If I were willing to lose that job, I would have sermonized about contradictions on the political right. They have a libertarian streak that says with less government, citizens would actually be more virtuous. Hence, businesses and property owners should be free to engage in any contractual activity they like (besides, of course, same-sex marriage contracts). However, at the same time, they support "tough on crime" policies against people whom they pre-emptively define out of the category of citizens. Those people, apparently--those poor people, the ones that are immigrants, or don't speak English, or those criminals who don't wear business suits--are inherently immoral.Ω The story goes that the police are the only protection from the anarchy that these people aim--every moment of their lives--to impose. Therefore, the absence of police automatically means that chaos and disorder are rampant.
I find myself thinking of these slides (from libertarian to authoritarian styles, from the absence of a leader to the absence of social cohesion) with the guilty verdict handed down in the case of New Orleans officers convicted of shooting six citizens (and killing two) in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. I remember being furious with the stories that were coming out--not only from the 24-hour speculation channels but also from "old media" like the august New York Times: babies being raped in the Superdome, a gang of 400 armed black people crossing a bridge to loot, deranged black people shooting at military helicopters.
Anyone who has reflected on being targeted by police knew immediately that all of this was sheer nonsense. We didn't need the later articles retracting the reports. The reason? We never believed black people (the poor ones who haven't made it into the middle class) are so savage that the instant the police presence is suspended they'd do every manner of evil--hell, improvise new types of evil like it was a jazz solo or a freestyle rap. We were smarter than that. But, unfortunately, law and order/tough on crime talk has been so effective that even people in targeted groups repeat it. When the police cat is away, the negroes unleash anarchy.
•People displaced by the storm provided some of the sensationalized stories. Perhaps they thought heightening the amount of danger they were in would get them help. After all, the hurricane and flood were not enough to arouse many people's charity for those people.
• Police Superintendent Edwin Compass offered "babies getting raped" on Oprah. To be clear, he's black. But his skin color helps prove my point about the success of "law and order" talk. Being black doesn't make one immune from parroting that discourse. In fact, he might have felt he had to master it to rise in the ranks of the police department. By being so fully indoctrinated in police thinking, he is as fluent in "those people are animals" as anyone else and clearly believed that a "thin blue line" separated good law-abiding folks from near-animals waiting to be uncaged.
• Tiger Woods said (I'll never forget this and he's unlikely to ask for forgiveness for it):
"It's just unbelievable. Not only the devastation, but how people are behaving, with the shootings and now with the gang rapes and the gang violence and shooting at helicopters who are trying to help people out, trying to rescue people, I just don't understand that whole concept. You figure if anything, they would all come together and try to help one another out, but they are doing the exact opposite. From that standpoint, I just can't see how the community is doing that to themselves."Doing that to themselves?!?! Two words on the broken levee ("the devastation") and then sentence upon sentence of paranoid fantasies of Negroes Gone Wild: Hurricane Edition?!?! Better, I think, for Mr. Woods to have remained silent.
How much of those nightmares turned out to be true in the light of day? Well, no 7-year old was found raped and with her throat slit--much less a whole group of babies.† And considering that the National guard was sent to New Orleans with guns before water or medical supplies arrived, how would a citizen know whether a helicopter was being sent to help them or kill them? If you thought the latter, you had good reason and may well have shot at a plane. Or maybe the shot was fired in an attempt to get attention to be rescued--or even arrested. The accommodations in prison beat dying of thirst on your roof, I'm sure.
The point is that the presumption that it must have been lawless, looting, gang-raping, gang-banging insanity is the least likely explanation. After all, these were people who had no food, no water, no medication. They were unsure of where their loved ones were and if they were alive, unsure of whether or not they would have homes to go back to. What person, in the midst of that, decides to rape a baby--much less participate in a gang-rape of a baby? Can you imagine the unfortunate victims of any of the tsunamis being described this way? Or the tornados that ripped through the Midwest this year? I can't. Those New Orleans blacks must be super-negroes, because even without food and water, they can still commit unimaginably, heinous crimes. So why send food and water?
And that conclusion, dear readers, is the reason for this whole law and order/tough on crime mantra. It's not meant for unique cases like Katrina. It is meant to paint a general portrait of a certain segment of the population in effect at all times. It doesn't need proof. It already predicts this behavior because it knows those people.
So, let's be clear: Katrina didn't unleash black anarchy, it unleashed the authoritarian imagination--the same imagination that confuses the absence of an uninhibited police force with an anti-social paradise for crime. (More on the "liberal media's" participation in paranoid racial fantasies below...)
