The Urge to Believe the Worst

When I first heard the reports of gang rapes and child killings issuing forth from New Orleans, I was horrified, and it struck me at the time that either some of the things being reported had to be untrue, or else human nature in the absence of authority was even baser than I'd imagined it to be. It therefore didn't come as all that much of a shock to me to read this piece by Matt Welch indicating that the worst of the reports which have been circulated are so far entirely unsubstantiated.

In the course of his essay, Welch raises an important question, one which a great many people have been doing their damndest to shut down: why is it that so many people were so ready to believe even the most outrageous tales issuing out of New Orleans? I have my own preferred explanation, and it's one which I think is given a great deal of credence by reports such as the following letter [see comments here] written by an irate reader to Jesse Walker:

The first rule of an honest man is that you are willing to accept the facts of reality - even if they are the less wholesome, feel-good type facts. And the fact here is that race matters. The fact here is that New Orleans turned into the night of the living dead and every white person feared for their lives. Ask the British tourist trapped inside that dome. Thank god they were rescued before they were completely slaughtered and their woman brutally raped. In our country this is incomprehensively horrible. But in lower Africa it is commonplace. When I think of that one 14 year old girl that was literally raped to death I picture your dumb ass with that stupid candide's smile pregnant with the positive spin you're dying to blurt out. How many rapes and murders can you ignore to make yourself feel good?

So now all you have is that the government didn't get the job done. Nice. When you leave race out of this equation you become a government lackey since political correctness implies coercive force.

Now, this is amusing for several reasons, not least of which is that the British tourists to whom this individual seems to be referring would appear to be the ones quoted here, and neither of them actually testifies to seeing any rapes occurring with their own eyes, just to hearing stories and later seeing people they believe to have been "rape, shooting and stabbing" victims (I doubt they went up to each one and asked what he or she had fallen victim to). The important thing here isn't the hard facts, of which there are still precious few, but the knowledge that the overwhelming majority of those caught up by the hurricane happened to be black, and hailing from "lower Africa" as they do, it's common knowledge that rape and mayhem must be in their genes, right?

I don't doubt for a second that at least a few terrible crimes must have occurred in the atmosphere of chaos which prevailed (or rather, still prevails) after the storm hit, but I'm also fairly sure that the exaggerated reporting of events in New Orleans has quite literally been colored by unstated assumptions many reporters have made about the character of the people they're covering. That is why one couple who are carrying food they didn't pay for are placidly described as "finding" it, even as a young man who has the presence of mind to commandeer an unused schoolbus and rescue 100 of his fellow citizens is referred to as a "looter" and a "thief". But hey, racism obviously has nothing to do with any of this, as certain self-proclaimed Friends of the Negroes will no doubt shortly appear to reassure us.

Comments

[kwasi]

Pretty much what I expected to happen.

The sight of black people in large numbers in a lawlwss environment was bond to bring out the old 'savage' meme. Its amusing watching people attempt to deny it though

[Abiola Lapite]

The funny thing is, there *have* been quite a few needless deaths in New Orleans, but they've mostly come from government neglect and incompetence, not the raging black beasts of some idiots' febrile imaginations.

http://www.nydailynews.com/09-04-2005/news/wn_report/story/343088p-292987c.html
http://www.nydailynews.com/09-02-2005/news/story/342770p-292645c.html

The more I read about the way in which these people have been treated, the more surprised I am at just how *little* mayhem there has been. They were basically herded into high-density unsanitary conditions like so many herd animals and then left to starve, waste away from thirst and stew in their own filth, and then came all the sensation-seeking reporters to add insult to injury by falsely labelling them as savages out-of-control for no reason.

[Jim]

"The more I read about the way in which these people have been treated, the more surprised I am at just how *little* mayhem there has been. '

Amen. The one place where it really seems ot have been hell on earth was at the convention center in NO. One seven y/o little girl had her throat slit, for example. That sounds like drug craziness more than anything else, and that applies to people of any race.

There is some of this "savages" meme, but nothing like what you would have heard in former times. Think it may be a breakthough for a little decency? I even read one commentator talking about untold stories and so on say that one untold story is of strong able-bodied guys, the kind who supposedly should have left under their own power, "looting" hardware stores for axes and then going from house to house to open up roofs where people were trapped in attics. There's bad violence and there's good violence.

