There’s a now-legendary thing making the rounds on the blogs:

An AP photo of a young black man wading through chest-deep waters with a load of groceries. The caption that ran on the wire with the photo:

A young man walks through chest deep flood water after looting a grocery store in New Orleans on Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2005. Flood waters continue to rise in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina did extensive damage when it made landfall on Monday.

An AFT wire photo of two young white people wading through chest-deep water with a load of groceries. The caption:

Two residents wade through chest-deep water after finding bread and soda from a local grocery store after Hurricane Katrina came through the area in New Orleans, Louisiana.

The black man loots, the white people “find.” In a nutshell, there you have the coverage of Katrina’s aftermath.

Sadly, it isn’t surprising that such overt racism is still the norm in the mainstream media. The media is only a reflection of the society it’s in; if a society is racist, then so too will be its media.

What is disturbing to me is how this tragedy in the deep South is resuscitating so many nasty deep South stereotypes.

After word got out about the looting in downtown New Orleans, the white Republican governor of next-door Mississippi made it clear that looters in his state would be dealt with by “whatever means necessary.”

Why beat around the bush? Why not just dig out the old Mississippi footage of the German shepherds and the fire hoses and be done with it? We all know that’s what he meant.

After all these years, the prime directive in America is still this: Keep the darkies in line. All else pales with that overriding goal.

Can you imagine the scale of the airlift we’d be seeing if it was mostly white people trapped in the Superdome? If thousands of white people were stranded on roofs while the floodwaters rose?

You’d have Marines in amphibious vessels — well, the Marines that aren’t in Iraq, anyway — storming in to save those poor white folks. You’d have the sky filled with a rotating schedule of military helicopters plucking Caucasians off of roofs all over the Mississippi River delta.

You’d have long coverage of long speeches from the president about our hometown heroes and the great sense of national unity that will come from this tragic — yet strangely beautiful — catastrophe.

But when the American media found out New Orleans is mostly black — gee, who knew? — the window for some good old-fashioned chest-thumping self-congratulatory patriotism closed rapidly.

And instead we got the same footage of the same black men looting the same stores of the same plasma TVs and the same cases of Heineken. To everyone’s everlasting shame.

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Does it seem odd to you that 3,000 Louisiana National Guardsmen are in Iraq and Afghanistan while the entire lower portion of their state is being rendered uninhabitable for the forseeable future?

Does it seem odd to you that soldiers in a combat zone are now more worried about how things are back home than in how things are going in said combat zone?

Does it seem odd to you that the Republican Congress recently cut about $7 billion in funds for New Orleans-area levees?

Does it seem odd to you that your president has for several years now seemed more concerned with how things are going in Iraq than how things are going here?

How does that make you feel?

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Reading this morning’s New York Times coverage of Hurricane Katrina, I’m reminded of how everything today is phrased in terms of finality, and finality’s corollary, new beginnings. It seems that in today’s overhyped, media-saturated, reality-TV world, every big event must be bigger/worse than anything that’s ever come before, and nothing can ever be the same afterward.

No sense of continuity, of shared human experience across the generations. Just a prefabricated “uniqueness” that upon closer inspection turns out to not necessarily be that unique, but something that may have repeated itself thousands of times in human history.

For example, in the Grey Lady’s lead story on the hurricane, we have not just one but two examples of the new solipsism, the new drive to make every new event bigger and more ominous than anything that came before. You see here how silly it’s all become:

Example 1:

In an interview with CNN, the coordinator, Capt. Terry Galbraith, said several hundred survivors still needed to be rescued in New Orleans, but he did not have an estimate for nearby areas.

He added that the disaster and its aftermath would “change the face” of Coast Guard operations in New Orleans. “It’s going to be catastrophic for everyone,” he said.

“Change the face” of Coast Guard operations? What does that even mean? It’s not just me; as the parenthetical treatment indicates, the Times also found that concept somewhat jarring. Has the Coast Guard not faced natural disaster before in its long and storied history? Hurricanes are not new, Capt. Galbraith; especially not to the Gulf of Mexico.

Example 2:

“This is our tsunami,” Mayor A. J. Holloway of Biloxi, Miss., told The Biloxi Sun Herald.

No, it’s not your tsunami, Mr. Mayor. No matter how much devastation your city has experienced, I am quite sure you will not experience 100,000 dead.

What is behind this new compulsion to have everything that happens occupy new historical ground that is only comparable to the most extreme experiences of humankind? Is it because “everything changed” after 9/11, as we were told so many times after that catastrophe? Is it because the world has grown so small in this information age that everyone has a convenient and commonly-held reference point to compare everything to?

And how can you even try to compare a hurricane with a tsunami? Can’t be done. The hurricane announces its arrival days ahead of time; the tsunami gives you maybe 20 minutes warning, max. They both involve lots of water, but so does doing the laundry.

I don’t in any way mean to trivialize the loss of life that Katrina caused, but I must say that I find it disturbing that so much rhetoric is being spouted about what really is little more than a lot of property damage. One bad day of suicide bombings in Iraq takes more life than Hurricane Katrina is likely to.

Hurricanes today simply do not kill anywhere near as many people as they once did. A single hurricane in October 1780 killed over 20,000 people in the Caribbean, during a time when there were few large urban concentrations at all in that part of the world.

Because of the loss of ships and sailors in that one storm, the Royal Navy drastically curtailed its operations in the Caribbean from that point on. Talk about “changing the face” of a maritime operation, Capt. Galbraith.

What hurricanes do these days, of course, is tear down a lot of buildings. That’s really the paradigm shift we’re dealing with. Bodies to buildings. One replaceable, one not.

