This for Mississippi, and every place y'all treat like Mississippi.
Y'all wouldn't give us shit, we gone take it, bitch. YEAH!
-David Banner, "Bush", from his debut Mississippi the Album

I hid from the news. For days, I avoided any mention of Hurricane Katrina. In my hometown of Portsmouth, Virginia, a hurricane was a large and powerful thunderstorm that always threatened major collateral damage yet never delivered. Skies darkened, clouds grayed, winds blew, trees swayed. Outside of extremely minor flooding on low-lying streets, nothing of note really happened. I always stayed home and played video games. A bad hurricane for me growing up was when electric service ceased and I read Peter David's novel Imzadi by candlelight. So, Hurricane Katrina held no interest for me; the commercial symbolism of rock music's forced resurgence at MTV's recent Video Music Awards - a show I didn't watch - was more interesting than constant coverage on a Category 5 hurricane.

Yesterday, I watched CNN and lost my national innocence.



Massive, total destruction. Burning water above downed power lines. A flooded metropolis. Sniper fire. Random violence. Human suffering. Barbarism. Animalism. Theft. Rape. Sickness. Death. On American soil.

Not Bosnia. Not Rwanda. Not Fallujah. Not Malaysia. Right here, in the United States of America, your fellow citizens wait with taxed patience for federal disaster relief amidst demoralized savagery and subhuman conditions. Today marks the sixth day. As if to demonstrate the surreal calamity in the Mississippi River Delta, CNN's Nic Robertson, international correspondent known for on-location reporting in global political hot spots like Kabul, Afghanistan or Mogadishu, Somalia delivered commentary from New Orleans; what's next, Christiane Amanpour live from the Houston Astrodome? Stories of exhausted young Black mothers hobbling along country roads and flooded streets to escape certain death by drowning or starvation or disease fill the airwaves. Acrid black smoke from random fires dot New Orleans; disgusting, contaminated water filled with bacteria and gasoline and desiccating human bodies saturates the Big Easy, threatening diseases like cholera and dysentery upon an already devolved electorate. Doctors work without sufficient power or medicine or food or water at makeshift hospitals at the New Orleans International Airport; nurses give each other IV's, according to CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight, to maintain their strength to care for the dying. Disheartening images of impoverished elderly men and women languishing in hellish heat plaster the national news; their corpses rot before shell-shocked Southerners and a world audience baffled by the complete and utter deconstruction of American society within the continental United States.

Experts predicted years in advance that the levies protecting New Orleans from utter calamity were vulnerable to powerful hurricanes, yet those warnings sounded upon the deaf and the uncaring. The human cost of this unprecedented event has yet to be determined. The New York Times called the anemic, belated disaster relief efforts seen today "a very costly game of catch-up", while noting that Iraq deployment of Louisiana and Mississippi National Guard units may have severely hampered relief efforts. The Congressional Black Caucus, the NAACP, and the Rev. Jesse Jackson publicly attack the President's shuffling, shucking and jiving disaster relief response, a response that allows untold numbers of working poor African Americans to die on their feet amid rising water and scarce resources and simple human wastes. Mental note to Lou Dobbs: Just because New Orleans is seventy percent Black and the city power structure is nearly exclusively Black and Mayor Ray Nagin is Black, does not mean that every national Black politician should immediately assassinate local Black political leaders to satisfy White sensibilities about a national public service failure. The apocalypse now endured in New Orleans, the catastrophic cessation of all public infrastructure and order, embarrasses the United States, cripples our global standing, and deserves swift and complete accountability at the highest levels of American federal government. Mr. Bush, you deserve impeachment.

"No one wants to see any American suffer," says Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, when answering charges by the Congressional Black Caucus that race and class encouraged the Bush Administration's lazy response to assist impoverished African Americans in Louisiana and Mississippi. Her constant evasion and emotional sidestepping of the obvious - those low on capital and high on melanin are utterly inconsequential her Chief Executive - displays a conflicted and complicated African American conservative response to the callous indifference the modern Grand Old Party shows towards America's weakest members. Mayor Ray Nagin of New Orleans, Louisiana should not have to curse out the federal government to secure federal help for his dying citizenry. During times like this, I do not comprehend why any free thinking African American could vote Republican. Black America has endured the most patently anti-Black Presidency I've ever known, including the Reagan years. (Don't believe me? Ask Kanye West.) President Bush steals office by disenfranchising African American voters, refuses to discuss anything with any Black leader or organization that he hasn't handpicked, demonstrates a callous disregard for the financial squeeze his economic policies cause hardworking citizens, and now mismanages Hurricane Katrina disaster relief so completely that those unfortunate souls unable to care for themselves are now plastered all over CNN in stark relief: the poor, the Black, and the dead. All day yesterday, my wide-eyed horrified stare observed masses of impoverished Black Southerners baking in unmerciful August heat among contaminated water and broken toilets and rotting garbage, watched the young and the middle-aged and the old weep with hopeless despair, heard sweaty Black men recount stories of bloated corpses - their neighbors - floating like driftwood past their front doors.



Black men. Dangerous, scary, young Black men. America's longest national nightmare made corporeal and physical and larcenous. Much of the media coverage centers around repeated images of rampant looting of local businesses for supplies and luxury items by not-yet-recovered citizens, and an amorphous criminal element that impedes meager relief efforts from helping those in need. First, the looters. You can understand the looting by first understanding dehumanized poverty. People with no personal political tethers to accepted societal morality, people who operate on the fringes of America during the best of times, people normally abandoned and consistently controlled by the police powers of a indifferent and callous capitalist order have no reason to abide by American moral reverence for private property in the absence of a ruling military presence. I have no judgment for any looter of any items - given personal immersion in those abysmal circumstances, I can not tell you what my actions would entail. We are watching a modern American state of nature; the utter breakdown of governmental control can not be judged or criticized or moralized through comfortable climate controlled reason alone.

Next, the criminals. The 'roving gangs of violent men' the twenty-four hour broadcast media pontificates on relentlessly, who snipe stranded hospital patients and threaten rescue operations in New Orleans, mirror similar bands of armed anarchists in Liberia, Sudan, Rwanda, Somalia, and Iraq; the constant display of young, muscular, dark Black men on these channels reinforces violent Supermasculine Menial stereotypes to lull the American public into the belief that the usual suspects totally comprise the unchecked criminality of post-Katrina New Orleans. Rather, the isolated metropolis displays the cessation of American law and order: the only relevant criminal activity here is the atrocious and inadequate and overdue federal disaster relief measures undertaken by the Bush Administration. President George W. Bush failed to make the world safe from terrorist attack, failed to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, failed to secure peace and maintain civic infrastructure in Iraq, and now failed to ensure the domestic tranquility of American citizens under extreme duress. The Bush Administration cut Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) funding, treating the agency like 'an unwanted stepchild' according to New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. The Bush Administration diverted a third of the Louisiana National Guard to Iraq. The Bush Administration left those without money or health or youth to chance in a metropolitan area widely predicted to destroy itself in a perfect storm. As was true during Election 2000, President Bush's sacrificial lambs again resemble the Black sheep of our American family.

Native society is not simply described as a society lacking in values. It is not enough for the colonist to affirm that those values have disappeared from, or still better never existed in, the colonial world. The native is declared insensible to ethics; he represents not only the absence of values, but also the negation of values. He is, let us dare to admit, the enemy of values, and in this sense he is the absolute evil. He is the corrosive element, destroying all that comes near him; he is the deforming element, disfiguring all that has to do with beauty or morality; he is the depository of maleficent powers, the unconscious and irretrievable instrument of blind forces. - Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

The American colonizer still fears the Black native. Yesterday's repeated question was "who shoots at unarmed hospital patients?", today's is "who's burning the New Orleans ruins?" President Bush, Head Colonizer In Charge, waxes Crawford philosophical over the unwavering American spirit while babies die on American soil of malnutrition and thirst. Meanwhile, Louisiana Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D) put the phantom American insurgents on notice, shouting of the National Guardsmen who've arrived "fresh back from Iraq". "These are some of the 40,000 extra troops that I have demanded," Blanco said. "They have M-16s, and they're locked and loaded ... I have one message for these hoodlums: These troops know how to shoot and kill, and they are more than willing to do so if necessary, and I expect they will." This sentiment displays without doubt the complete disregard for African American suffering shown by governmental officials. Amid the worst humanitarian disaster in United States history, the Governor of Louisiana treats its victims like hardened convicts in a prison riot. Criminality certainly stymied some relief efforts, but this 'Battle of New Orleans' should be a mission of mercy that delivers food to the hungry, shelter to the homeless, and safety to the scared. You can't save anyone if you're shooting at them.

Any pretenses about the sanctity of the American spirit or the stainless honor of the American body politic have been shattered, crushed, and discarded by the Bush Administration. We have witnessed the demise of the American Dream. Houses smashed into wet matchsticks and kindling. Businesses flooded beyond repair. Wal-Marts raided for food and water and fuel and clothes and sneakers and knives and guns. Blond, busty, blue-eyed national newscasters speak of American 'refugees' who drag their tired, battered, demoralized bodies from the horrific squalor and standing water and inhumane conditions of New Orleans along several hours in charter busses without air-conditioning to be turned away from the Houston Astrodome to locations so undisclosed, the drivers don't even know where they're headed.

