| GREG-STRANGE.COM |
"If you haven't found something strange during the
day, it hasn't been much of a day." -- John A. Wheeler
day, it hasn't been much of a day." -- John A. Wheeler
PROVIDING SUBSTANTIVE COMMENTARY ON THE
PEOPLE, POLITICS, EVENTS AND ABSURDITIES OF
OUR TIME. SERVED UP WITH ACERBIC WIT, YOU
SHOULD FIND IT QUITE SATISFYING.
PEOPLE, POLITICS, EVENTS AND ABSURDITIES OF
OUR TIME. SERVED UP WITH ACERBIC WIT, YOU
SHOULD FIND IT QUITE SATISFYING.
The Katrina Kool-Aid Gets Spiked
“I don’t put anything past the United States government. I
don’t find it too farfetched that they tried to displace all the
black people out of New Orleans.” --- Spike Lee, renowned
black film maker, commenting during a recent CNN interview
on the theory that a levee in New Orleans may have been blown
up during Hurricane Katrina in order to kill or displace the
city’s black population.
Displace all the black people to where, Spike? What good
does it do a racist United States government (your
presumption) to displace them from New Orleans to Baton
Rouge, or to Houston, or to Memphis, or to anywhere else
unless it’s out of the country altogether and for good? Did
these nefarious government operants just decide for some
reason that they wanted this one particular city to become lily
white? Doesn’t seem too smart. Since tourism is New Orleans’
lifeblood -- presumably because of its unique ambiance, much
of which is constituted by jazz and black culture -- how would
it help to turn it into a colorless blandsville, devoid of the very
essence that made it an attraction in the first place?
Way to go, Spike. You crossed a line in front of a national
television audience that transports you beyond your former
status of mere nettlesome complainer about the evil forces that
relentlessly conspire to keep black people down. You’ve now
moved on to a whole new dimension of racial conspiracy
theories where the emphasis is on patent lunacy.
Our old pal Louie Farrakhan is the one who first publicized
the blown-up levee theory: “I heard from a very reliable source
who saw a 25-foot-deep crater under the levee breach. It may
have been blown up to destroy the black part of town and keep
the white part dry.”
Yeah, right, a “very reliable source.” A regular “Deep
Throat” type of informer in the great plot to destroy the black
part of New Orleans. Let’s just call it Floodwatergate. Maybe
this Deep Throat will keep feeding Farrakhan dribs and drabs
of information until it all comes out and the Bush
administration can be taken down for attempted genocide.
Or maybe the men in the clean white coats will come and
take Farrakhan away, ha-ha. If only.
This blown-up levee hogwash is every bit as wacky as it
would be if someone suggested -- I don’t know, let me think of
something really wild -- that several days after Katrina hit,
starving black people who had been abandoned by callous
authorities resorted to eating dead bodies to stay alive.
Actually, someone did suggest that very thing. Randall
Robinson, “internationally respected foreign policy advocate
and author,” according to his bio, posted this on Arianna
Huffington’s blog site: “It is reported that black hurricane
victims in New Orleans have begun eating corpses to survive.
Four days after the storm thousands of blacks in New Orleans
are dying like dogs.” However, the reports didn’t turn out to be
so reliable and a couple of days later Robinson issued a
retraction. But don’t expect any such retraction from
Farrakhan. He’s all about nutty and unverifiable claims.
But just for the heck of it, let’s see if we can try and
understand how this plot that Farrakhan publicized and Spike
wouldn‘t put past the U.S. government might have come about.
There must have been some pretty nefarious and very secretive
people within the U.S. government who found the time to sit
down together as Hurricane Katrina approached and said:
Hey, we’ve got this catastrophe headed straight for New
Orleans, compliments of mother nature. There ought to be a
way to take advantage of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity
and get rid of all the blacks. Let’s see, what we could do is, we
could send in a clandestine agent to set off an explosive at a
strategic point on one of the levees and the result would be
that lots and lots of blacks would be killed and/or their part of
town would simply be wiped out. Whatever blacks survived
would have to be displaced to other parts of the country since
they would have no homes to return to. Then we rebuild New
Orleans as a pristinely white city, everything is hunky-dory
and no one’s the wiser.
Sure, there are plenty of people in the government who think
that way, and sure, it could work. Heck, it pretty much did,
didn’t it?
Do people like Spike ever stop and think about the logic of
these conspiracy theories or do they just pick them up and run
with them because of some perverse psychological need to
believe them? It must be painful living with that kind of racial
paranoia. Of course, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t
mean no one’s after you. But on the other hand, just because no
one’s after you doesn’t mean you’re not paranoid. In other
words, maybe Spike is paranoid, but for no good reason.
For instance, did Spike have a good reason for believing
himself to be the victim of a movie ticket plot back when his
movie “Malcolm X” came out? Spike alleged that some theatre
owners had credited sales from “Malcolm X” to some other film
in order to make his film look less successful, thereby hurting
his chances of studio support for future films. Sure, you believe
that a bunch of racist theatre owners got together and hatched
that petty plot, don’t you?
So this is the mentality that Spike brings to one of his latest
projects, a post-Hurricane Katrina documentary for HBO that
will no doubt delve deep into the delusional. But hey, anything
to make poor blacks look like the hapless victims of diabolical
plots, particularly when those plots are coming out of the self-
evidently evil cabal of Bush/Cheney/Halliburton -- or as you
might as well call it, Black Genocide, Inc. (What about Condi?
Presumably, she goes along with it all just to stay in good graces
with her masters.)
