let me ask you a more general—that‘s a pretty good answer. I like quick answers on HARDBALL. Let me ask you this. During the hell of 9/11, the one good thing about it was—well, we had a president who seemed to be in charge, but we also had somebody on the ground, Rudy Giuliani, who seemed to be the guy who was there every day standing on the street corner, answering questions. You got a sense that there was one person taking the heat, being accountable, being authoritative and being authentic.
I still don‘t see a face of this relief effort. I don‘t see one person. Would that help? Or am I being naive, one person standing there saying, I‘m in charge of relief and reconstruction right now; I will make the calls?
[…]
MATTHEWS: Right. Congressman Livingston, you love that area. You grew up there. That‘s your home. Do you think we should have somebody like a Rudy Giuliani or a Colin Powell, some big shot on the site who says, I will make the big decisions at federal, state and level right now? Somebody is in charge.
[..]
MATTHEWS: OK. We‘re going to come back. We are going to be covering this. Joe Scarborough, do we need one man in charge down there, do you think?
MATTHEWS: You know, during the 9/11 tragedy, we had at least a face on the ground. We had a face in the White House, the president‘s, obviously. And we had the face on the ground, Giuliani. To really make this relief effort work and this reconstruction effort work in the next several months and years, even, does the president have to name one person as sort of a man in charge, a woman in charge, who is out there and says, look, state, federal and local, come to me; we are going to make this thing work?
Tuesday:
MATTHEWS: Let me ask you, Howard Safir, the big question. Should the president have a person of high prestige and command ability, almost like a young Douglas MacArthur or a younger, perhaps, Colin Powell—I don‘t want to knock him—he might be the right guy—who stands ready to take charge in these tragic situations? Or should he pick them on the spot, like right now pick somebody?
[…]
MATTHEWS: Well, there‘s been a lot of buzz around Washington, as you know, David, as to whether the president will name a big name to go down there, like a Giuliani or a Colin Powell to be the man on the spot. Making the vice president that man on the spot, is he in fact not promoting the vice president once again to a very high executive position?
[…]
Yesterday:
MATTHEWS: But with what mandate? Is Cheney‘s challenge to show the flag, to show the administration cares about the suffering and wants to smarten up the relief effort and thereby lower the heat on President Bush? Is Cheney‘s challenge to chop off heads? Will Dick Cheney be the butcher who lops off some bureaucrat heads, starting with FEMA Director Michael Brown, and thereby reforge the federal relief effort? Is Cheney‘s challenge to take charge personally of the reconstruction?
Will the most powerful vice president in American history become the man who ramrods the rise of the new South and with it a legacy that could promote a draft for a Cheney presidency? The question is a big one. Is Cheney charging down South to serve as President Bush‘s executioner or full-fledged viceroy?
[…]
MATTHEWS: Coming up, Vice President Dick Cheney is headed, with or without the boots, to the Gulf Coast. Will he take the lead in the rescue of those Gulf states and save President Bush‘s legacy in the process? Is this about public relations, this trip? Is it about lopping heads in the bad work some of people have done in this relief effort? Or is he taking on a very big job down there, as the president‘s viceroy for cleaning up that area?
Former New York Police Chief Bernie Kerik was a towering figure in New York after the terrorist attacks on 9/11. He‘s going to come here and talk about whether it should be Dick Cheney‘s job or maybe Rudy Giuliani‘s job.
MATTHEWS: You know, whenever we have, Mr. Commissioner [Kerik}, a big challenge, like rebuilding Tokyo after World War II or rebuilding Berlin or saving Berlin from the communists, the president of the United States, whoever he was, would name a big figure, Lucius Clay in Berlin airlift, of course, the general, or, of course General MacArthur in Tokyo.
He became basically an American Caesar over there. I want to ask you when we come back whether the president doesn‘t have to do something like that now and pick somebody big to go in there, whether it‘s the vice president, to go down there and move down in New Orleans for six months, or put in Rudy Giuliani or Colin Powell in there, somebody who is a power figure that will take—who will give orders and put everything together and do something like you folks did up in New York during 9/11.
[…]
MATTHEWS: OK. One last time with David Gregory. Will the president let Dick Cheney be his big foot down there this week, and that‘s enough, or does he still feel the need to put a Giuliani in there or a Colin Powell in there as his viceroy in that part of the country?
He has OCD on this issue, desperate to have Bush put a big … “foot” in charge of the disaster.
