The usual suspects are blaming the complete breakdown of civility in New Orleans on everything except the anti-social types committing the rapes, murders and looting. The ”’L.A. Times”’ resident Stalinist, Robert Sheer, blames the “culture of greed.”
A National Public Radio interviewer keeps asking a guest leading questions about “race and class” as the causes of this disaster. Ralph Luker, never to be out done in moral hysteria, blames “self-righteous white jerks.”
One question the above persons don’t ask is why the horror stories in the media seem to be limited to New Orleans. Katrina cut a much wider swath through the Gulf Coast. Here is a list of Mississippi towns and cities that have been extensively damage. I have not read any reports of the complete breakdown of society as a result of Katrina outside of New Orleans.
As some writers have noted, the savagery at the Superdome is a microcosm of ”’Life at the Bottom”’.
Four years ago Theodore Dalrymple published a book titled ”’Life at the Bottom: the Worldview That Makes the Underclass”’.
Dalrymple is a physician and psychiatrist who spent many years working with England’s “underclass” of long-term welfare recipients.
He dramatical demonstrates that the breakdown of civility we witnessed in New Orleans has roots dating back decades:
”’Here is a searing account