So, now that the water has mostly receded and it turns out the Rita didn't deliver the "two" punch to Katrina's "one", some of the dust (well, maybe mud) is beginning to settle. And guess what? It's beginning to look like post-Katrina NOLA wasn't such an atrocity exhibition after all. This counts as good news, I suppose...
I'm sure that some bad things happened, more of them than should have. And a lot of horrible stuff probably didn't get reported officially- the locals don't trust the cops or the city government. Still, it no longer looks like the behavioral sink that was originally reported.
Why the wild exaggeration? The phenomenon is in some part understandable, and even forgiveable. After all, it was an extraordinarily messy situation by anyone's lights; everyone knows how easy it is to blow things out of proportion, to misinterpret what you see. The same event gets reported multiple times, details get abraded and lost as rumors fly. It's part of the human condition.
But parts of the article made me grit my teeth, nonetheless- not the writer's fault, but the content...
Much of it is the usual media feeding-frenzy reaction to natural disasters and other traumatic situations: find those grand guignol elements and ram them down the viewers' throats 24-7. That's what sells the ads, after all. The American viewing public has an almost unappeasable appetite for train wrecks and hysteria. Especially if there's the old "man's inhumanity to man" factor involved (this explains the popularity of a huge number of reality shows, as well). Reports of people being orderly, helping each other, cheering the soldiers instead of shooting at each other just don't sell as well, I guess. Mencken was right...
We also have everybody who get quoted, who gets on camera, wanting to make themselves look more important, more dramatic. People like the police chief and the mayor, who should be trying to calm their populace down, instead start making claims that make me instantly go to The Urban Legends Reference Pages. And everyday folks do the same thing- repeat rumors as if they were fact, just to feel important.
And I suspect a nasty racist element to the national appetite for these stories, too. It isn't just bad taste. I think a lot of this got extra play because the bulk of the people affected were black, and it made a wide range of white twits (from Hastert and Santorum down to the kind of trash who still think that putting on white hoods and burning crosses is pretty keen) feel all superior-like.
I prefer to focus on the heroes- from the Coast Guard, who got in there right after the storm and worked their butts off saving lives, to the Humane Society, rescuing all those pets that had to be left behind when their owners were evacuated. Or Jabbar Gibson in his comandeered school bus. There's where we need more focus.
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