Today, he found sweet relief for his hard-on. Big Daddy Cheney has arrived:
“a tough guy…smart politician.. trying to figure out how to get his president out of a jam… smart guy, tough warrior..aware that now that he’s put his [huge] boots on the ground he has a stake in this. How big a foot is he going to land on this issue.”
I get the sense that he’s suffering from a bad case of post coital melancholy, though. He just isn’t satisfied. He wanted Rudy so badly he could taste it. And all he got was Dick.
Update: Ooops. Apparently he isn’t going to have to settle for old Dick after all. According to David Gregory the buzz all over town is that the president should apppoint a Katrina Czar. Wow! (I guess “viceroy” didn’t take.) Chris is back in the saddle.
He’s talking up Jack Welch and Norman Schwartzkopf today. I hear Bernie Kerik is available. So is Ken Lay. How about a statue of Ronald Reagan?
And since Chris seems top think that the most important things is for the president to appoint “someone of grandeur, visible and public in America” I am personally willing to offer up Schwarzenneger. In Bush’s America it’s every citizen for him or herself.
Kevin passes on an article pointing out that there is already a high apartment vacancy rate in the south central region and that the government should just issue section 8 vouchers for people to use to house themselves in already vacant dwellings. He says this seems like something that could be passed right away on a bipartisan basis.
The only problem with this is that you would also have to pass a law that required landlords to accept them. And that, I’m afraid, is a non-starter. A large number of property owners are not going to stand for being forced to accept New Orleans evacuees as tenents and those who would be their neighbors will not accept it either.
I wish it were not true. And I wish that someone could propose something like this on the floor of congress so we could see where people stand — it would be very illustrative of how far we’ve come since the discrimination in housing wars of the 1960’s. That single issue almost succeeded in getting the civil rights act repealed. Sadly, I suspect we haven’t come as far as we might have hoped.
There is something very dangerous happening in New Orleans and I’m not talking about the diseased gumbo that has become the flood waters. The combination of blocking the media, forcing evacuations and too many guns is a recipe for disaster. There is going to be trouble. Via Atrios and Josh Marshall I see that Brian Williams reported on his blog last night:
An interesting dynamic is taking shape in this city, not altogether positive: after days of rampant lawlessness (making for what I think most would agree was an impossible job for the New Orleans Police Department during those first few crucial days of rising water, pitch-black nights and looting of stores) the city has now reached a near-saturation level of military and law enforcement. In the areas we visited, the red berets of the 82nd Airborne are visible on just about every block. National Guard soldiers are ubiquitous. At one fire scene, I counted law enforcement personnel (who I presume were on hand to guarantee the safety of the firefighters) from four separate jurisdictions, as far away as Connecticut and Illinois. And tempers are getting hot. While we were attempting to take pictures of the National Guard (a unit from Oklahoma) taking up positions outside a Brooks Brothers on the edge of the Quarter, the sergeant ordered us to the other side of the boulevard. The short version is: there won’t be any pictures of this particular group of Guard soldiers on our newscast tonight. Rules (or I suspect in this case an order on a whim) like those do not HELP the palpable feeling that this area is somehow separate from the United States.
At that same fire scene, a police officer from out of town raised the muzzle of her weapon and aimed it at members of the media… obvious members of the media… armed only with notepads. Her actions (apparently because she thought reporters were encroaching on the scene) were over the top and she was told. There are automatic weapons and shotguns everywhere you look. It’s a stance that perhaps would have been appropriate during the open lawlessness that has long since ended on most of these streets. Someone else points out on television as I post this: the fact that the National Guard now bars entry (by journalists) to the very places where people last week were barred from LEAVING (The Convention Center and Superdome) is a kind of perverse and perfectly backward postscript to this awful chapter in American history.
The media need to be in that city right now in great numbers. There has to be a record of what is going on — for the sake of the soldiers and cops who are in there as much as the residents. This is a recipe for mayhem. Here’s a passage from the Kerner Commission about the Newark riots of 1967:
. . . On Saturday, July 15, [Director of Police Dominick] Spina received a report of snipers in a housing project. When he arrived he saw approximately 100 National Guardsmen and police officers crouching behind vehicles, hiding in corners and lying on the ground around the edge of the courtyard.
Since everything appeared quiet and it was broad daylight, Spina walked directly down the middle of the street. Nothing happened. As he came to the last building of the complex, he heard a shot. All around him the troopers jumped, believing themselves to be under sniper fire. A moment later a young Guardsman ran from behind a building.
The Director of Police went over and asked him if he had fired the shot. The soldier said yes, he had fired to scare a man away from a window; that his orders were to keep everyone away from windows.
