Choke on Pearls, Please

Can we please stop with the 9/11 comparisons? Please? Take, like, a five-minute break on that. "We need a Guiliani character. Someone strong."

When the World Trade center building went down, it was horrible. A lot of people died. But it was a building. New Orleans -- hell, large chunks of Louisiana and Mississippi -- lost everything. The economy is destroyed. New York lost a building. New Orleans lost a lot of them. The farms are flooded. Crops are gone. I read that Mardi Gras brings in $1 billion to New Orleans. I assume tourism garners tons of money on non-Fat Tuesdays as well. Who's gonna go there now?

A bunch of bombs going off in the middle of the Mardi Gras parade would have provided a more apt comparison. Or, if al-Qaeda had, you know, wiped New York off the map. Because New Orleans isn't really even there anymore.

And when the Trade Center buildings went down, Guiliani was there to be strong because his house was still standing up there on 92nd. George W. Bush, after finally putting the goddamned book down, made a cameo on a pile of rubble promising to capture bin Laden. New Yorkers banded together and bravely forged ahead with their altered skyline. New Orlean-ers don't even have a skyline anymore. George W. Bush, well, there was no standing in two-foot-deep muck of water telling the people America would be there for them, but he flew over in a helicopter. Wouldn't want to get dirty now.

I don't subscribe to the "racist" arguments that are made in the sense that the government isn't saying, "forget them they're just black." It's not as diabolical as that. If there were all white people down there, they'd still be saying "forget them." Because they're poor. I always view things through the eyes of class difference. Race is the visible manifestation of this because of the unbalanced socio-economic scale of America. So maybe what's happening is a form of institutional racism. And maybe this is just a semantics argument, because the results are the same. Those people down there -- white and black -- are poor and, therefore, fucked. The government may not be saying "forget them, they're black" but for the past few years the government has been saying "forget them, they're poor." Why spend money to take preventive measures of such an event? Who cares? They're poor. In San Fransisco they sure take measures to try and prevent earthquakes. Can you imagine if the government operartions after 9/11 was such a clusterfuck? New Yorkers would be insane with anger and indignation. America would be up in arms. But a white-collar building in a white-collar section of town was wrecked. Shit got done. And rightly so.

But I suppose shit is finally getting done down in Louisiana and Mississippi. To quote Barbara Bush:

"What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality... And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them."

Oh, good. It's all working out so well.