Stormy Blather

by Greg Strange

“It is reported that black hurricane victims in New Orleans have begun eating corpses to survive. Four days after the storm, thousands of blacks in New Orleans are dying like dogs. No one has come to help them.” --- Randall Robinson, author of “The Debt--What America Owes To Blacks,” in a post on Arianna Huffington’s Internet blog site.

You would think that a guy who once went on a 27-day hunger strike for the cause of democracy in Haiti would know better than to believe that people would be desperate enough to resort to cannibalism after a mere four days without food. You would think it would be particularly hard to believe given the news footage showing hundreds, if not thousands, of people looting stores of food (not to mention jewelry, television sets and liquor). Does that really sound like a scenario for widespread cannibalism to you? The inescapable conclusion, then, is that Robinson believed it because for some perverse psychological reason, he wanted to believe it. But why would anybody want to believe that?

Well, let’s say you’re a black man and a diehard America-hater right down to the core of your being; and let’s say you’re looking for any excuse to believe the absolute worst about America; and let’s say you have a psychological need to be able to blame that worst on white people. And then, along comes the storm of the age conveniently headed straight for New Orleans, a city with a large population of poor blacks who will be in serious jeopardy if they don’t find some way to evacuate the city.

What would better satisfy your pathological desire to believe the worst than the ghastly idea of black people being helplessly turned into cannibals by the callous inaction of monstrously evil whites? It couldn’t get much more horrifying than that, right?

Nor could it get more patently ridiculous. There are and have been refugee situations all over the world far worse than this one, that last for months or even years, but the refugees don’t resort to cannibalism ever, let alone after only four days. But somebody “reports” that it’s happening with black people in the Big Easy and Randall Robinson gobbles it up (no pun intended) hook, line and sinker.

Robinson never mentioned where the cannibalism “reports” came from, but a couple of days later he posted a retraction because, he said, the reports “turned out to be unsubstantiated.” Well, knock me over with a feather! No, not because the reports turned out to be unsubstantiated, but because he even bothered to post a retraction. Relative to most other posters of such egregiously idiotic claptrap, his retraction is a magnanimous gesture.

Still, correct my logic if it gets a bit squirrelly here, but if the cannibalism reports were unsubstantiated a couple of days after Robinson’s original post, weren’t they unsubstantiated from the very beginning? And that begs the question: Why did he make the post to begin with? But then, we’ve been over that, haven’t we?

In the meantime, Jesse Jackson showed up on the scene to make this revelatory observation: “Today I saw 5,000 African-Americans on Highway 10, desperate, perishing, dehydrating, babies crying--it looked like the hull of a slave ship. It’s so ugly and obvious. The issue of race as a factor will not go away.”

Well, it certainly won’t go away as long as race hustlers like Jackson go around relentlessly delivering the one-note message to willing audiences that everything that is wrong in their lives is a result of racism. He also said it was poignant that blacks were suffering in New Orleans, which once upon a time was the South’s biggest slave-trade port. You’ve got to hand it to Jesse. He never misses an opportunity to make some reference to slaves, or the slave trade, or slave ships, or slave owners, or slave drivers, or plantations full of slaves, or mint julep-drinking slave holders down on the plantation. The problem is, the overseer of this particular slave ship -- the mayor of New Orleans -- happens to be black himself and when it comes to getting the slaves out of harm’s way, he failed miserably. By now, everyone has heard about the hundreds of municipal and school buses lined up neatly in vast parking lots that could have been used to get potentially tens of thousands of poor people out before Katrina actually hit. In fact, doing just that was a part of the official plan as detailed in “The Southeast Louisiana Hurricane Evacuation and Sheltering Plan.” This plan states quite specifically that “local transportation resources should be marshaled and public transportation plans implemented as needed. Announce the location of staging areas for people who need transportation. Public transportation will concentrate on moving people from the staging areas to safety in host parishes . . . Etc, etc, etc.” Kinda sounds like Ray Nagin, the undeniably black mayor of New Orleans, was a bit derelict in his duty. But since the black mayor of New Orleans is, indeed, undeniably black, how can the catastrophe be written off as racism? Simple: Because Bush, the white president, didn’t respond fast enough since he doesn’t care about black people. Or because his evil oil company-enriching environmental policies caused global warming, which caused the hurricane which caused the death and anguish of black people. Or because funds were cut or diverted from levee projects that would have saved the majority black city from the global warming-induced storm which was callously allowed to occur in order to fill the coffers of predominantly white corporations. Or insert your ludicrous fantasy here. On second thought, maybe the aggregate of poor, black neighborhoods in New Orleans does

resemble the hull of a slave ship, but a liberal slave ship, adrift and on its way to nowhere, offering no solutions, but only the same old tired mantra of racism, racism, racism.

That’s how a different reverend with the first name Jesse might view it, the Reverend Jesse Lee Peterson. This Reverend Jesse is a black conservative and frequent critic of the entrenched civil rights leadership who says that liberal black leaders have not only failed, but exploited African-Americans. About the aftermath of Katrina he had this to say: “The truth is black people died, not because of President Bush or racism, they died because of their unhealthy dependence on the government and the incompetence of [Democratic] Governor Kathleen Blanco.” When he talks about “their unhealthy dependence on the government,” I wonder if he might be talking about the elephant in the living room here: the welfare state that keeps poor blacks down by eliminating their need to ever get anything through their own initiative, including even their own survival during a natural disaster. It‘s a message that needs to be preached to the high heavens, but as long as the Reverend Jesse Jacksons far outnumber the Reverend Jesse Petersons, it won’t happen.

Greg Strange