Spina said he told the soldier: “Do you know what you just did? You have now created a state of hysteria. Every Guardsman up and down this street and every state policeman and every city policeman that is present thinks that somebody just fired a shot and that it is probably a sniper.”
A short time later more “gunshots” were heard. Investigating, Spina came upon a Puerto Rican sitting on a wall. In reply to a question as to whether he knew “where the firing is coming from?” the man said:
“That’s no firing. That’s fireworks. If you look up to the fourth floor, you will see the people who are throwing down these cherry bombs.”
By this time four truckloads of National Guardsmen had arrived and troopers and policemen were again crouched everywhere looking for a sniper. The Director of Police remained at the scene for three hours, and the only shot fired was the one by the Guardsmen.
Nevertheless, at six o’clock that evening two columns of National Guardsmen and state troopers were directing mass fire at the Hayes Housing Project in response to what they believed were snipers..
———-
Snapping power lines, firecrackers, and nervous, untrained police and national guardsmen caused much indiscriminate firing. The police often faced a very difficult job for which they were unprepared. According to the director of the Newark police, “Down in the Springfield Avenue area it was so bad that, in my opinion guardsmen were firing upon police and police were firing back, at them.”
I cannot figure out why they have decided to do this. It’s a mistake. In the past government authorities have sent in men with guns for the explicit purpose of taking down troublemakers by any means necessary. I hope that isn’t what’s happened. (That National Guard Colonel saying “this is going to look like “little Somalia” makes me very nervous.)
It is wrong for the government to be keeping the media out of this situation. If they are willing to take the risk of disease they should be allowed in. I hope they scream bloody murder. The media is a mitigating factor not a complication in situations like this. They need to be there.
I mentioned before the hurricane hit that I had lived as a child in Mississippi when Hurricane Betsy hit in 1965. I lived in Bay St. Louis, which was at the eye of Hurricane Katrina and seems to have been completely destroyed.
I’m sad to hear it. It was a beautiful little gothic southern town, dripping in drawly, molassas charm and warm hospitality. It was the location for the Natalie Wood and Robert Redford movie version of Tennessee Williams’ “This Property is Condemned.” I was there when they filmed the scenes down at the abandoned railroad tracks. I haven’t been there in many years, but it was like a place out of time when I lived there and I doubt it changed all that much. We had heirloom roses growing in our backyard that locals said had been planted during the antebellum days. Apparently the house was on the site of an old planatation. My school was said to have been Henry Clay’s summer home, although I don’t know if that was true.
The period I lived in this little town was a momentous time in the south and there was a palpable undercurrent of profound disturbance. In 1965, the march on Selma hit as hard as the hurricane that came along months later.
Many of my readers know that my father is a blazing, unrepentant right wingnut. At 83 he’s still going strong, but in those days he was something to behold. He had been career military (WWII and Korea vet) who retired by the mid 60’s and went to work for the military industrial complex. He was such a die hard conservative that he had even hated Roosevelt. During the depression! In 1965 he was a formidable and charismatic figure. He was also a racist. Still is, but he’s much less open about it. In those days it was no holds barred. And down south, in that period, he had a lot of company.
So, when I was over at Michael Berube’s place last night I came across a vile comment by a reader giving a litany of crimes allegedly committed by the hurricane victims in New Orleans during those horrible days at the convention center and the Superdome, I recalled a strange episode from a period of my childhood spent deep in the heart of Tennessee Williams country.
After Selma, somebody wrote a book that made the rounds among my parents’ friends in Bay St Louis that supposedly showed that the marchers had defecated in the streets, had sex in public and then made the police dogs aggressive with their “sex smell.” I was not allowed to see this book, but my little friends and I got a hold of it. I’ll never forget the images. It was racist pornography.
And then, exactly 40 years later I read this inside that amazing comment I linked to above:
“That same day, when it was time to board buses for Houston, soldiers had trouble controlling the crowd. People at the back of the mob crushed the people in front against barricades the soldiers put up to contain the crowd. Many people continued to yell obscenities whenever they saw a patrol go by. Some were afraid of losing their place in line and defecated where they stood.”
The commenter didn’t provide links, but the quote above appears to be traced to a story in the Marine Corps Times:
Outside, thousands of civilians were mobbing a walkway leading into a mall that the military is using to process people getting onto the Houston-bound buses. Many civilians have been in the stuck waiting for more than 24 hours. People afraid of losing their places in line have defecated where they stand. People in the front of the mob have been injured from being crushed against steel barricades that separates the civilians from the military men and women trying to conduct the evacuation
Think about what the phrase “defecated where they stood” conjures up. Animals. Cows and Horses defecate where they stand. Humans don’t.
