By TIM WISE
Disasters bring out the best and worst in people.
On the one hand, millions of folks respond to the suffering of their fellow human beings with compassion, concern, and even significant financial assistance when needed. Be it a hurricane, an earthquake, tornadoes or the recent massive flooding in the Midwestern United States, the hearts, minds, and often wallets of large numbers of the nation's people are with those in need.
And on the other hand, there's Rush Limbaugh, who has decided to use the flooding in Iowa not to demonstrate compassion, but as an opportunity to make derogatory statements about poor black folks: specifically those caught by the flooding in New Orleans after Katrina in 2005.
This week, as Iowans and some in Illinois watched flood waters rise ever higher, Limbaugh took to the air to contrast these supposedly good and decent people who have joined forces to help each other, with the presumably evil, lazy and violent folks of New Orleans, who we are told, did nothing but foment criminality and wait for the government to save them during flooding there in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
Thus, we have his statement of a few days ago, in which he noted that in the midst of the devastation in the Midwest:
"I see people working together. I see people trying to save their property...I don't see a bunch of people running around waving guns at helicopters. I don't see a bunch of people running shooting cops. I don't see a bunch of people raping people on the street...I see the heartland of America. When I look at Iowa and when I look at Illinois, I see the backbone of America."
Sadly it isn't only Limbaugh who has been making these kinds of comparisons. Millions of us have also been subjected to the e-blast missives making the rounds, which seek to contrast the law-abiding, God-fearing, and (let us not forget) mostly white farming folks of the Midwest to the black, urban, and congenitally defective folks of the Big Easy. If you haven't received something like this from a friend, relative or co-worker yet, just wait, because you probably will soon.
But what all of these like-minded rants indicate--whether spewed to 20 million pliant sheep via the airwaves, or posted on a pathetic little blog read by no one--is the dishonesty of those offering them up. Either that, or the fundamental ineptitude of the same when it comes to doing basic research, fact-checking, or merely paying attention to the fundamental differences between the flooding of New Orleans and that of rural and small town Iowa communities.
Among the differences that should be readily apparent to almost anyone, consider:
In New Orleans, residents were kept from escaping, literally forced back into the city by armed police from a neighboring community. Nothing like this has happened in Iowa.
In New Orleans, relief agencies like the Red Cross were prohibited from entering the city, thanks to an order from the Department of Homeland Security, which feared that the provision of relief would delay evacuation. In other words, the suffering was heightened deliberately by government order, as noted on the Red Cross website, as early as September 2, 2005. Nothing like this has happened in Iowa.
In New Orleans, those stuck in the flood zone (tens of thousands in all) were herded into the Superdome and Convention Center, where there was no air conditioning (at the hottest time of the year in that city), no food, and little or no water. When those who were trapped (and who would wait for three full days before any serious assistance arrived) tried to get to the food in the pantries of the Convention Center (food that would have gone bad or been written off anyway), they were met by guns, pointed at them by members of the National Guard, who warned them to "step away from the food or we'll blow your fucking heads off." Nothing like this has happened in Iowa.
In New Orleans, there are very few escape routes out of the city, as anyone who has spent much time there can attest. The only artery capable of handling a significant number of vehicles is Interstate 10, heading west or east. In the Midwestern flood zones, there are far more escape routes, far fewer people to get evacuated, and the flooding was a slow and steady process, unlike the rapid inundation in New Orleans, which happened quickly after the overtopping of inadequately constructed levees.
In New Orleans, according to data in the 2004 and 2006 American Community Surveys, conducted by the Census Bureau, residents were about four times as likely as their Iowa counterparts not to have access to a vehicle that could facilitate their escape from the flood zone. Whereas more than 21 percent of New Orleanians were without access to a car at the time of Katrina, only 6 percent of folks in Black Hawk County (home to hard-hit Cedar Falls, Iowa) and 5 percent of those in Linn County (home to flooded Cedar Rapids--the biggest city affected by the latest deluge) were carless. To put the importance of not having a vehicle in stark terms, 38,000 households in New Orleans, comprising approximately 100,000 people, were without a car, and thus, unable to flee on their own.
But perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the Limbaugh and like-minded screeds has been the speed with which they have descended into the pit of racist myth in order to bash the people of New Orleans once again, much as they were doing in August and September of 2005. To wit, the repeated references to looting, rapes, murders, shooting at helicopters and other assorted mayhem by New Orleans' black folks, nearly all of which claims have been discredited as utterly false, almost from the time they were first concocted.
So consider Limbaugh's formulation, where he says, "I don't see a bunch of people running around waving guns at helicopters, I don't see a bunch of people running shooting cops. I don't see a bunch of people raping people on the street."
Fair enough. Those things aren't happening in Iowa. Yet, according to multiple post-Katrina investigations, and stories written up by the Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times, the New Orleans Times Picayune, the London Guardian, the New York Times, Popular Mechanics, Reason Magazine and the American Journalism Review, they weren't happening in New Orleans either. Reports of shooting at helicopters, or rapes or murders were almost entirely false. There were no murders in the evacuation centers, few if any sexual assaults (and none on the street as Limbaugh claimed), no helicopters fired on, and no police officers shot by residents. Yes, there was looting, although by a distinct minority of persons trapped in the city, and overwhelmingly for necessities like food, medicine, water,and clothing to replace the rotting, soaked rags people were wearing after wading through waist-deep water. And according to persons on the ground in the flood zone, even the luxury items taken were typically used as barter chips, to get rides out of the city for oneself and one's family when it became obvious that large scale assistance wasn't going to arrive any time soon. In other words, reports of widespread thuggery in New Orleans during the flooding have been greatly exaggerated, if not entirely fabricated, and have only remained believable to millions because of the race and class biases that allow people to believe the worst about poor black folks even without a shred of actual evidence.
Continued>>>
http://www.counterpunch.org/wise06212008.html
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