The need for dispassionate conservatism by James Panero

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Sep 02, 2005 12:36 PM

The need for dispassionate conservatism

by James Panero

Global warming, the ozone layer, the spotted owl, and the war in Iraq had nothing to do with the forces of nature that hit New Orleans, regardless of what the editorials might say. But the manmade disaster now tearing apart what remains of that city does have a root cause in failed urban policy. New Orleans was a largely ungovernable city before hurricane Katrina. One corrupt Democratic regime after another saw to it that New Orleans never reaped the benefits of lower crimes that Republican leadership brought to cities like New York. One reason New Orleans is now besieged by criminals after this hurricane is that not enough criminals were incarcerated before the hurricane. Through a combination of white guilt and incompetent local leadership, New Orleans had long allowed the fabric of its urban life to be torn apart by vandalism and crime.

There’s a news report out of New Orleans about a young woman who noted that "God is punishing New Orleans" for its corruption and crime. That’s about as close as any pundit or politician has come to identifying the problem with the city. Of course, it’s not God who is punishing New Orleans for its corruption and crime. It’s the legacy of corruption and crime that is now doing the punishment in New Orleans.

Ray Nagin is no Rudy Giuliani. The New Orleans mayor, although praised by the likes of National Review in the past and The Washington Post today, has to me demonstrated only the basest tendencies of liberal urban leadership since the hurricane hit his city. He blames everyone but himself for the disaster, resorts to historical rhetoric, and declares his city helpless in the face of criminals. Here are just a few of his recent comments:

[the feds are] feeding people a line of bull.
I need troops, man. I need 500 buses, man. This is a national disaster.
They thinking small, man, and this is a major, major deal.
Get off your asses and let’s do something.
[the criminals are] looking to take the edge off their jones.
I’ve been out there man. I flew in these helicopters, been in the crowds talking to people crying, don’t know where their relatives are. I’ve done it all man, and I’ll tell you man, I keep hearing that it’s coming. This is coming, that is coming. And my answer to that today is BS, where is the beef? Because there is no beef in this city.
Excuse my French -- everybody in America -- but I am pissed.
(More here and here.)

There seems to be a mentality out there that maintains that poor Americans, specifically poor black Americans, do not benefit from crime prevention--and the exacting leadership required to carry it out--as much as rich Americans or white Americans do. This is a devastating myth, and the results of this delusion are now playing out in the lawless streets of The Big Easy.

The other day I pointed out what I considered to be an illustration of this mentality as represented by The New York Times. Let me reprint here some of the critical responses I have received regarding this post:

Mr. Panero ---
Imagine for a moment that you can’t afford to lunch at the Four Seasons. Your parents knew little about nutrition and they couldn’t afford a regular diet of fruits and vegetables anyhow. They raised you on Diet Coke and cheap canned goods. When disaster strikes and you’re hungry and thirsty, what are you going to do?
Alright then,
Ken Wilson
Wonkette, much less academic than you, notes that the AFP headline differed from the AP’s, perhaps the Times used the AP.
Ry Rivard
The whole "liberal media conspiracy" that conservatives complain of is getting tiresome. That you’ve managed to draw out the argument apropos coverage of a hurricane shows just what an obsession this has become. Last I checked, natural disasters were neither liberal or conservative -- merely devastating. That The New York Times ran a photograph of a boy making his way through flood-water with a twelve-pack of soda without mentioning in the caption that he had looted the item from a store hardly makes out a case for "liberal bias". For one, nothing in the photograph alone overtly indicates the item is stolen. Perhaps an editor thought it best not to brandish the kid as a thief on the cover of an internationally-read newspaper absent stronger evidence. But even if what he carried had obviously been stolen -- perhaps leaving a trail of green smoke or something -- maybe the editors didn’t really care. Maybe that wasn’t the story. Maybe the story was, here’s a kid walking down a street chest-high in water after a hurricane destroyed his city. Maybe he grabbed a case of Pepsi because he left his wallet in his house which -- oh yeah -- is in the Gulf of Mexico right now... Who knows?
Does The Times have a liberal bias? Sure, sometimes. But it’s by far the best paper in this country, and you all obviously read it religiously. So to paraphrase Freud, sometimes a hurricane is just a hurricane.
John Fitzgerald
Your expose of the New York Times is a little deceiving. On their nytimes.com picture slideshow - that you link to - the picture of the infant Pepsi liberator that you have posted is directly preceded by a photograph captioned "Looters made their way into and out of a grocery store in New Orleans" - so we can surely assume that the NYT intend that we should believe that your dreadlocked friend is among their number. No?
Stephen Baldwin

Who knows the particulars of the young man with the Diet Pepsi. Did he need those items in his bag? I don’t know. But what is clear beyond a reasonable doubt is that this young man looted a store. That fact that this wasn’t mentioned, I still believe, demonstrates our willingness to tolerate petty crime and unlawful behavior when it is either committed by or enacted upon (the two tend to go hand in hand) poor people and black people. When we are presented with mitigating circumstances, whether it be poverty or a natural disaster, this seems to hold especially true. The fact that the critical responses to my first post have relied on every argument available to explain away the looter or claim he wasn’t a looter or whatever only reinforces my suspicion that sentimentality prevents us from admitting what we see.

At the time I wrote my post, Mayor Nagin maintained that he would tolerate looting for food in his devastated city, saying that except for a few "knuckleheads," the looting is the result of desperate people just trying to find food and water to survive. The young man with the Diet Pepsi may be innocent of a crime of ethics, but his looting and the looting by many people like him in New Orleans have served to reinforce a climate of lawlessness and helplessness, perpetuated by the Mayor himself, that we have now seen escalate into full scale criminality. The innocent episodes of lawlessness may strike that Bicycle Thief/Les Mis chord in everyone. But its the Broken Window Theory of urban crime that now has New Orleans in its death grip, and the perception of lawlessness in New Orleans long predates the arrival of Hurricane Katrina.

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