The doctored quote from Berube’s blog takes it to the next level, of course, and explicitly condemns that evacuees as animals (read the rest of his comment for a real treat.)But the original quote is somewhat jarring in itself. It’s a “mob” that somehow “waits.” The barricade is described as “separating” the military from the evacuees. The injuries of people pressed against the barricade are portrayed with out emotion as necessary to “processing” which is not defined. There is no discussion of how a “mob” can stand in a crushing line for 24 hours with no food, water or toilets. The defecation quote seems to be in the story as a prurient non-sequitor.
Here’s a description of the very same scene from a tourist who stood in the same lines:
Finally, Thursday morning, Major Bush—I’m not making this up—declared on a megaphone that we would be evacuated. There was total calm for two hours.
We got in lines that went out towards the neighboring commercial center by a footbridge. They separated men and women, I don’t know why (I thought it might be in order to search people, but we weren’t searched). A guy who was with us was separated from his wife, and he had already lost his home and job.
The line was like the Paris metro at the height of rush hour. We were packed like sardines, we couldn’t even see our feet. We walked on garbage, diapers that exploded sometimes, bottles full, with urine, perhaps. There were also bottles of liquor. This lasted from midday Thursday until Friday morning, a total hell. People fainted every two or three minutes. We heard cries of “somebody down.” They evacuated people towards the barriers. A pregnant woman’s water broke. Twice we heard gunshot and everyone dove for cover. We didn’t have anything to eat, only water.
Imagine for a minute what it would be like to stand in a crushing line for more than 24 hours in overpowering stench and blazing heat after having lived in hell for the previous three days inside the Superdome. Imagine how hard it would be to keep control of yourself, how frightened and how frustrated you would feel.
And yet, that Marine Times reporter and his racist reinterpreter do not see human beings stretched to their limits by conditions that are unimaginable — many of them young mothers with children, old people and others who had no means to get out before the hurricane hit; they see misbehaving animals.
These stories have already become urban legends. Stories of blacks shitting in the streets are making the rounds all over the internet and becoming more and more lurid with each retelling. Just like these very same stories made their way into the homes of racist whites forty years ago and validated all their preconceived notions.
Be skeptical, my friends, and don’t let these claims go unchallenged. This is the illness in our American soul that will not die. It lurks inside all of us, of all races, to some degree. I grew up inside the belly of the beast and I know that I must be vigilant to challenge certain assumptions.
Martin Luther King and the freedom marchers weren’t shitting in the streets in 1965. Desperate victims of Hurricane Katrina were not animals — they were treated like animals. Let’s make sure that we understand the difference.
Ordinary people are sitting at home, transfixed by the spectacle unfolding on their television screens. Their hearts are breaking as they watch the horrifying spectacle of an entire city drowned. Many have already contributed what they can to the American Red Cross, to the Salvation Army, to the other armies of compassion, and only wish they could do more.
What must they think of the talking heads who treat this as if it were another bit of minor grist for the political mills? As if this were another story about some politician’s war record or a nominee’s nanny issues. The callowness now on display goes a long way toward explaining why politicians and the media are held in public esteem somewhere above child molesters and below bankers.
Little pitchers have big ears, don’t you know. Shush with the “b-l-a-m-e” game or somebody might get the idea that somebody made a mistake.
Sometimes I wonder if these pundits ever talk to anyone but each other. Apparently, he doesn’t know that “ordinary people” have lots and lots of opinions about how the leadership of this country should behave in a catastrophe. They do not have this strange, fey reticence to engage in “the blame game.” They expect their leaders to take charge — and when the task is huge and unprecedented, they expect their national leaders to take charge and mobilize the nation to help.
Jesus, George W. Bush has spent the last four years babbling about his superior leadership on a loop.
From his stump speech in 2004:
There are quiet times in the life of a nation when little is expected of its leaders. This isn’t one of those times. This is a time when we need firm resolve, clear vision and a deep faith in the values that make us a great nation. (Applause.)
