Funny How I Haven’t Seen Him on CNN Yet

Remember when I said, “Don’t be surprised if [Mike Davis] turns up at some lefty policy journal by the end of the year talking about the institutional failures that made this disaster a lot worse than it could have been”? The man was way ahead of me. He wrote “Poor, Black, and Left Behind” almost exactly one year ago:

“The evacuation of New Orleans in the face of Hurricane Ivan looked sinisterly like Strom Thurmond’s version of the Rapture. Affluent white people fled the Big Easy in their SUVs, while the old and car-less–mainly Black–were left behind in their below-sea-level shotgun shacks and aging tenements to face the watery wrath.”

But in Davis’ view, this isn’t just the fault of the Republicans, but also “the culmination of the long crusade waged by the Democratic Leadership Council to exorcise the specter of the 1980s Rainbow Coalition.” And, in fact, that largely turns out to be the real theme of this article; he only comes back to the original subject to observe, “A party that in every real and figurative sense refuses to shelter the poor in a hurricane is unlikely to mobilize the moral passion necessary to overthrow George Bush, the most hated man on earth.”

5 September 2005 | uncategorized |