Sometimes the White Man’s Burden is just unbearable. Try explaining that to my Stockholders now. All they want is a bottom line of profit. They don’t understand at times, what we are up against.
Katrina wasn’t enough, you know those levees had to fail for it to be the Perfect Disaster for a nice white Capitalist takeover. It was almost done. Most of the tract houses and apartment buildings are still boarded and abandoned. There were “just enough” people of color left to play for the Tourists on Bourbon. Maybe a couple Chiefs who can still convince themselves that there is “pride on Bourbon” enough to create a second line or two here and there; while working two jobs and moonlighting at the strip clubs as musicians. But overall, the Blacks and the Creoles left en masse, and the Real Estate is there for the picking. Like manna from the heavens, room for all the rich white people who love just a “tiny bit” of color in their lives. You know, the “cultural absorption” spectator sport that convinced them in the past that seeing Buffalo Bills traveling Indian Show made them experts in Lakota, and that on Prince Spaghetti day everyone is Italian. God knows, there was no culture there in the slums, anyway. Poor people and their poor English, and the scariest of them at least stay way-back in the deep bayous. Those people are crazy.
We had such plans. The Resorts. The Marinas. The theme parks with genuine Cajun shrimp kabobs, but not too spicy for the freckle faced kiddies from the corn belt. Gauhrunteeeeed. Its not like we weren’t planning on buying east coast shrimp, anyway; and no one swims in the ocean when you have a series of cascading pools, but the smell? Its not just the oil and dispersants, now its dead fish too.
I don’t know if we can divest quick enough. Who the hell is going to come down to the smell of petrochemicals and tar balled beaches? I wouldn’t bring my yacht down here on a bet. Not even my sailboat or offshore racer. Can you imagine what a mess it would be getting that gunk in the intake of even one of those motors? Some of these chunks are big enough to snap a shear pin the size of baseball bat, let alone what it might do to the actual prop. And by all thats holy, we certainly don’t want them coming in by air. Then they could really see the mess down here.
My stockholders are in convulsions right now. I just cannot see my way through to turn a profit off this yet. A skimmer/refinery would take far too long to make and far too much operation to make money. All these lots, and not a thing I can do with them, now.
I can see only one solution, ironic as it is. We must just walk away from here, and let the damned unwashed have it back. Its not like myself or my investors are racist or anything, but lets face it, it could have been one of the richest cities in the South, and we would have given those that stayed jobs. Its not like they were doing anything for themselves anyway. Every city has its slums. Every place that white people make nice, has the lazy fringes who choose to live like pigs on its skirtcoats. They are just different. They like to live like that.
There have always been the poor. I mean, these people could work if they wanted to. There are plenty of jobs. But if you let them into the prime real estate, it ends up looking like a dump. Who wants their cities to look like this? That’s not how we live. They choose it. They are too busy with their little customs and superstitions to get up off their asses and make something of their world. They count on us, its a burden, but we have to make LIVABLE places; places that give them the inspiration to rise above. We created industry, we created wealth. Most lands are wasted on these fringers.
Its not like we are giving up, people have a hunger for warm sunshine, pristine resorts, and just a wee but of “color” to entertain them. You know, a good tsunami or huge Earthquake in L.A. would be a fine thing about now. We could remake that shithole into a white paradise… the way God intended it to be. Once the area was, shall we say, cleansed for us, we could bring on a few of those chicano types to play a little mariachi for flavor. New Orleans had Mardi Gras, but we could turn Cinco de Mayo into the Festivals to end all Festivals. Maybe we could do both, just relocate Mardi Gras to LA and hire some feather dancers and queers to sex up the place for a few days. People love their naughty.
I mean, if we could bypass some of the International backlash, Haiti would have progressed much further by now. It is still in the works. There is a different market now. One of the losses we had to take on this whole “terrorist” drama is that even the affluent are leery about leaving the Country. The ubers still come; we have that niche market. Being able to travel under the auspices of owning the means of travel has its perks. Still, the developers in India knew, they created lovely resorts after the 2004 Tsunami. We were THIS CLOSE to making NOLA a paradise.
Now? We have to just walk away, like all those lazy quitters did when the Storm came.
This is an Oil Hurricane. There’s no way back from that. But a good businessman knows when to cut his losses. The only question left is “What’s Next?” It may sound odd to pray for another, more manageable disaster, but I think God wipes the slate clean so his chosen can create new heavens on Earth.
So, So Long, Disneyland South.
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in even trying to put myself into the minds of the Disaster Capitalism exploiters.
You know, you can travel anywhere on Earth, anywhere not Westernized or made unto a Kleptocracy, and people DO NOT LIVE LIKE THIS!
Exploiters CREATE the slums out of ordinary people.
Even as the men came home from WWI, II, and Viet Nam and Korea, surprised that much of the world still is living in “third world” conditions: using horses to travel, plowing by ox, whatever…. they still found the people happy, well fed, their villages clean and friendly.
People were just floored by the South Pacific’s beautiful people and way of life. People were just smitten with Hungarian villages.
Then we did what we always do. Came in, changed it, fouled it, took the resources and made the resources unavailable to the people who lived there…. all across the globe. Colonialism started it, but industrialization finished it – once mass-production allowed a new class of Uber-rich, the planet was done.
I know I didn’t speak to the environmental angle of this. That has been well covered by better than me.
To me, this is a microcosm of what is happening everywhere… Katrina is a disaster that is still happening, to those FROM that area. This latest disaster is just the final death throe.
I will not rest until NO SINGLE PERSON has to live in hunger, displacement, bone-shattering labor and still sleeps in a sewer, where water is filth.
Exploitation as way of life has to END. Racist thinking and entitlement has to end.
I feel soiled, but I do believe it is the way they think.
Ponder it, if you will.
… reduced to living in “homeless” encampments, in tents and shanties on the beaches of what had less than a century ago been their own sovereign, independent country.
We were never a nice people from the beginning. We were expansionists, plundering and killing, causing genocide, our way through the Indians, the Mexicans, slavery, and on and on.
The rich do not give a flying fuck about the “life” — whatever succumbs in their path is simply “collateral damage.”
And it’s all so, so easy for the corporatists — all the deregulations, lack of controls, laws, etc. Greed has no conscience. And “greed” has been enabled by our government for quite a number of years now — and it all just gets worse and worse — there’s nothing to stop criminals.
BP has been criminally negligent for years and years, but so what? We have no stringent laws over them, the EPA is a joke.
The wars, the endless killing, maiming, torturing, use of drones, white phosphorous, and depleted uranium and it’s all been “so what.” But all these insidious behaviors creep into the “psyches” of many, giving way to similar attitudes even domestically.
I could go on and on, as most of us here could.
Thanks, Diane G.
You are not soiled.
That`s the blood from the tear in your heart.
What a great essay.
Thank you.
Thinking that way in order to do the essay might have made you “feel” soiled, but you are NOT soiled!
…as you do, Diane, and acted on that, we would be going in the right direction instead of killing our planet. Please pardon the “our”. It is not ours. It is only ours to protect and nourish; but not to possess, not to destroy.
has to be savored in it’s true majestic enviornment. Not the cheap plastic copy made by a cheap plastic society dominated by sociopathic controlling assholes. It would not be so sad, so tragic if the solution lied in the private safes of “energy” companies. Yeah the secrets of Tesla’s free energy which they have had and developed for he last hundred years. I did say sociopathic control fucks right.