None of us will ever forget that week when one era ended and another began. On September the 14th, 2001, I stood in the ruins of the Twin Towers. It’s a day I will never forget. There were workers in hard hats there, yelling, “Whatever it takes.” I was trying to do my best to thank and comfort the firefighters and policemen and the rescuers. A guy grabbed me by the arm, and he said, “Do not let me down.” (Applause.) Ever since that day, I wake up every morning thinking about how to better protect our country. I will never relent in defending America, whatever it takes
This was what he ran and won on — the idea that he alone, the man in charge, wouldn’t “let us down.” But after Iraq — and now this — it’s become clear to many “ordinary Americans” that his stirring assertions of his own committment aren’t enough. There is massive failure and a complete lack of accountability. Actions speak louder than words. You don’t have to be a pundit to understand that when Americans are abandoned in flood waters — while the media were able to film their despair for days on end — that the government let us down.
The guy who said over and over again “my greatest responsibility as President is to protect the American people,” was selling people his leadership abilities in a crisis. And he let the country down. Ordinary people understand that quite well thank you. They aren’t confused in the least. Even if the state a local authorities weren’t on the ball it doesn’t mean that the president was. And he’s the man in the codpiece.
The sub-text of this crisis is that when the shit came down in an overwhelming way our national government failed.
This story about Bush using firefighters as props should be circulated far and wide. I think it is the perfect symbol of the photo-op presidency.
I would like to see it juxtaposed with another one:
Karl Rove believes that politics is TV with the sound turned off. And that’s mostly true. What he fails to understand is that people turn the sound way up during big stories like this. And they are feeling the cognitive dissonance between the images of horrible suffering and the president’s dull and meaningless babbling:
“So long as anybody’s life is in danger, we’ve got work to do. That’s why I want people to be assured we’re going to do it. And — but remember, this is a project that not only deals with the immediate, we’re going to have to deal with the long term, as well. The immediate needs are being taken care of right here, and I fully understand there’s a lot of work to be done.”
I think that there have been two important political comments these past few days. The first is this by William Kristol:
“He is a strong president . . . but he has never really focused on the importance of good execution. I think that is true in many parts of his presidency.”
“… an administration whose FEMA director knew less about on-the-ground conditions in the stricken city this week than the average TV viewer has a real vulnerability.
It will only address that vulnerability with a performance in coming days and weeks that is more in keeping with the GOP’s image as the “daddy party,” the party of competence, the party that can be trusted in times of crisis. That is the main thing.”
Daddy isn’t supposed to snivel about how the locals didn’t do their job. Daddy whining about “the blame game” makes the kids feel like Daddy still isn’t in charge and doesn’t know what he’s doing. And he should not be making excuses for his idiot cronies or relying on politesse and bureaucratic snafus to explain why he was late when the crisis hit. Daddy isn’t supposed to be late.
I went through the LA riots in 92 and I recall that there was a delay in deploying the National Guard, ostensibly because they didn’t have enough ammunition.(It turned out that they didn’t have the proper locks on their guns.) The (possibly apocryphal) story that circulated at the time was that Pete Wilson, ex-marine, said, “Well then, issue one fucking bullet a piece and tell them to get their asses out there.”
I have no love for Pete Wilson (and the response of the guard was very tardy) but that’s the way people expect leaders to behave in a crisis. They want to see them making tough decisions, holding people accountable. Taking charge. That’s the manufactured image the Republicans have been selling for decades. The reality is little Lord Pontchartrain telling his political hack “Brownie” he’s doing a great job — and using fire-fighters as props for his latest costume pageant. George W. Bush is America’s deadbeat Dad.
I have clearly angered the geek gods in some way. I had a massive computer meltdown of both laptop and desktop within 4 days. I’ll be posting from odd distracting places for the time being.
BATON ROUGE, La. — They locked down the entrance doors Thursday at the Baton Rouge hotel where I’m staying alongside hundreds of New Orleans residents driven from their homes by Hurricane Katrina.
“Because of the riots,” the hotel managers explained. Armed Gunmen from New Orleans were headed this way, they had heard.
“It’s the blacks,” whispered one white woman in the elevator. “We always worried this would happen.”
I had the misfortune to be around some bigots this week-end as I watched the footage from New Orleans. I hadn’t heard some of this stuff so frankly admitted since I was a kid (when I heard it a lot.) The twisted, subterranean, politically incorrect world of racism has reared its ugly head.
This is just the latest chapter in the oldest story in America. We should be aware of it and understand it. And we should also be glad that it isn’t worse because in the past it certainly was.