Seems silly to me to build up a hurricane that causes comparatively few deaths, historically speaking, into some apocalyptic experience. As bad as Katrina certainly was, it’s not much compared to the earthquakes that routinely kill tens of thousands in Iran and Turkey, the typhoons that routinely kill tens of thousands in Bangladesh and India, the carnage taking place in Iraq every single day of the week, month in and month out.

Loss of perspective is a bad thing. I blame TV.

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The buzz today, locally and nationally, is about televangelist Pat Robertson’s bizarre comments on his 700 Club program calling for the U.S. to assassinate Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. Even my mom called me up wanting to know what the deal is with Robertson and why he’s continually allowed to say such strange things to such a large audience.

As we speak, local Democratic activist and attorney Joe Steffen is calling for concerned citizens to call WSAV TV 3, which apparently broadcasts Robertson’s show, and voice their opposition to public airwaves being used to call for the assassination of duly elected presidents of foreign countries.

Here’s a quote from an e-mail I got from Steffen:

If this were the UK under Blair’s new anti-terror law (a law which the Right has lauded as a necessary civil liberties sacrifice in combatting terror) Pat Robertson would be DEPORTED for his call to immediate violence in the name of religion. Can you imagine ANY network continuing to air a program in which the host called for Dick Cheney to be assassinated ? Yet 700 Club was STILL on this morning. I say, we should ask that it be taken off the air unless and until Robertson retracts and appologizes. Tell WSAV that they should do so unless calls to political murder are OK as long as they are directed against someone who has criticized the President and who also happens to run a country with significant oil reserves.

Ah, yes, the oil thing. Seems Venezuela is one of America’s largest suppliers of oil. Seems Venezuela’s leader is now being demonized as a “communist in league with Castro.” Seems the U.S. media forgot to tell folks that President George W. Bush gave at least tacit support to a recent coup attempt against Chavez, which just might explain why the man’s so pissed at us.

Bush went into Iraq in part because Saddam “tried to kill my Dad.” Remember that old chestnut? Chavez, it seems, is also not the forgiving type.

I’m afraid Bush is messing with the wrong guy now. Chavez is no Latin Saddam. He governs with the support of a majority of his people, albeit a thin majority. He controls the massive oil operation in toto. No Halliburton or Exxon required or desired. He also has some newly powerful allies in China and Russia.

And, just as importantly: I wonder how Latino servicepeople in our armed forces, thousands of whom are not yet naturalized U.S. citizens, would feel about being sent to invade a Spanish-speaking country?

About Robertson: I remember visiting the Christian Broadcast Network headquarters in Virginia Beach about 20 years ago when I was fresh out of college. It was a top-flight, professional broadcast operation even then. The place just reeked of money. Though the uber fundamentalist vibe creeped me out — complete with bouquets of artificial flowers and lots of purple highlights around the wood paneling — it was obvious that someone smart was behind all this.

Robertson is not only smart. He is old Virginia money. See, old Virginia money is screw-you money. It’s untouchable. Its reach and influence cross party and generational lines.

In the short time I lived in Virginia in the late ’80s, I learned that blueblood Virginians consider themselves Virginians first, Southerners second, and Americans third. You don’t tell them what to do or what to say; that’s their job, thank you very much.

Robertson isn’t part of some religious right-wing agenda. He does not suck up to the likes of the Bush family, who in his mind are apostates. Keep in mind that during Robertson’s call to off Chavez he also jabbed Bush with this line: “We don’t need another $200 billion war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator.”

Pat Robertson is simply Pat Robertson. He represents nothing but himself. What’s more, that’s all he cares to represent. And he’s got the money to back it up. Like I said: Screw me? No, Pat says. Screw you.

Affiliates like ABC Family Channel (CBN’s home network) and WSAV are the weak sisters. If you want to do something about Pat, take the fight to them. Just don’t take it to Pat. You’ll lose that one everytime.

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You’ll notice a couple of letters to the editor in the issue hitting stands August 24 regarding our letters policy — specifically our willingness to run unsigned/anonymous letters.

The letters reference a particularly nasty personal attack published in this week’s paper from a fellow screennamed “Intruder,” who strongly objects to the anti-war tone of a letter the prior week — which was in itself a letter responding to another letter from the wife of would-be conscientious objector Sgt. Kevin Benderman.

(You gotta love those letter chains, man — where people respond to letters responding to other letters that are in response to letters. I tell ya, editors flat-out live for this kind of stuff.)

I think it’s always an interesting debate, especially in this age of screennames. You can now have a fairly long and fruitful intellectual relationship with someone you know only by their Internet handle. Or a fairly bitter and contentious relationship, for that matter.

Such was not always the case, and I think it’s incumbent on the media — especially the alternative media — to be quick to adapt. Hence, our wild-and-wooly approach on the letters page.

Truth is, there are very few letters I won’t publish. Racial or ethnic slurs are of course the huge no-no. Libelous attacks on non-public figures are also anathema. Another no-go area is when we get a specific consumer complaint about a local small business that has no reference to anything printed in our paper (I generally tell these writers to contact the Better Business Bureau instead of me).

It is true that most mainstream newspapers only publish signed letters. I have rejected such an unimaginative and unentertaining blanket policy for two reasons:

1) Every editor wants a lot of letters in the newspaper. This makes for a more vibrant reflection of the community the newspaper is in. If you start looking for ways to keep letters out of your paper, guess what? You not only get less of those dialogue-provoking letters, you begin to see a kind of “mission creep,” whereby you reject more and more letters on more and more specious grounds. Not a slippery slope any good editor wants to be on.

2) I prefer to err on the side of publication. I don’t at all reject or ridicule the stance of those more old-school editors who prefer the signed-letter route. But my stance is always to publish unless there’s a compelling reason not to. And that applies to the letters page as well as to everything else.

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