New Orleans = Springfield
Indeed. As Simon indicates below, "unexplained" explosions can only add fuel to the fog of confusion in a part of the world without magic/electricity.
There's something almost humorous in the way New Orleans exploded into mob violence and looting, seemingly within minutes of the hurricane moving on. It reminds me so much of episodes of The Simpsons, the ones in which you get a complete breakdown of law and order following some minor event - people running around holding their heads and screaming, shooting each other, looting, stealing cars etc. Exaggeration for comic effect, in Springfield, turns out to be frighteningly close to the truth.
As one BBC correspondent pointed out this morning, the event has exposed the two deepest problems of American society: race, and violence. News pictures would seem to indicate that the vast majority of those left stranded in the city are African Americans, left behind by their richer, whiter, neighbours. It's shocking to those of us who live in slightly more Socialist countries, to see what it means to live in a society with few safety nets. To be poor in America is to be poorer than anyone else in the world, I think.
And the violence: how easily they slip into it, the bullying, the shootings. Didn't happen after the tsunami, didn't happen after the earthquake in Japan. But in America, with their paranoid style*, there are whole groups and sub-cultures who prepare for this, look forward to it even, who are ready and waiting with their stockpiles of weapons and ammunition.
*The paranoid style of American politics goes back a long way, to the Pilgrims, who saw signs and portents in every aspect of nature, and it extends from left to right: from anti-Google, privacy-fearing lefties, to ant-State, rabid survivalists. The internet, being mostly American in nature, can also be a very paranoid place. Have you noticed?
===============
My own modest proposals for the future of New Orleans, by the way:
1. Abandon it. Cut your losses. Rebuild elsewhere, above sea level. It could be like the Lost City of Atlantis.
or
2. Rebuild on stilts/floating platforms - make it the Venice of the Deep South.
There's something almost humorous in the way New Orleans exploded into mob violence and looting, seemingly within minutes of the hurricane moving on. It reminds me so much of episodes of The Simpsons, the ones in which you get a complete breakdown of law and order following some minor event - people running around holding their heads and screaming, shooting each other, looting, stealing cars etc. Exaggeration for comic effect, in Springfield, turns out to be frighteningly close to the truth.
As one BBC correspondent pointed out this morning, the event has exposed the two deepest problems of American society: race, and violence. News pictures would seem to indicate that the vast majority of those left stranded in the city are African Americans, left behind by their richer, whiter, neighbours. It's shocking to those of us who live in slightly more Socialist countries, to see what it means to live in a society with few safety nets. To be poor in America is to be poorer than anyone else in the world, I think.
And the violence: how easily they slip into it, the bullying, the shootings. Didn't happen after the tsunami, didn't happen after the earthquake in Japan. But in America, with their paranoid style*, there are whole groups and sub-cultures who prepare for this, look forward to it even, who are ready and waiting with their stockpiles of weapons and ammunition.
*The paranoid style of American politics goes back a long way, to the Pilgrims, who saw signs and portents in every aspect of nature, and it extends from left to right: from anti-Google, privacy-fearing lefties, to ant-State, rabid survivalists. The internet, being mostly American in nature, can also be a very paranoid place. Have you noticed?
===============
My own modest proposals for the future of New Orleans, by the way:
1. Abandon it. Cut your losses. Rebuild elsewhere, above sea level. It could be like the Lost City of Atlantis.
or
2. Rebuild on stilts/floating platforms - make it the Venice of the Deep South.
posted by Anonymous at
Friday, September 02, 2005
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