Ever since 1791, there have been white Americans who get very nervous when they see a large number of angry black people in one place. That was the year that Haiti’s slaves rebelled and killed almost every Frenchman on the island. The fear of slave revolt — black revolt — entered the consciousness of the American lizard brain and has never left. From Gabriel Prosser to Nat Turner to Malcolm X to Stokely Carmichael and the long hot summers of 66 and 67, notions of barbaric vengeance being wreaked upon unsuspecting white people has lurked in our racist subconscious. During slavery it was the immoral institution itself combined with horrible inhumane treatment. After the civil war it was the knowledge of seething anger at Jim Crow. During the 60’s the anger became explicit and words like “by any means necessary” reached deep into the American psyche and fueled the backlash against the civil rights movement — and set the conditions for the Republican dominance of politics today.
Race is America’s deepest psychic wound that festers in different ways over and over again. It has lost much of its original blazing pain, but it is still there, buried and waiting to come to the surface.
The memories of Nat Turner are still fresh to many for whom the Lost Cause is their defining cultural benchmark:
Starting with a trusted few fellow slaves, the insurgency ultimately numbered more than 40 slaves and free blacks, mostly on horseback. The rebels traveled from house to house, freeing slaves and killing all the whites they could find; men, women and children alike. In all 55 whites were killed in the revolt.
In total, 55 blacks suspected of having been involved in the uprising were killed. In the aftermath, hundreds of blacks, many of whom had nothing to do with the rebellion, were beaten, tortured and murdered by hysterical white mobs.
In the summer of 67, the cities of this country went up in flames. The rhetoric was the same as what we heard coming from the right this past week. Peggy Noonan suggested that looters be summarily shot. And, in that summer of fire, they were. In large numbers. Only, it turned out, they weren’t necessarily looters or rioters — they were just black. Ordinary people, housewives, kids were gunned down by renegade cops and national guard who were given orders to shoot to kill. Every african american killed by police that summer became a symbol of collective punishment. If you were black, you could be asked to pay with your life for the sins of other blacks. That’s just the way it worked.
In Rick Perlstein’s (as yet unpublished) new book, which I’ve had the privilege to read a bit of, this is the real crucible of the 1960’s. Here is just a little bit of what happened in Newark that long hot summer after the cops took off the gloves and started doing what Peggy Noonan and Jonah Goldberg have been agitating for this past week in New Orleans:
“The press was interested in making the carnage make sense. A turkey shoot of grandparents and 10-year-olds did not make sense. The New York Daily News ran an “investigation” of the death of the Newark fire captain [killed by police] and called it “The Murder of Mike Moran.” The Washington Post left his cause of death as more or less a blank. The alternative–that when law enforcement spent days spraying … rounds of ammunition, more or less at random, even white people can get killed–seemed too horrifying for mainstream ideology to contemplate. Twelve-year-old Joey Bass, in dirty jeans and scuffed sneakers, his own blood trickling down the street, lay splayed across the cover of the July 28 Life. The feature inside constituted a sort of visual and verbal legal brief for why such accidents might have been excusable. The opening spread showed a man with a turban wrapped around his head loading a Mauser by a window with the caption, “The targets were Negro snipers, like the one above.” In actual fact the photo had been staged by a blustering black nationalist by the name of Colonel Hassan, what the copy claimed was an upper-floor vantage onto the streets actually a first-floor room overlooking a trash-strewn back yard. “The whole time we were in Newark we never saw what you would call a violent black man,” Life photographer Bud Lee later recalled. “The only people I saw who were violent were the police.”
Here is a link to Bud Lee’s famous photograph of Joey Bass.
In a city racked by violence for a week, there was yet another shootout on Sunday. Contractors for the Army Corps of Engineers came under fire as they crossed a bridge to work on a levee and police escorts shot back, killing three assailants and a fourth in a later gunfight. A fifth suspect was wounded and captured. There was no explanation for it, only the numbing facts.
Perlstein reports on this incident from Newark:
And around 4 pm a group of citizens were milling around outside front of the Scudder Homes housing project off Springfield when three police cars turned the corner. The crowd assumed the police must be firing blanks at them,until a .38 caliber bullet ripped through Virgil Harrison’s right forearm.
Men took off their undershirts to wave them as white flags. The cops just kept on shooting. They said they were looking for a sniper on the upper floors of the building. But they sprayed their shots at ground level. That was how Rufus Council, 35, Oscar Hill, 50, and Virgil’s father Isaac “UncleDaddy” Harrison, 72, and perhaps Robert Lee Martin, 22, and Cornelius Murray, 28, lost their lives. Oscar Hill was wearing his American Legion jacket. Robert Lee Martin’s family reported that money was taken from his body. Murray’s body was missing $126 and a ring.
