Dress Rehearsal for the Big Ugly II

Police in Suburbs Blocked Evacuees, Witnesses Report

These are public servants, answerable to the people. And when the people came, fleeing pestilence, chaos and dehydration, they sent the people running back into the abyss, plucking buckshot out of their behinds. Why? Good old fashioned racism, classism, fearmongering. New Orleans had been destroyed, and it was the fault of those who had stayed, the "looters", whose numbers were made up primarily of children, parents, and the elderly. These police officers could look at huddled masses of bedraggled and stricken people, obviously in distress, obviously helpless and harmless, and see waves of the iconic priapic, razor-wielding Negro rapist who has haunted the white Southern mind for centuries. They could point shotguns at them and send them to their deaths.

This is how things will be during the Big Ugly. When the economy collapses, stranding everybody but that lucky 1% in a Hobbesian nightmare, the forsaken aren't all going to take it lying down. Some of them will escape the cities, looking for sustenance and salvation in the rolling exurban hills. And there, they'll meet the local equivalent of the Gretna, LA police department, guns drawn, ready to happily open fire on the unfortunates. They might be private security people, but, as we've seen, they could just as easily be public officials. As we've seen, "protect and serve" means protecting the property and serving the interests of the white and the connected. That is always the case, of course, but during times of crisis the inhuman nature of that order, which is hidden during the slow motion carnage of the day-to-day, comes into stark relief.