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COMMENTARY
September 3, 2005
Bad gumbo
I've been mesmerized by New Orleans through the week, partly of course by the excitement that attaches to any huge disaster (why do you think newspapers cover such events?) -- but more by the spectacle of the looting. It has been, I think, worse than Baghdad after the U.S. liberation.For in Baghdad, from the more reliable accounts, the looting was done chiefly by persons affiliated with the outgoing regime, who knew exactly what to hit, and why, before disappearing into the cracks of the "Sunni Triangle". There was little "spontaneous" looting, in which people seize upon a moment of disorder, to take what doesn't belong to them. People not affiliated with the Saddamite regime mostly looked for cover, and minded their own business, waiting for the shooting to stop. From several correspondents I heard rather touching stories, in which, after some degree of order had been restored, individuals in possession of "ownerless objects" came forward to return them. From a narrowly legal angle, it doesn't really matter whether they did this from conscience or fear. (Society must depend on one or the other.) They did the right thing, and the docket is closed. Compare New Orleans. Chaos and suffering were to be expected -- this was a natural disaster, after all. Some looting could also be expected, from lawless elements; but the scale and the malice were extraordinary. It was spontaneous. And in several cases, the police joined in. There can be no moral objection when people stranded without food or water, take what they can find in an abandoned supermarket. Indeed, where staff or management remained, the stranded were encouraged to help themselves to what would anyway spoil. I am prepared to assume that this is what most of the "looters" were after; in which case, they weren't looters at all. But for considerable numbers, the focus was instead on liquor, dry goods at WalMart, jewellery, flatscreen TVs, and other expensive appliances, including guns. And the atmosphere among them was unambiguously aggressive and violent and malicious. I was especially struck by accounts in a weblog of the siege looters mounted upon the Children's Hospital, trying to break in -- I suppose, for drugs -- while nurses and children were cowering inside. The evacuation of City Hospital was delayed by sniper fire, while inside doctors barricaded themselves against roving thugs. Patients in the University Hospital (not Tulane) were, according to an urgent message from within, "dying at an alarming rate" from the breakdown of infrastructure, while rescuers refused to risk the streets outside. And so on. One had to read the blogs -- especially the minute by minute postings on the Times-Picayune's -- for many of the sordid details, which the "mainstream media" seemed to be passing over. But even through them, we became vaguely aware not only of the physical squalor in the Superdome, but of rapes and other violence being committed inside. So what was the excuse? "To be honest with you, people who are oppressed all their lives, man, it's an opportunity to get back at society," said a certain Mike Franklin, glibly explaining the scene before the cameras to the Associated Press. How wonderfully that sentence encapsulates the spirit of postmodern liberalism. In complete ignorance of his intellectual ancestry, this simple clod repeats an idea that has descended from arcane roots in Descartes, to Rousseau, and through Marx, to Frantz Fanon, and through the sociology departments of the universities, to daytime television, and out into popular cliché, till it has finally settled in the sewers of New Orleans. It is the idea of "victimhood"; the idea that a man is not responsible for his acts; that he is instead a victim of the oppression of some abstraction called "society" -- because he is black, or on welfare, or whatever. And everyone who isn't can be held guilty, regardless of how they have actually behaved. Oppressed by whom? Oppressed, actually, by the implied permission that is granted in advance, to looters, and rapists, and thugs, and amateur neighbourhood terrorists, by that very satanic idea of victimhood, and its practical corollary, that if you can play the victim, you can manoeuvre yourself into a position to victimize everyone around you. Oppressed, not by society at large, but by white liberal society, and the excuses it manufactures. By the people who are prepared to put the blame on anyone but the perpetrator of the evil deed. The criminal being the one "holy innocent" remaining after the crime has been done. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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