New Orleans, and the Hurricane Next Time

By Nicholas Stix A hurricane hit New Orleans. However, America has suffered many such hurricanes, and will suffer many more to come. Whether she can endure them, is another story. Looks like America to Me ‘It doesn’t look like America; it looks like a third world country.’ That was the refrain from CNN reporters such as Sanjay Gupta in New Orleans on Friday. The problem is, New Orleans looks all too much like America – as in urban, “multicultural” America. Meanwhile, black politicians were saying that the issue is “racial.” You have a majority black city whose 480,000 residents were warned to evacuate, yet approximately 150,000 (31.2 percent) declined to. (I am allowing for 10,000-20,000 old and/or disabled people, like the 94-year-old man stuck in his apartment with a dozen eggs and a few gallons of water, who could not evacuate.) Most of the angry people shown waiting for transport appeared to me to be able-bodied. You have armed young black men roaming the city streets, looting, raping, murdering and carjacking. You have rescue workers in helicopters who are fired on by gun-toting “victims,” and who then flee to save themselves. You have national guardsmen in the streets ordered not to do their jobs. You have a black mayor, Ray Nagin, who failed to do his job and then cried racism, condemning the Great White Father for not bailing him out, and complaining about a lack of National Guardsmen, as if he would tolerate the Guard doing its job. You have Jesse Jackson, crying racism, insisting that had the victims been white that help would have arrived in a hurry, and diminishing the savagery in the streets as a few people taking “TV sets.” You have socialist media opportunists racially pandering to racist, black demagogues. You have smirking, effete snob Los Angeles Times editorialist Jon Healy, claiming that the omniscient, omnipotent feds knew exactly what to expect, and should have responded with lightning speed to avert disaster. You have CNN anchor Paula Zahn, attacking the Bush Administration, by way of feeding black politicians rhetorical softball questions. You have Larry King, “asking” racist Cong. Elijah Cummings, former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, “Do you think if New Orleans were two-thirds white instead of two-thirds black, this wouldn’t have happened?” Those weren’t questions, they were despicable cases of racist grandstanding. To Cong. Cummings’ credit, he sought to de-emphasize race, emphasizing instead that these were poor people “with no money, and nowhere to go.” A black woman named Kesha Booker said that the people who stayed in New Orleans “are living paycheck to paycheck, in dire straits.” And yet, during the Great Depression, whites who had no jobs, no paychecks, and nowhere to go, traveled cross-country, in search of work. And they hadn’t even been warned to evacuate in the face of an approaching hurricane. And you have white doctors and nurses saving black patients, and a white president who is expected to save the day. And then be damned, no matter what he does. I’m sorry. I know that some of my readers are thinking, “Well, golly. He’s not the most compassionate type.” It’s true. Compassion is not my greatest virtue. If it’s compassion you want, you need to find yourself some white Evangelical Christians and Orthodox Jews. Those are the folks who are always going out of their way to give their time, their money, their sweat, and sometimes their lives, saving strangers who are not even of the same faith or race. You know, the guys for whom the socialist mainstream media have only contempt. I was raised a secular humanist, and secular humanism has no room for compassion. Excepting for libertarians, who don’t even claim to have compassion, secular humanists claim to feel compassion for blacks and Hispanics, and illegal immigrants, oops, undocumented immigrants, and homosexuals, but what they really have is political loyalty to those groups and a corresponding political enmity towards (non-socialist) heterosexual white Americans. If they really had compassion, they’d feel it for white Evangelicals and Orthodox Jews, as well as for all those groups whom they politically protect … and live off of. The only CNN reporter who showed any decency or courage was Anderson Cooper, who pointed out – also by way of rhetorical questions -- to Jesse Jackson that New Orleans is a black-run city, that Mayor Nagin is black, and that it was Mayor Nagin’s responsibility to take care of his constituents. CNN security consultant Richard Falkenrath said as much, in a roundabout way, when he contradicted Jon Healy. “There was a cascading failure of public infrastructure that we hadn’t planned for.” English translation: ‘The first line of defense always is constituted by local authorities. You know, the sewer and water and transportation and police and fire and health departments. Well, not only did one of them screw up, but they all screwed up, one on top of the other. Imagine the 102 stories of the World Trade Center towers collapsing one on top of the other on 911, and you have an idea of the failures by local authorities.’ No federal agency can ever swoop in fast enough to compensate for such incompetence at the local level. The locals must always hold the fort for several days, until the feds can get their airlifts and personnel organized and at the scene of the catastrophe. That Jon Healy would damn the feds while absolving local officials of responsibility shows either incredible ignorance or breath-taking dishonesty. The contrast to Mississippi could not have been more stark. Mississippi had less warning about Katrina. And yet, once people heard that Katrina was coming, they got in their cars and drove away. CNN’s Anderson Cooper reported from Waveland, MS, where a married white couple and the husband’s mother had returned to see the leveled house they’d lost. In New Orleans, 150,000 people refused to leave, despite railroad lines and bus depots. Mayor Nagin likes the title of mayor and the power the job confers, but like most black urban mayors, he refuses to lead. Or rather, he thinks that leadership begins with demanding nourishment from white people, and ends with biting the hands that feed him. As the blog Our Way of Life showed (a tip o’ the hat to Steve Sailer), Mayor Nagin had hundreds of buses sitting around in parking lots prior to Katrina, which by Sailer’s reckoning could have been used to transport up to 12,000 people per trip to higher ground in Baton Rouge, 75 miles away. Instead, Nagin dithered, and then raged. Meanwhile, the parking lots were flooded in, wasting the buses. As blogger Zach wrote, “Why did the mayor not use the buses?! This is incompetence and stupidity of the first order, period.” Think Locally, Act Federally One of the many lessons lost in this disaster is that local disaster relief is not a federal obligation; it is a state and local matter. On Fox News a few days ago, members of the “Fox All-Stars” panel noted that financially bailing out the Gulf region hit by Katrina is not a federal mandate. One panelist cited people whose homes were devastated who said proudly that they would rebuild. (Although no one said so, they were talking primarily of whites, because blacks were more likely to be clustered in cities and to proudly demand to be saved by the feds.) But the rest us would have to pay for the rebuilding! The proud locals had knowingly moved to the hurricane belt, where there is no hurricane or flood insurance, expecting the federal government to pick up the tab when the foreseeable occurred. And “conservative” George Bush will not disappoint them, because just like his socialist adversaries, he seeks to buy votes with federal taxpayer dollars wherever and whenever he can. If the feds kept out of such local disasters, and left them to the governments of New Orleans and Louisiana, respectively, New Orleans blacks would still blame the white devils for their problems, but at least those white devils wouldn’t go broke paying for them. Mayor Ray Nagin and Gov. Kathleen Blanco would be forced to do their jobs. The price of area housing and land have artificially risen over the years, due to the flood of federal dollars after previous natural disasters. Without the artificial inflation of federal dollars, prices would return to a reasonable level – not that property buyers would acknowledge the trade-off. That would ease financial pressure on future home buyers, not to mention federal taxpayers in the other 49 states. Gulf Coast whites and blacks alike will expect federal help; of that there can be no doubt. But the contrast between whites who sought to save themselves and blacks who expected to be saved; between whites who “helped each other” and blacks who tried to murder rescue workers and police officers, could not have been more stark. Expect to see hundreds of millions of dollars of federal and private aid money stolen in New Orleans, as happened with the South Asian tidal wave aid money earlier this year. Such criminality by public officials is a matter of pride in Third World jurisdictions. Expect more cases of insurance fraud in the white rural and suburban areas hit in Mississippi and Alabama, but unlike in New Orleans, private white frauds are much more likely to be prosecuted than criminal black public officials. During the 1960s, over 100 such “hurricanes” hit America’s cities, large and small. At the time, various politicians and alleged social scientists and journalists told Americans that the “hurricanes” were justifiable reactions to white “racism.” They lied. The riots were not reactions to white racism, but explosions of black racism. Blacks had just enjoyed (1940-1960) the greatest explosion of prosperity in black American history, unparalleled to this day. They had been granted, the Constitution be damned, Brown vs. Board of Education, by the Supreme Court. They had been granted the 1964 U.S. Civil Rights Act. And so how did they respond? By rioting, natch. Isn’t that how everyone celebrates improvements in their lives and historic political victories? The riots were statements of confidence, based on the victories, telling whites to get out of town. Those whites who resisted, were labeled racists, as were those whites who left. But once whites