There indeed were three snipers in Scudder Homes. But they began their shooting in response to these fusillades. They killed a police detective, Fred Toto, 33, a father of three, about on hour later, though in later testimony police claimed the order of the shootings was reversed.
I’m not saying that’s what happened in New Orleans in the incident I reference above — or any others. I don’t know the facts. I am saying that’s the kind of thing that tends to happen when rumor and paranoia get out of hand.
Here’s the Council of Conservative Citizen’s web site:
Updates! Eyewitness accounts report that at least six people have been murdered inside the superdome. One dozen or more have been raped. Most of the rape victims are very young. A seven year old girl, an eight year old boy, and numerous teenage girls. The US media is extremely reluctant to report any of this because of political correctness!
Yet this doctor who was ministering to the sick in the Superdome reports nothing like this:
Perhaps it’s the stench that Dr. Kevin Stephens will remember the most. It was a stench that was a gumbo of human waste, sweat, and despair. For four days, Stephens, the Health Department director in New Orleans, administered to the sick in the Superdome, his primary patients being those in wheelchairs and nonambulatory. He watched conditions deteriorate from one of calmness on the eve of Hurricane Katrina crippling the city, to one of frustration by the time he was evacuated to the adjacent New Orleans Arena on Wednesday. He was taken to Baton Rouge on Thursday.
[…]
“I never felt threatened and I walked around the entire place,” Stephens said. “I was talking to people, administering first aid. But people were ready to get out of there. The conditions were horrid and horrible. The stench was unbearable. If we had electricity, it would have been so much better.”
“This place is going to look like Little Somalia,” Brig. Gen. Gary Jones, commander of the Louisiana National Guard’s Joint Task Force told Army Times Friday as hundreds of armed troops under his charge prepared to launch a massive citywide security mission from a staging area outside the Louisiana Superdome.
In Detroit during the riots there in 1967, Perlstein reports:
“I’m gonna shoot at anything that moves and that is black” an arriving National Guardsman declared.
(He also reports that the federal government and state blame game almost perfectly mirrors the current crisis. When things are hurtling out of control, politicians will dither until they figure out what the play is, I guess. Too bad about the dead bodies.)
The story to which I linked at the beginning of this post concludes with this:
By Thursday, local TV and radio stations in Baton Rouge—the only ones in the metro area still able to broadcast—were breezily passing along reports of cars being hijacked at gunpoint by New Orleans refugees, riots breaking out in the shelters set up in Baton Rouge to house the displaced, and guns and knives being seized.
Scarcely any of it was true—the police, for example, confiscated a single knife from a refugee in one Baton Rouge shelter. There were no riots in Baton Rouge. There were no armed hordes.
But all of it played directly into the darkest prejudices long held against the hundreds of thousands of impoverished blacks who live “down there,” in New Orleans, that other world regarded by many white suburbanites—indeed, many people across the rest of the state—as a dangerous urban no-go area.
Now the floods were pushing tens of thousands of those inner-city residents deep into Baton Rouge and beyond. The TV pictures showed vast throngs of black people who had been trapped in downtown New Orleans disgorging out of rescue trucks and helicopters to be ushered onto buses headed west on Interstate Highway 10. The nervousness among many of the white evacuees in my hotel was palpable.
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It’s that last that we need to look for now. The evacuees are a diaspora all over the country. They are “infiltrating” a bunch of cities and towns in large numbers. Many whites fear blacks in large numbers, especially those from the big city, those who are desperate. Most especially, they fear those who are angry. (Why if they get it in their heads to be mad about how they were left behind to die like animals, who knows what will happen? Lock the doors!)
I don’t honestly think there is any racist conspiracy at work. There doesn’t need to be. All it takes is a reactivation of long held racist beliefs and attitudes — attitudes that led the president to say that they had “secured” the convention center on Friday night — which we all saw in that amazing FoxNews footage actually meant that the desperate survivors had been locked inside the sweltering hellhole. It was the attitude that had tourists staying at the Hyatt hotel being given special dispensation to go to the head of the lines at the Superdome. It was the attitude that made my racist companions disgusted by the “animals” at the convention center because they were living in filth fail to grasp that these people had been expecting to be rescued at any moment for more than four days.
It’s that attitude that led these people to talk endlessly about rape with lurid imagery and breathless, barely contained excitement. This too is part of the American lizard brain.
