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Now that Representative Nancy Pelosi and her delegation have given President Bush and his administration the equivalent of a diplomatic wedgie during their trip to the Middle East, it would be fitting if they would make another high profile trip to highlight the incompetence and rigidity of this administration. That trip, of course, would be to New Orleans.
If you have been paying any attention to the news recently you will have heard about the murder epidemic in New Orleans, which has reached an unprecedented crescendo in the last few days. This past weekend four people were murdered in the Big Easy. On what should be called Bloody Monday, four people were shot. The New Orleans Against Crime website reported yesterday:
New Orleans police are at the scene of a fatal shooting at Gov. Nicholls and North Johnson streets. One person was killed in the shooting that occurred shortly after 5 p.m.
The number of murder victims in New Orleans since Saturday equals the number of soldiers killed in Iraq during the same time period. According to the global security.org web site eight American soldiers died in Iraq from March 31 to April 2, the latest date for which figures are available.
Since the beginning of the year, 54 people have been murdered in New Orleans, while 269 American soldiers have died in Iraq. Of those 269, 93 died in one city, Baghdad, although the reports list many of the deaths as “northwest of Baghdad,” or “south of Baghdad,” so it is a bit more difficult to determine exactly how many have died in Baghdad itself.
Estimating the population of Baghdad is not easy, but most sources I found put it at between 5-6 million as I noted in my post For God and King George. Getting reliable estimates for New Orleans is almost as difficult–especially because there is a tendency to play politics with the numbers–but the consensus estimate for the current New Orleans’ population is between 200,000-300,000–and the higher figure is quite optimistic.
Putting all these data together means the number of American troops killed in Baghdad this year is 93/5,000.000 while the number of murders in New Orleans is 54/250,000. In other words, an American is more likely to die a violent death in New Orleans than in Iraq.
And what is this country doing about The War in New Orleans? Not much. There have been no presidential requests for more “troops” in New Orleans, for a surge to meet the surge in murder rates. While a trip to Baghdad seems to be on every politician’s “must visit” list, especially if you are a presidential candidate, no politician has booked a trip to New Orleans recently. The media circulated pictures of John McCain touring Baghdad in a flak jacket. Would he wear one in New Orleans?
Oh yes, I forgot, President Bush did make it down in early March. He visited a charter school and promised for the umpteenth time to get more money to New Orleans. He even made some remarks about the crime problem:
One of the things that you’ve got to continue to work on, and we want to help you at the local level, is in the criminal justice matters. It’s important for the society to say loud and clear, there are consequences for crime. And there’s got to be a — (applause) — there can’t be any doubt in somebody’s mind that this is a consequential society if you want to be able to walk your streets safely.
And so I know the Attorney General was down here the other day. He briefed me personally on working with the local folks on — for the federal government helping, what really is a local responsibility. And yet, we want to help. We want to make sure your criminal justice system does it’s job so that citizens feel safe and tourists feel safe to come. It’s a big responsibility we have. To the extent that we can help, we will.
All of us who have heard too many Bush speeches would see this one as falling into the genre of “I care, but I/m not going to do anything.” Notice there are no specifics from the president about the crime problem, in fact he goes out of his way to indirectly criticize New Orleans itself, saying the murder epidemic �really is a local responsibility.�
Epidemics, whether they are of murders or flu pandemics or AIDS signal profound disturbances in the system. They also, unfortunately, tend to follow compounding curves�what those of us in system dynamics refer to as an infection model. That is, I infect you, you in turn infect those you come in contact with who are not immune and so on.
I am no expert on New Orleans, but I find in its murder rate a curious parallel with the War in Iraq, especially in Baghdad. We all know the deaths in Iraq have come about as the result of an internal civil war between rival religious factions and their militias. From what I read about the New Orleans murders, many of them are gang-related, battles between rival factions and their militias.
Stories coming from Baghdad recently have stressed that many people are leaving the city, especially the middle class, who no longer feel safe. Those who live in neighborhoods of the opposite faith or dominated by some militia group they do not belong to are abandoning their houses to move to neighborhoods dominated by their own factions.
Something like that is also happening in New Orleans. People who can afford to are moving out of the war zones. Those not associated with the gangs that dominate a certain area also must be looking to move to safer places. In February the New York Times reported on the exodus from New Orleans. The story opens with a profile of a young couple who have endured human feces deposited on their roof, two burglaries in the space of a week, and the attempted carjacking of a pregnant friend.
Now they have joined hundreds of the city�s best and brightest who, as if finally acknowledging a lover�s destructive impulses, have made the wrenching decision to leave at a time when the population is supposed to be rebounding.Their reasons include high crime, high rents, soaring insurance premiums and what many call a lack of leadership, competence, money and progress.
As usual, blogdom has almost totally ignored the War in New Orleans for the War in Iraq. Nobody publishes the names of the New Orleans dead in the newspaper. Nobody publishes pictures of what is happening in this war the way they do in the other.
The War in New Orleans was created by our government and FEMA’s botched response to Katrina. You might say it may be the worst war against our own people since the Civil War. Many figure the War in New Orleans will eventually wear itself out. The gangs will reach a truce, or their battles will become less frequent. There also seems to be a rising national indifference about New Orleans, a kind-of “it’s not my problem” attitude that seems resigned to letting the city slowly decline. That the city is largely populated by people of color should be a warning sign to those who care about equality.
In the early days of the Civil War, both sides also thought the conflict would be short. The elite of the nation’s capitol even drove out to Bull Run in carriages with picnic lunches to watch what they thought would be an easy victory for the North. Few imagined the slaughter that lay ahead.
That was because they did not really grasp the root causes for a war that even today we argue over. A major root cause of The War in New Orleans is also misunderstanding what lies behind it. As I noted in the concluding chapter of Strange Death, Katrina symbolized the battle between those who believe in a level playing field and those who do not. (I have reposted that chapter on the sidebar about the book).
The War in New Orleans continues and the casualties pile up in the city morgue. So Representative Pelosi, please come to New Orleans to dramatize the tilted playing field the Republican Counterrevolution has created. Whatever you do, don’t treat this war like those in Washington treated Bull Run.
Ralph Bauer also blogs at My Left Wing, All Things Democrat, and Progressive Historians.
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