Katrina: Whose Chaos?
So, conservatives spin this as the result of the "liberal media" out of control, liberals spin it as conservative hysteria out of control. I don't think this report is all that surprising, but with all the spinning most everyone seems too dizzy to see what the real lessons are.
In New Orleans' whiter, affluent western suburbs, stories spread after the hurricane of gangs of looters taking over one community after another. No such thing happened. Residents openly described the urban poor as " animals" and indicated they were willing to believe just about anything about them. Once the National Guard arrived in the city, soldiers charged with securing the perimeter of the Superdome warned journalists they would not be safe going inside.
The inside turned out to be chaotic, fetid and stiflingly hot, but very far from the violent hellhole advertised. "It just morphed into this mythical place where the most unthinkable deeds were being done," Ed Bush of the National Guard told yesterday's Los Angeles Times. Only now, one month later, is the record being set straight.
[Andrew Gumbel (in Los Angeles), "Katrina chaos", The Independent [UK], 28 September 2005.]
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