Trajan
conscientia mille testes
It's not Racism when Whites are discriminated against.
Didn't you get your Progressive Politically Correct Beliefs cheat sheet?
Better than wondering when CBS is going to do a similar poll on Joplin...I wonder when FNC will do a poll.....
Rupert Murdoch, are you listening?
hey I made a comment yesterday on the other thread....
I'll do so again, there was no shortage of angst, aired carefully but none the less by all manner of media, I think I can encapsulate it all here, compliments of a NY Times review of the major "documentaries" made to capture Katrina for the ages...some select snips which speaks to the media machines attitude and purveyance;
If God Is Willing and Da Creek Dont Rise
a film directed by Spike Lee
HBO Home Video, two DVDs, $24.98 (on sale April 19)
When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts
a film directed by Spike Lee
HBO Home Video, three DVDs, $19.98
Race
a film directed by Katherine Cecil
Information available at RACE - Homepage.
Trouble the Water
a film directed by Tia Lessin and Carl Deal
Zeitgeist, DVD, $29.99
snip-
Crime, we learn, is back at its unconscionably high pre-Katrina levels. The police force is brutal and corrupt. Poor blacks are on the receiving end of white vigilantism and cursory, rough, inefficient treatment in the court system. Federal aid is pathetically low, and so, therefore, is the pace of rebuilding. Residents of the tens of thousands of trailers put in New Orleans by the Federal Emergency Management Administration are being poisoned by formaldehyde
snip-
most of the people to whom he gives the last word in his treatment of each of these issues believe that the black infrastructure of the citythe schools, the neighborhoods, the projects, Charityis being taken away because its inconvenient and threatening to the white business elite, and because Katrina offered an irresistible opportunity. Conversely, restoring (and improving) pre-Katrina black New Orleans in toto is the only morally acceptable approach now.
snip-
Congress and the Bush administration did spend heavily in New Orleans, but a few months after Katrina Bush balked at what was probably the closest thing to a big comprehensive plan that he might plausibly have endorsed, a proposal by a Louisiana Republican congressman named Richard Baker for a big federal buyout of flooded housing. Bakers plan was meant to lead to an overall remaking of the city: whole neighborhoods would be bought up, resold, and redeveloped. Instead the administration and Congress appropriated billions in grants to individual homeowners who wanted to move back, and to specific building projects for schools, water treatment plants, libraries, and so on.
snip-
Thats probably not soits doubtful that either BP or the Obama administration had a solution in place by May that they delayed until September because the spill was in Louisianabut it bespeaks an authentic New Orleans attitude, a feeling that all of the citys spectacular misfortune hasnt happened in the first place, and doesnt get more fully corrected after it has happened, just by unhappy accident. There is, so many feel, an uncaring attitude, or even a malign intent, behind the citys troubles, which stem from New Orleanss being a poor, black-majority city.
snip-
The nerve that Nagin struck was a feeling in black New Orleans that somebody out therewhite New Orleans, the Bush administration, American culturedid not want New Orleanss displaced black residents to return, so that the city could return to white political control; and that all the arguments about how and where and when to rebuild were really about that. As a white New Orleans expatriate who still goes home regularly, I had access during those years to white opinion as expressed in living rooms rather than in public, and I can report that this feeling in black New Orleans wasnt entirely wrong. The ancient, ever-present white fear of black insurrection spiked after Katrina, and there was a palpable longing for New Orleans to be reconstituted as another Charleston or Savannah, smaller, neater, safer, whiter, and relieved of the obligation to try to be a significant modern multicultural city. But that longing has to be understood as something far short of a program that was actually (if surreptitiously) put into effect. If white New Orleans were that efficient, the recovery would have proceeded in a faster and more orderly way.
The New New Orleans by Nicholas Lemann | The New York Review of Books