- What I cannot understand is why the people of Baghdad and Basra should be punished for a meteorological catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico. We should get out and leave them to their own devices. We need the stuff at home, goddamn it. This has all the charm and beauty of John Kerry saying that we ought not to be opening firehouses in Baghdad while closing them in the United States. It also has all the easy appeal of a zero-sum, provincial, isolationist mentality.
Oh, gawd, call the hate-crimes police! Isolationism! Send in NATO, the UN, the United Federation of Planets – whatever it takes to beat some sensitivity into those callous, overfed Americans! They’re racists, too!
- A favorite trope among those who try to politicize the justified outrage over New Orleans is the plight of the slum-dwellers and the dark-skinned, and quite right, too. But it’s highly objectionable to be told, by those who go on in this way, that we should instantly dump the Iraqis and Kurds who are fighting for their lives in a slum that could become another slaughterhouse and plague-spot. There is something degrading and suspect here-why lavish any of our care and resources on the wogs? Does this suggestion do anything to diminish xenophobia and resentment “at home,” at just the time and just the place where we don’t need it? Am I expected to tell a homeless woman in Biloxi that she has just been ripped off by an Ay-rab?
No, you fatally conceited blob of dementia, you can tell those poor white trash in Biloxi that they have been ripped off by Israel-Firsters and Kurdistan-Firsters who wish they would just shut up and vote Republican, or die. The Ay-rabs had nothing to do with it.