left, conditions in black-dominated cities got worse, not better. Let’s Form a Commission! In 1967, Pres. Lyndon Johnson formed an eleven-member National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders to study the race riots, which came to be known as the Kerner Commission, after its titular head, Otto Kerner. The 1968 report’s summary argued, “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”Although the positions of that summary are a part of socialist gospel in America, as Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom observed in their classic work, America in Black and White, “very little of value was accomplished by the original body. Its authors appear to have been so traumatized by the ghetto riots during the long, hot summers of 1965-1968 that they had deluded themselves into thinking that the condition of African Americans in the United States had been deteriorating rather than improving since World War II, and that this supposed deterioration was in good part due to the spatial differentiation between cities and suburbs.” Actually, the Thernstroms were too easy on the commission, which was dominated by one of the most venal, stupid, incompetent white politicians ever to ascend to the national stage in these United States, New York City Mayor John Vliet Lindsay (1921-1999). As Vincent J. Cannato chronicled in The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York, Lindsay took over -- really, hijacked -- the commission and manipulated it into accepting a summary written by two of his aides, Peter Goldmark and Jay Kriegel. “[The summary] spoke in loud and clear terms placing the blame squarely on white America for the recent urban riots.”John Lindsay’s qualifications to lead were that he was 6’4” tall, had matinee idol looks, seemingly limitless energy, people thought he was rich, and he oozed confidence, even if there was no basis for that confidence. Lindsay had “compassion” for New York’s blacks, which he put into practice by more than doubling the welfare rolls (from 565,000 to 1,165,000, according to historian Fred Siegel) by inviting unwed black mothers to quit their jobs and illegally go on the dole; putting black supremacist gangsters on the city payroll; ordering the police to stand down, in the face of black supremacist gangsters’ organized assaults on white teachers in the city’s schools; and treating the white working and middle classes who were paying for his experiment in social disintegration with contempt. Lindsay had hoped to use the Kerner Commission as a stepping stone to the presidency; Americans thought otherwise. And yet, America’s socialist and communist elites have uncritically cited the nonsense promoted by Lindsay’s aides tens of thousands of times since 1968. It’s easy to blame whites for black racism, when one travels in taxicabs (or chauffeured limousines) rather than public transportation, and enjoys 24-hour security in luxury buildings, thus protected from the predations of the people whom one champions. A New Reason for Hating? But some will argue that what I am saying is irrelevant. After all, the black “anger” on display in New Orleans is a response to the federal delays. Nonsense. First of all, black “anger” is a euphemism for hatred. The mainstream press has resolved never to speak of blacks as haters. And yet, is there a group in America that hates more? Who hates homosexuals more? Who is more xenophobic? More misogynistic? No, no, no and no. Instead, the media portray white, heterosexual Christians – probably the most tolerant group in the world, as haters of the above-cited groups. Secondly, the racism excuse is already in use. Third, if when 1960s blacks began throwing race riots the way whites threw block parties they were responses to “racism,” how does one rationalize the race riots after NBA championships by the Chicago Bulls and Los Angeles Lakers as responses to “racism”? The “racism” line was always as phony as a three-dollar bill. Race riots are rarely a response to racism; more typically, whether in 1863 New York, 1921 Tulsa, or 1992 Los Angeles, they are expressions of racism. The fact of the matter is that an ever-growing proportion of urban blacks – females and males alike – is in a perpetual state of rage. Rage, when whites are around, and rage, when whites are absent. For forty years, urban blacks have used hatred of whites as an excuse for not leading responsible lives. Psychologically and morally speaking, I see no difference between the genocidal hatred of Arabs toward Jews, and the majority of urban American blacks toward … everyone. What we have seen in New Orleans is not merely a reaction to Katrina; it is simply a dramatic version of life in many black-dominated American cities – Detroit, Washington, DC, Baltimore, St. Louis, Gary IN, East St. Louis IL, Oakland CA, etc. And at the rate at which illegal immigrants are importing similar pathologies and lawlessness from Mexico and elsewhere, in twenty years all of America’s cities with populations of over 100,000 will be just like New Orleans. New Orleans is not an aberration; we have been seeing its like for over 40 years. Expect to see more of the same.