Monday, September 05, 2005

Race-baiting at Its Best

The resident race-baiter at the Lexington Herald-Leader is a lady named Merlene Davis. In her Sunday column, she was at her best, accusing everyone she could think of – of every bad thing she could think of – of every bad motive she could think of – of course, especially if they happened not to be African Americans. Here is an open letter to Ms. Davis:

Thanks so much for your Sunday column, with its revelations about the refugee problem. Not to put too fine a point on your definition of refugee, these persons do come into being as a result of natural disasters. Those who ran for their lives last winter in the face of the tsunami returned to their homes only to find no homes, thus becoming refugees, so refugeeism does often happen that way.

What you may not know is that president Bush called in Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, and Rush Limbaugh during the first week of his recent vacation in Crawford. They decided that a hurricane was needed to punish democrats and that New Orleans was the best place for it to happen, since the city existed on only pure luck anyway and had almost no republicans, if any. They took up a collection and paid Castro’s top scientist and three smart taxi drivers to cook up a hurricane far out in the Atlantic, head it weakly toward Florida to provide cover for the big show, just touching Miami as a category one, but then turn into a beautiful monster in the Gulf to bear down directly on New Orleans as at least a category five, guaranteeing the destruction of the levee that everyone, especially those in New Orleans, knew was built just to handle a category three, not to mention blowing the buildings away in the bargain.

The president announced early on that everyone should evacuate New Orleans, Gulfport, and Biloxi, but knew that a poll taken that week in New Orleans indicated that 60% of the citizens would not leave, no matter what category. He then sent a note to the New Orleans mayor indicating that the poll showed that everyone would leave on their own, thus setting the stage for a real blast. The mayor, who apparently had never read the evacuation plan devised years before, anyway, didn’t furnish any buses or other transportation, didn’t stockpile any provisions, didn’t empty the nursing homes or hospitals, didn’t set up triage centers, didn’t mobilize his emergency forces, didn’t plan for looters, didn’t do anything, in fact, except practicing the “Dean Scream” in case he had to be heard over the noise, and certainly didn’t expect the levee to break, simply because it never had, at least seriously.

Castro, who hates Governor Barbour of Mississippi because he’s a republican and has a nice house, got wind of all this, arrested the scientist and the taxi drivers and tortured them for five seconds before the scientist turned the hurricane toward Biloxi, where another hated man, republican Senator Trent Lott, also had a nice house and even a late-model car, not to mention a pickup with two gun racks, and had once suggested that Strom Thurmond was actually human. That, alone, was enough to waste any republican.

The president knew that nothing could be done during Monday and Monday night, and not much of anything on Tuesday and Tuesday night because the roads would be flooded, the power out, the phones down, the bridges gone, and the mayor would be eating crab-cakes and drinking good wine. He was mad, of course, because of the Cuban double-cross, but took hope when the levee started breaking anyway. At that point, the mayor and his whole gang (mayor, police chief, city council, all of them African-American, as well as most of the policemen), having done nothing to prepare – well, come on, they had had only three or four days of warning – began screaming for somebody to do something, and sent out word for Louis Farrakhan to consult Qadaffi and start a revolution somewhere, preferably in Montana, so folks’ attention would be diverted elsewhere and not on them.

There was an eight-day plan to take care of an event like Katrina, and, even though the president had to be dragged along, the city was evacuated in only six days. The president knew that the mainstream media would work the public like a fine violin in whipping up angst against him, but knew when the inevitable hearings were held and the truth came out, his administration and the American citizens who carried the day, most of whom are white and hundreds of whom risked their lives, would be seen in a different light, thus impacting the elections in 2006.

I know this would sound incredulous to most folk, but you have the sophistication to understand the president and his seeming insensitivity to anything because you’re on the record as noting that white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant males are direct descendents of Lucifer, the wicked angel cast out of heaven and winding up in the serpent to tempt Adam and Eve with a bowl of gumbo. The president is, of course, a WASPM.

If you should have an attack of reality, try this site: Center for the Study of Public Health Impact of Hurricanes. It’s about 51 pages long, was prepared a few years ago for New Orleans and should have been in the mind of the officials there, and predicted precisely what did happen. One of the most interesting statistics to come out of this document was the fact that roughly one-third of NO citizens insisted they would not evacuate even in the face of a category four hurricane (think hurricane Andrew) and only 55% of those on public assistance would leave. By simply using school-buses and city buses, everyone could have left, and the fact that the mayor did not see to the evacuation of the sick and other vulnerable people, even though he had plenty of time, makes him a sort of passive murderer, since he left them – in your words – like animals…to die.

And so it goes.

Jim Clark

No comments: