David Remnick Doing Boundary Maintenance Again

New Yorker editor David Remnick published a article in this week’s New Yorker about Hurricane Katrina. Like most of his pieces it starts out with promise but soon becomes profoundly disappointing. He begins with a description of Lyndon Johnson’s response to Hurricane Betsy, an obvious contrast to Bush’s reaction to Katrina. But then, in the section where Remnick becomes a reporter and interviews various victims of Katrina, he plays the role of establishment debunker in a clumsy way.

Interviewing African-American hurricane victims, Remnick is soon forced to confront the belief that the poor, black areas of New Orleans were deliberately flooded both in Betsy and Katrina. Remnick seems to believe that all he has to do to debunk any such claim is to label it “conspiracy theory.” Comparing Katrina to Betsy, Remnick writes:

The pattern in Katrina’s wake is similar. Everywhere I went in Louisiana and Texas to talk to evacuees, many of the poorest among them were not only furious—furious at the President and local officials, furious at being ignored for days—but inclined to believe, as many did after Betsy, that the flooding of the city was, or could have been, a deliberate act. (David Remnick, “High Water: What Bush Failed to Learn from L.B.J.,” The New Yorker, October 3, 2005: p. 53)

Now comes the time to calmly reassure the readers and begin to ridicule the accusers:

The link between conspiracy theory and oppression is as old as racial conflict. Some early American slaves were convinced that their new owners were cannibals bringing them to the New World to eat their flesh. In Washington in the nineteen-eighties, there was often talk in poorer black communities about The Plan. This was a belief that the “white power structure” had a secret scheme to inexorably move the black population out of the District. Similarly, in shelters in Louisiana and Texas you heard the suspicion that the “higher powers” of New Orleans wanted to employ a policy of citywide gentrification through natural disaster, that a mass exile of poor African-Americans was the “silver lining scenario.” For most, it hardly seemed to matter that some wealthier neighborhoods in New Orleans, particularly Lakeview, did not escape damage. (p. 55)

That paragraph is odious. Remnick ignores the widely circulated statement by a certified member of the “white power structure,” James Reiss, in New Orleans published in the Wall Street Journal:

James Reiss, [is a] descendent of an old-line Uptown family. He fled Hurricane Katrina just before the storm and returned soon afterward by private helicopter. Mr. Reiss became wealthy as a supplier of electronic systems to shipbuilders, and he serves in Mayor Nagin's administration as chairman of the city's Regional Transit Authority. When New Orleans descended into a spiral of looting and anarchy, Mr. Reiss helicoptered in an Israeli security company to guard his Audubon Place house and those of his neighbors.

He says he has been in contact with about 40 other New Orleans business leaders since the storm. Tomorrow, he says, he and some of those leaders plan to be in Dallas, meeting with Mr. Nagin to begin mapping out a future for the city.

The power elite of New Orleans -- whether they are still in the city or have moved temporarily to enclaves such as Destin, Fla., and Vail, Colo. -- insist the remade city won't simply restore the old order. New Orleans before the flood was burdened by a teeming underclass, substandard schools and a high crime rate. The city has few corporate headquarters.

The new city must be something very different, Mr. Reiss says, with better services and fewer poor people. "Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way: demographically, geographically and politically," he says. "I'm not just speaking for myself here. The way we've been living is not going to happen again, or we're out."

That right there is proof of the motive for the conspiracy. Now you can’t tell me that David Remnick doesn’t read the Wall Street Journal.

Note the technique he uses: by lumping accusations of cannibalism among southern planters with the well-documented wish of the ruling class in New Orleans to have a cleaned up Las Vegas-style simulacrum of Bourbon Street New Orleans to attract tourists and corporate conventions, he deflects the reader from any rational historical look at the possibility that the accusations of the evacuees might be true. Here is another telling passage:

At the Houston Astrodome, for instance, people made statements and asked questions that mixed the logical and the conspiratorial. (p. 55)

Notice how here the opposite of logical is conspiratorial. Say what you want about conspiracy theorists, but they are always “logical.” They always posit a motive and a logical series of inferences based on evidence. Although the evidence is often murky, the process of coming to a “conspiratorial” conclusion is usually more logical than the thinking processes of “coincidence theorists.”

As for Remnick’s simultaneous ridiculing of conspiracy theories about Betsy, here’s Kurt Nimmo and Wikipedia:

In 1927, the so-called Great Mississippi Flood was used to ethnically cleanse African-Americans. “As the flood approached New Orleans, Louisiana 30 tons of dynamite were set off on the levee at Caernarvon, Louisiana,” explains Wikipedia. “This prevented New Orleans from experiencing serious damage but destroyed much of the marsh below the city and flooded all of St. Bernard Parish… During the disaster 700,000 people were displaced, including 330,000 African-Americans who were moved to 154 relief camps. Over 13,000 refugees near Greenville, Mississippi were gathered from area farms and evacuated to the crest of an unbroken levee, and stranded there for days without food or clean water, while boats arrived to evacuate white women and children. Many African-Americans were detained and forced to labor at gunpoint during flood relief efforts… The aftermath of the flood was one factor in the Great Migration of African-Americans to northern cities.” (Emphasis added.)

Remnick, if he is sincere and not engaging in disinfo and psyops (he was an American “journalist” in the Soviet Union during the Cold War, if you catch my drift), seems to think either that “They wouldn’t do THIS,” or THEY wouldn’t do this.” In other words, although history is replete with horrible acts of planned genocide and ethnic cleansing, the accusations in New Orleans go beyond what that particular ruling group would do or that that group is not as bad as all the other ruling groups in history. So who’s logical now?

Many earnest white people have wondered why African-Americans believe in more conspiracies than other U.S. citizens. Maybe it is because they have never been allowed to have any illusions about the nature of the rulers.