You might laugh, shrug your shoulders and wonder why
anybody cares what these wack jobs say. The problem is, guys
like Farrakhan and Spike Lee have a lot of influence over
multitudes of black people, some of whom are all too eager to
believe such nonsense. Combine that with the constant
negative rhetoric of the Al Sharptons and Jesse Jacksons, who
basically act as if there hasn‘t been a half century of dramatic
racial progress, and what do you get? A whole lot of needlessly
angry black people who are convinced of the futility of trying to
get ahead when instead, they could be taking advantage of the
incredible opportunities that any non-white immigrant to this
country will tell you exist in fabulous abundance.
“I don’t put anything past the United States government. I
don’t find it too farfetched that they tried to displace all the
black people out of New Orleans.” --- Spike Lee, renowned
black film maker, commenting during a recent CNN interview
on the theory that a levee in New Orleans may have been blown
up during Hurricane Katrina in order to kill or displace the
city’s black population.
Displace all the black people to where, Spike? What good
does it do a racist United States government (your
presumption) to displace them from New Orleans to Baton
Rouge, or to Houston, or to Memphis, or to anywhere else
unless it’s out of the country altogether and for good? Did
these nefarious government operants just decide for some
reason that they wanted this one particular city to become lily
white? Doesn’t seem too smart. Since tourism is New Orleans’
lifeblood -- presumably because of its unique ambiance, much
of which is constituted by jazz and black culture -- how would
it help to turn it into a colorless blandsville, devoid of the very
essence that made it an attraction in the first place?
Way to go, Spike. You crossed a line in front of a national
television audience that transports you beyond your former
status of mere nettlesome complainer about the evil forces that
relentlessly conspire to keep black people down. You’ve now
moved on to a whole new dimension of racial conspiracy
theories where the emphasis is on patent lunacy.
Our old pal Louie Farrakhan is the one who first publicized
the blown-up levee theory: “I heard from a very reliable source
who saw a 25-foot-deep crater under the levee breach. It may
have been blown up to destroy the black part of town and keep
the white part dry.”
Yeah, right, a “very reliable source.” A regular “Deep
Throat” type of informer in the great plot to destroy the black
part of New Orleans. Let’s just call it Floodwatergate. Maybe
this Deep Throat will keep feeding Farrakhan dribs and drabs
of information until it all comes out and the Bush
administration can be taken down for attempted genocide.
Or maybe the men in the clean white coats will come and
take Farrakhan away, ha-ha. If only.
This blown-up levee hogwash is every bit as wacky as it
would be if someone suggested -- I don’t know, let me think of
something really wild -- that several days after Katrina hit,
starving black people who had been abandoned by callous
authorities resorted to eating dead bodies to stay alive.
Actually, someone did suggest that very thing. Randall
Robinson, “internationally respected foreign policy advocate
and author,” according to his bio, posted this on Arianna
Huffington’s blog site: “It is reported that black hurricane
victims in New Orleans have begun eating corpses to survive.
Four days after the storm thousands of blacks in New Orleans
are dying like dogs.” However, the reports didn’t turn out to be
so reliable and a couple of days later Robinson issued a
retraction. But don’t expect any such retraction from
Farrakhan. He’s all about nutty and unverifiable claims.
But just for the heck of it, let’s see if we can try and
understand how this plot that Farrakhan publicized and Spike
wouldn‘t put past the U.S. government might have come about.
There must have been some pretty nefarious and very secretive
people within the U.S. government who found the time to sit
down together as Hurricane Katrina approached and said:
Hey, we’ve got this catastrophe headed straight for New
Orleans, compliments of mother nature. There ought to be a
way to take advantage of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity
and get rid of all the blacks. Let’s see, what we could do is, we
could send in a clandestine agent to set off an explosive at a
strategic point on one of the levees and the result would be
that lots and lots of blacks would be killed and/or their part of
town would simply be wiped out. Whatever blacks survived
would have to be displaced to other parts of the country since
they would have no homes to return to. Then we rebuild New
Orleans as a pristinely white city, everything is hunky-dory
and no one’s the wiser.
Sure, there are plenty of people in the government who think
that way, and sure, it could work. Heck, it pretty much did,
didn’t it?
Do people like Spike ever stop and think about the logic of
these conspiracy theories or do they just pick them up and run
with them because of some perverse psychological need to
believe them? It must be painful living with that kind of racial
paranoia. Of course, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t
mean no one’s after you. But on the other hand, just because no
one’s after you doesn’t mean you’re not paranoid. In other
words, maybe Spike is paranoid, but for no good reason.
For instance, did Spike have a good reason for believing
himself to be the victim of a movie ticket plot back when his
movie “Malcolm X” came out? Spike alleged that some theatre
owners had credited sales from “Malcolm X” to some other film
in order to make his film look less successful, thereby hurting
his chances of studio support for future films. Sure, you believe
that a bunch of racist theatre owners got together and hatched
that petty plot, don’t you?
So this is the mentality that Spike brings to one of his latest
projects, a post-Hurricane Katrina documentary for HBO that
will no doubt delve deep into the delusional. But hey, anything
to make poor blacks look like the hapless victims of diabolical
plots, particularly when those plots are coming out of the self-
evidently evil cabal of Bush/Cheney/Halliburton -- or as you
might as well call it, Black Genocide, Inc. (What about Condi?
Presumably, she goes along with it all just to stay in good graces
with her masters.)
You might laugh, shrug your shoulders and wonder why
anybody cares what these wack jobs say. The problem is, guys
like Farrakhan and Spike Lee have a lot of influence over
multitudes of black people, some of whom are all too eager to
believe such nonsense. Combine that with the constant
negative rhetoric of the Al Sharptons and Jesse Jacksons, who
basically act as if there hasn‘t been a half century of dramatic
racial progress, and what do you get? A whole lot of needlessly
angry black people who are convinced of the futility of trying to
get ahead when instead, they could be taking advantage of the
incredible opportunities that any non-white immigrant to this
country will tell you exist in fabulous abundance.