The United States of America is a different country today, a primeval, feral, Neanderthal nation without civility or civilization or simple human decency. We are the worst we have to offer. We are a nation of rich cynics shocked by our own barbarism, waiting for our turn at the chopping block. What's worse, this could all have been prevented. Simple, logical organization of all available manpower to help those who could not help themselves - the moral purpose of federal power in a modern industrialized liberal democracy - could have saved lives: organized removal of the poor and homeless days ago, when Category One Katrina introduced itself to Florida, or food and supply airdrops over New Orleans after the levies broke - anything but abandonment. Fuck 20/20 hindsight! No American citizen can today believe that the federal government can or would help them if their homes, livelihoods, and utilities are destroyed by actions outside their control. None of us. No American citizen can today believe that their country can do for them when they cannot do for themselves. Given this, what is the point of doing anything for our country? Why volunteer to fight an unjust, illegal, commercial war, when your fellow citizens can't be rescued from heavy rains, high winds, and their own bodily wastes? What's the point of voting when the guy the minority voted for bungles both foreign policy and domestic health in such cataclysmic fashion? To all Republicans: why give a damn about illegal immigration when the society the impoverished illegal aliens claw and scratch and steal their way into refuses to save it's weakest and neediest from natural calamity and public anarchy? What's the national character of a country that reduces those without capital to those without voice, those without help, those without life?

President Bush murders America when he refuses to help Americans.

Whether his acts are sins of commission or omission, they deserve investigation. Whether his callousness displays the rich man's ancient indifference towards the poor or the White man's ancient prejudice towards the Black, it demands accountability. President Bush's compassionate conservativism unmasked today as a separate but unequal phenomenon, reserved for wealthy metropolitans in New York and denied to destitute metropolitans in New Orleans. With Bull Connor's bastard child in the White House, no amount of fervent prayer or political cajoling will alter Hurricane Katrina's violent commoner's sense - your government does not care about you. The poor and the Black and the dead, decomposing underwater, or on public streets, or in alleyways, demand justice no one can provide, because federal authorities (or Karl Rove, or whomever) are not concerned with the public welfare of the American people. Law-abiding, taxpaying Americans were eaten by rats on the streets of New Orleans because the Bush Administration found their economic contributions lax and their racial configuration undesirable. African Americans, reduced to the 'undifferentiated brown stuff' of George Orwell's Marrakech, invisible in plain twenty-four hour news camera sight, are the perfect victims of federal apathy. We hate their dangerous violence. We hate their persistent poverty. We hate their expressive speech and their colorful colloquialisms and their creative music. We hate their minority cultures. We hate their grace, their passion, their strength. We hate their brown skin. We hate the fact they exist.

We hate the poor, the Black, and the dead.



Every time a political pundit or robotic reporter wonders aloud why the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina exposes a race and class dynamic I cringe. There's no big secret - the Bush Administration hates Black people. Well-educated tokens willing to tote the grand old party line past pathetic concerns of reason or reputation or sanity may apply, but the starving Black underclass left indigent and depleted in the post-colonial, post-integration post-apartheid affirmative action environment may as well commit Jonestown mass suicide as far as this Administration is concerned. Our democracy functions because of the tireless efforts of those we don't see. The minimum-wage labor that cooks and cleans and cares for the wealthy and the White only exist as news stories for the general G-8 public. The poor and the Black and the dead materialize as convicts like the Washington sniper John Muhammad or the Atlanta courtroom killer Brian Nichols. The poor and the Black and the dead live as flashing statistics on American national poverty or printed percentages on American teenage pregnancy. The poor and the Black and the dead benefit from our affirmative action benevolence, profit from our Social Security charity. The poor and the Black and the dead deserve incarceration, provoke police brutality, justify capital punishment. The poor and the Black and the dead are social parasites, oily obsidian leeches who drain our scarce American resources from within.

The poor and the Black and the dead are the wretched of the earth. When we choose not to help them, we damn our own souls.

God Bless America.



Update: More on Kanye West's nationally televised pimpslap of President Bush. MSNBC has the Kanye video. C-SPAN.org has video of the Congressional Black Caucus' honorable disgust with the President. Also, check out Michelle Malkin's knee-jerk defense of the worst President in modern American history.

For sanity and reason, hit up Reappropriate.com, Crunk & Disorderly, and Solitaire Redux.