I have no doubt that there was criminality on the streets of New Orleans. When the law disappears, that’s what happens. But when you looks closely at our history you see that whenever large numbers of african americans are featured, this is the kind of thing that is said and thought and done. It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t believe it or that criminals shouldn’t be brought to justice. But our history suggests that when we hear reports of cops gunning down looters, snipers and rapists in the street, we should at least maintain a normal skepticism. Far too often in our history it has been shown later that things were not as they seemed at the time.
This, by the way, is not a neat black and white thing and never has been. Some black Americans have the same lizard brain reactions as do whites. In 1822:
Perhaps inspired by the way slaves coordinated their slave revolution in Santo Domingue (know today as the Haitian Revolution), [Denmark Vesey] planned what would have been the largest slave rebellion in U.S. history. His insurrection, which was to take place on July 14, 1822, became known by about 9,000 slaves and free blacks throughout Charleston who were to participate. The plot was leaked by slaves loyal to their white owners who overheard talks of rebellion, and 131 people were charged with conspiracy by Charleston authorities.
Nobody will be surprised to learn, I assume, that recent scholarship indicates Desmond Vesey was framed.
Everyone has undoubtedly seen that dramatic and heartbreaking footage of Aaron Broussard on Meet the Press yesterday. But I wonder if most people saw Haley Barbour directly afterward. He completely ignored Broussard’s emotional plea and implied in a particularly unctuous tone that something was wrong with Louisiana because everything was going very well in Mississippi:
MR. BROUSSARD: Nobody’s coming to get us. Nobody’s coming to get us. The secretary has promised. Everybody’s promised. They’ve had press conferences. I’m sick of the press conferences. For God sakes, shut up and send us somebody.
MR. RUSSERT: Just take a pause, Mr. President. While you gather yourself in your very emotional times, I understand, let me go to Governor Haley Barbour of Mississippi.
Governor Barbour, can you bring our audience up to date on what is happening in your state, how many deaths have you experienced and what do you see playing out over the next couple days?
GOV. HALEY BARBOUR, (R-MS): Well, we were ground zero of the worst natural disaster ever to hit the United States. And it’s not just a calamity on our Gulf Coast, which is decimated, I mean, destroyed, all the infrastructure overwhelmed. We have damage 150 miles inland. We have 100 miles inland, 12 deaths from winds over 110 miles an hour.
Saturday night before this storm hit, the head of the National Hurricane Center called me and said, “Governor, this is going to be like Camille.” I said, “Well, start telling people it’s going to be like Camille,” because Camille is the benchmark for how bad–it’s the worst hurricane that ever hit America, it happened to hit Pass Christian, Mississippi. Well, Tim, Katrina was worse than Camille. It was worse than Camille in size. It was worse than Camille in damage. And so we’ve had a terrible, grievous blow struck us.
But my experience is very different from Louisiana, apparently. I don’t know anything about Louisiana. Over here, we had the Coast Guard in Monday night. They took 1,700 people off the roofs of houses with guys hanging off of helicopters to get them. They sent us a million meals last night because we’d eaten everything through. Everything hasn’t been perfect here, by any stretch of the imagination, Tim. But the federal government has been good partners to us. They’ve tried hard. Our people have tried hard. Firemen and policemen and emergency medical people, National Guard, highway patrolmen working virtually around the clock, sleeping in their cars when they could sleep. And we’ve made progress every day.
So, basically he said that Mississippi was getting the help it needed early on. I wonder if Mississippians agree with that?
In a sign of the political pressure facing Bush, Mississippi Republican Sen. Trent Lott, a former Senate majority leader, said he has been battling the Federal Emergency Management Agency and its Mississippi counterpart for help for his state and urged Bush to cut red tape.
After a one-on-one meeting with Bush in Poplarville, Lott said: “I am demanding help for the people of Mississippi to recover from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.”
Haley Barbour is hitching his wagon to Bush and it makes sense. He’s really never been anything but a political hack. But if things aren’t going as well in Mississippi as he says it is — and I doubt it is — then he’s playing with fire. I’d put my money on Lott. I have a suspicion that he understands the zeitgeist a little bit better that Barbour does.
…there are critics, particularly Jackson residents who are desperate for gasoline, and country folk still forced to scrounge for food and clean water in a world without electricity. And, there are those who say Barbour may have been too soft on early evacuation decisions.
The gulf coast was devastated. And people there are feeling overlooked in the shadow of the horrors of New Orleans. It’s going to take a long time to re-build and things will not go completely smoothly. If people get impatient with this endless happy talk coming out of Barbour and the rest of the Republican leadership, there could be hell to pay. They’d better hope that Bush can deliver.
