A couple of years back, there was this year long crossover in the Batman comics, called No Man’s Land. In this crossover, after Gotham City had been hit by an earthquake, the US government decided to cut its losses and abandon the city. At the time this was widely ridiculed as completely unrealistic; no government would act that way in reality.
This week New Orleans was hit by the worst disaster in its history, one of the worst natural disasters in the US in recent memory. Judging by comments made by Dennis Hastert, a senior Republican representative, the No Man’s Land scenario is not that silly anymore:
Despite the haste involved in congressional action, one senior GOP leader seemed to express some ambivalence about the extent of longer-term recovery efforts.
Asked in an interview with the Daily Herald, a suburban Chicago paper, whether it makes sense to spend billions rebuilding a city that lies below sea level, a reference to New Orleans, Hastert replied, “I don’t know. That doesn’t make sense to me.”
He added it was a question “that certainly we should ask. And, you know, it looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed.”
Unspoken: “Hey, the victims are all poor and Black; they won’t vote Republican anyway. We already took away the money needed to improve the hurricane defences of New Orleans to pay for our war in Iraq. What makes you think we’d want to spent a single dime to help you now?”
Hence the demonisation of the victims, as Bionic Octopus explains:
This is how they’re going to play it. They’re going to try to blanket-criminalize the victims they can’t even be fucked to rescue. The tens of thousands of people they fucking abandonedVastly, vastly more have quietly waited to be rescued, in vain, or have taken provisions from stores to feed and clothe themselves, their neighbors and their children after waiting days to be given food, water, medical care. Tarring these victims as ‘a criminal element’ and using ‘looting’ as an excuse for the monumental, unforgivable cockup that is
this shambolic rescue effort is beyond outrageous. That is what’s criminal.
That’s Bush’s America for you. A country where the ruling elites have largely even given up pretending to care.