A great article and maybe the most disturbing Katrina piece I've read.
>On a side street in Algiers, on the flood-spared west bank, the corpse of a
>young black man in blue pants and white shirt lies rotting in the sun about
>ten feet from a chained-up health clinic. Swollen, greasy and oozing
>maggots, the dead man has become a symbol of official neglect. There are
>scores of uncollected corpses like this all over New Orleans. ...
The BBC seems to have been bolder in depicting this. The shots they've televised of bloated corpses have been horrific -- not like the fleeting, distant views I've seen on US TV.
>Archie Haley, an emergency medical technician from Oak Grove, near the
>Arkansas border, squats as I scarf down a military MRE food ration; he
>explains that the major problem is "the large population of welfare-ized
>blacks who can't help themselves."
And this guy's an EMT, one of the so-called "helping professions." Compassion is his fucking trade for Christ's sake. God knows how the shove-you-around professionals of the police and military view the flood victims.
>... Traditions of racism, exploitation and exclusion are visible in every
>aspect of this crisis. One also feels the repressive reflexes of the war on
>drugs and war on terror. Rather than work on rescue and cleanup with the
>mutual-aid networks, like the distribution efforts of Malik Rahim and his
>neighbor, the increasingly militarized local, state and federal agencies
>have defaulted to their worst bureaucratic instincts toward the
>dispossessed: silence, exclude, control and intimidate. Never mind why or
>toward what end.
The increasing militarization of US society over the last 25 years has been awesome. But I resist calling it fascism because (a) the cover has been worn off the term, and (b) "fascism" connotes a degree of organizational efficiency not visible in the streets of Baghdad or NO. The US contrives to be both brutal *and* incompetent.
Carl