[Joseph Hertzlinger]

Has anybody actually called for prosecuting Jabbar Gibson?

[Abiola Lapite]

No one would dare now, not after even staunch right-wingers like Michelle Malkin have come out to praise him.

Still, this doesn't change the fact that he was initially described by more than one source as as a "looter" who "stole" the abandoned schoolbus - to use the actual phrase from the story which has since been sensibly pulled by News Channel 5, "In an extreme act of looting, one group actually stole a bus..." Imagine the cheek of the young man, a born criminal if ever there was one!

PS: Here's another copy of the original story which uses the "one group actually stole a bus" line.

http://www.poe-news.com/stories.php?poeurlid=000051574

[Chuckles]

Santa must have visited the "h-bd" bunch before XmasTime. What with Katrina, ASPM et al, things are really looking up for them.

I just noticed that Derbyshire over at NRO endored Sailer's Katrina analysis.

http://corner.nationalreview.com/05_09_04_corner-archive.asp#075519

[...Under the circumstances, to say, as Steve Sailer does, that African Americans "tend to possess poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups," and "need stricter moral guidance from society" does not seem to me very outrageous...]

But of course, the "native judgment" of the folks at FEMA and the good ole white boys who ignored Hurricane warnings for years is all fine and dandy.

And then there is the Xtian angle - Yep, its the judgment of God. Max Blumenthal does a good one on the folks at CBN:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050919/blumenthal

[...The September 5 edition of The 700 Club included a report by Christian Broadcasting Network correspondent Gary Lane from outside the ruined New Orleans Convention Center, which had housed mostly impoverished black disaster victims throughout the weekend. "A number of possessions left behind suggest the mindset of some of the evacuees," Lane said. "They include this voodoo cup with the saying, 'May the curse be with you.' " A shot of a plastic souvenir cup from one of New Orleans's countless trinket shops appeared on the screen. "Also music CDs with the titles Guerrilla Warfare and Thugs 'R' Us," Lane stated, pointing out a pile of rap CDs strewn on the ground.

The 700 Club's featured guest was Wellington Boone, a black minister invited by Robertson to provide a counterpoint to the ubiquitous Rev. Jesse Jackson. Boone is a member of the Coalition on Revival, a Christian Reconstructionist organization that advocates replacing the US Constitution with biblical law. Throughout his career, he has distinguished himself from his black clerical colleagues with such remarks as "I believe that slavery, and the understanding of it when you see it God's way, was redemptive" and "The black community must stop criticizing Uncle Tom. He is a role model."

Though Boone's appearance on The 700 Club consisted mostly of benign appeals for "laser-beam prayer," CBN featured a separate interview with Boone on its website in which he declared, "We need to consider the culture of those people still stranded in New Orleans. The looting of property, the trashing of property, et cetera, speaks to the basic character of the people." He added, "These people who have gone through slavery, segregation and the Voting Rights Act are doing this to themselves."...]

Apparently, the urge to believe the worst is most prominent among certain kinds of Xtians who are only too eager to see apocalyptic evil in every social incident as a confirmation of their worldview. Thus the Hurricane must be viewed in the light of the "Culture" of New Orleans - and in the midst of dead bodies, the conscientous observer ought to notice the hallmarks of Satanic invitation to judgment - Gangsta Rap, Voodoo et al...Of course, it is an entirely different story for Xtian Missisipi...

[Jim]

Good ole white boys haven't nbeen ignoring hurricane warnings for years; they have been getting swacked with hurricanes right alongside good ole black boys. In most places hit with hurricanes were low-lying but not below sea level - Florida, N. Carolina, etc, so the damage was sustainable. New Orleans and Louisiana are just different. They have been ignoring this forever despite everyone's Cassandra rantings

[Chuckles]

[...Good ole white boys haven't nbeen ignoring hurricane warnings for years; they have been getting swacked with hurricanes right alongside good ole black boys...]

Jim,

Actually I was referring not to victims of Hurricanes but to reports that the Bush administration ignored warnings of a major Hurricane disater in New Orleans basically for about 4 years.
Is this to be classified as an absence of "native judgment" or just sheer malevolence in Sailer's books?

[Jim]

I don't know anything about Sailer's books because I buy toilet paper in rolls. As for neglecting the hurricane threat, that is just the beginning of the neglect. The neglect goes back for a long time, but four years was time enough to do something about it. Running around somewher on one of these blogs was a post about a study some consultant did, with recomendations, left unfunded and unexecuted. There are quibbles about which levees broke, new and improved ones versus the ones people had been warning about - the bottom line is that the whole political establishment in Louisiana and New Orleans has been incapable of governance for a very long time. The individual personalities don't matter.

There are three mai disiaster zones in the US - the Gulf Coast with hurricanes, the midwest with floods and tornadooes, and the West Coast with earthquakes and volcanos. I grew up on the West Coast, so that is what I know, but I am a little familiar with the South and the Gulf Coast. I know that on the West Coast we expect less form the federal government because that is just the way it has always been. That does not make us better; maintaining levees on a port of national significance seems like an obvious responsibility of the national government. We have levees too, in the California Delta. Fortunately we didn't build a city in alocation where its survival depends on those levees, but anyway, we and not the federal government do whatever little maintenance gets done. I guess we are just resigned ot the federal government ignoring us. Personally, I think California does a better job by itself in most things.

Earthquake preparedness is an example. In the case of earthquakes, preparedness has more to do with builing code standards than big public works. That is handled at the local level. By the way, the chaos after and earthqauke with be gigantic, with basically the whole roadnet impassible. A simulation exercise in the Seattle area predicted most roads within a 50 mile radius of seattle would be blocked fallen overpasses - thie terain is rather hilly - and even sea access from Puget Sound would be gone because the docks would have fallen into the water. Pople are told and should expect to be on thier own for up to 5 days, and that includes ammunition to protect your 5 days of food and water. Wanna bet how many people are set up for that?

[Chuckles]

[...I don't know anything about Sailer's books because I buy toilet paper in rolls...]

A prudent policy for sure - one cannot avoid toilet paper of any kind when crap is the subject of discussion and as original post on this thread shows; with regards to Katrina, the crap has been flying left, right and center.

[Mark Amerman]

I copied this from www.nola.com/weblogs/nola/ on Sept. 1 and 2.
It was part of "The Times-Picayne" website, a New Orleans newspaper.

[Your screendump has been deleted. This is a commenting facility, not a forum for wholesale syndication of other people's material. If you want to point others to anything more than a short excerpt, don't reproduce screen after screen on end, just provide a URL. - A.L.]

[Mark Amerman]

[Troll comments deleted.]

[Abiola Lapite]

Go fuck yourself, asshole. I don't have time for stupid bastards like you who can't respect the rules I lay down on my own property. I'm sure the world is full of websites whose owners will tolerate cretins like you clogging their property with all sorts of crap, but only intelligent people who actually have something to say are welcome around these parts, and you clearly never have qualified or will qualify for membership in the latter.

Intelligent disagreement I can not only tolerate but welcome, as the unmolested comments of any number of regulars on here will attest to. What gets up my nerves isn't someone having a different view from mine, but dishonest, braindead little shits like yourself who think it constitutes any sort of meaningful argument to simply cut and paste shovel-loads of stuff from other sites on here, as if I had either the time or the inclination to wade through your bullshit.

[angua]

Abiola, just a quick note about the "finding" vs "looting" photos. There was definitely some racism in the reporting, there is no need to make it up:

http://www.snopes.com/photos/katrina/looters.asp

[Abiola Lapite]

Thanks for the pointer. I find the explanation that

["They picked up bread and cokes that were floating in the water. They would have floated away anyhow"]

quite odd, as the black guy tagged as a "looter" wasn't carrying electronics, while the food he did take also would have rotted away anyhow if no one had been around to take it. It's fair enough to call a person who breaks into an electronics store and hauls off a TV a "looter" (and a dumb one at that - how's he going to watch it or even get it home safe and dry?), but somehow I doubt that describes the great majority of those accused of "looting."

[Jim]

Meanwhile there has been a swell of approval for a "car thief" or whatever you call someone who takes a bus to carry a load of people out of the city - a twenty-something kid with some presence of mind, you know, the "menacing" kind. There was some buzz that he might be brought up on charges and the counterbuzz was that he needed to be given some kind of award. I can't cite any sources because it's all word of mouth. I am reporting that fact of the rumor, not its truth value, to point out that the public is not going for this slanted labelling of people who acted to take care of themsleves and others.