sophiaserpentia | (no subject)

The floodwaters are making them come out from all over, seeking high ground: the bigots, finding new zeal in their victim-blaming. What's scary is how blatant they are being, not even trying to disguise their hatred. It's as if they sense now is the time to finally take off the mask and reveal themselves in all their ugly, racist glory.

You've all heard, of course, this comment by Rep. Richard Baker (of Baton Rouge): "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did." The "looting vs. finding" thing is old news, too.

pamscoffee reports that an official at Greenville Technical College in South Carolina lost her job after twice referring to Katrina evacuees as "yard apes." As in, "sending yellow buses to pick up the yard apes."

Amanda Marcotte's timeline of victim-blaming on AlterNet shows how right-wingers, hoping to deflect criticism of Bush, finally settled in on blaming the welfare state.

This isn't about the President leaving the citizenry of a major American city to die in a hurricane! No, this is a story of black people obtaining expensive goods that the teller of the story deems them unworthy of owning.

George Will is touting the line that the tragedy of Katrina could have been prevented by people marrying and having children the way he tells them to. How it is that married couples in the Superdome could have gotten water, food and evacuation vehicles there faster need not be explained. Laying the blame for Katrina on the shoulders of the mythological Welfare Queen and other Republican bogeymen looks like it's shaping up to be the primary distraction from laying the blame at the feet of those in the federal government who actually had power to help but didn't. The important thing is getting everyone in a tizzy over those awful hurricane victims who dare to believe that they deserve rescue just because they need it.

A frightening and insidious manifestation of this memetic rot was pointed out by

lady_babalon: An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State

There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the deluge hit—but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from two groups: criminals—and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness. The welfare wards were a mass of sheep—on whom the incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.