It just occurred to me that “Crackpipe Ray Nagin” (or “Crackpipe Bobby Jones”) would be a great name for a boxer. For get all these monikers like James Bonecrusher Smith", “Thomas Hitman Hearns”, “Bernard The Executioner Hopkins”, and “Terrible Terry Norris”, getting in the ring with “Crackpipe Ray Nagin” would be unsetttling indeed.
That’s okay. You don’t live in New York. I wouldn’t expect you to understand.
Oh, and dude, I heard you the first time. Really no need to foam at the mouth so hard that you posted the same retorts twice, eight minutes apart. We’re in the Pit of course, but yes I am reading what you have to say carefully and whether or not I agree with it, I respect the clarity and articulate methods you are using to make your argument. You needn’t make the same arguments twice, however. 
How about moving upthread and looking at the overlay of New Orleans flooding with NYC and NJ? Perhaps then, even though you don’t live in New Orleans, you might see what prompted the mayor to make his ham-fisted, foot-in-mouth comparison.
Interesting statement, in light of the fact that you don’t live in NOLA. That hasn’t stopped you from reaching your conclusions about Nagin and his intentions.
Not that I live in NOLA either, mind you. And that’s precisely why I hesitate to throw him to the lions with the same viciousness that I see others demonstrating. Unless I have a good reason to do so. I’m still searching for that reason. Once I find that reason, I’ll hop on the bandwagon along with all the rest.
I was hoping nobody would have noticed that. But still, sometimes a little reiteration is a good thing. Makes the juices of wisdom soak in deeper, I say.
No, we’re fighting for the “inalienable right” to make fun of politicians in the pit. You’re the one who brought race into it. You’re the one insisting that certain race-neutral terms can’t be used around black people 'cause black people are different. In fact, near as I can tell, you’re the only racist in this thread.
It’s not an accusation. It’s an off-handed insult that had nothing to do with the content of the OP. The way you keep insisting that this was some sort of legitimate accusation or attempt to convince people that Nagin is really a crack addict just highlights how badly divorced you are from reality.
Yeah, if you can show there’s no reason at all for someone to say that Nagin is acting like he’s on crack except that he’s black, you’d be somewhere in the vague geographical area of a valid point. Except you have no evidence at all that the comment was there because Nagin was black. Just your own racist insistence that black people have to be treated differently than white people. That is what you’ve been saying in this thread, right? That “crackpipe” is a race-neutral term when applied to a white person, but always, automatically deeply racist if applied to a black person? Maybe I’m the one on crack (I’m white, so I can describe myself that way safely) because I always thought “not being racist” meant “treating people of different races the same way.” I guess that was wrong: not being racist apparently means treating black people like they’re made out of spun glass and using special vocabulary with them so as not to damage their delicate feelings.
Thanks, I got your point. Your point, like most very stupid ideas, is not really hard to understand. I just reject it, on account of all the aforementioned stupid it’s got all over it. Yes, there are a lot of racist assumptions in the War on Drugs, and crack plays a big role in that. However, you’ve shown no evidence that the OP buys into any of that. You’ve taken one off-hand comment, that you admit could be used without incident when talking about a white politician, and assumed the very basest of motives for making that statement. That’s pretty fucked up, in my book. In fact, I’d say that’s far more damaging to the future of race relations than anything in the OP. Racism is alive and well, and very dangerous, but screaming about it here just makes you look like a fool, and is going to make most people think, “Well, if that’s what people are talking about when they say racism is still a problem, apparently it’s not such a big deal.” This Chicken Little shit demeans real, honest-to-God racism. The more you spout this nonsense, the less likely people are going to be to take racism seriously when it actually occurs. Particularly if it’s you doing the reporting, because you’ve pretty much destroyed any credibility you might have had on the issue with this thread.
That’s not even remotely what I said. “Nigger” is a racist term no matter what context it’s being used in. It was a racist term in the sentence I just typed! Racism is built directly into the definition of the word. If the racism of “crackpipe” is determined by the race of the person it’s applied to, the term is not racist. If I can call George Bush “crackpipe,” and not be a racist, then I can use that exact same line of reasoning to call Ray Nagin “crackpipe,” and still not be a racist. Yeah, it’s possible that the OP had a racist motive in using that term on Nagin. If he’d just called Nagin an asshole, there’d be exactly the same possibility, and you’d have precisely as much evidence of the OP’s racism: none at all.
Don’t be retarded. “Jungle Bunny” is a compound noun with, once again, a specific racist meaning, which it retains no matter what context it’s used. If crackpipe has a non-racist context, how do you know that the OP wasn’t using it in that context? Why do you assume that it’s automatically the racist context being used, if there’s no other evidence in the OP, his subsequent posts to this thread, or his posts anywhere else on this board of racist tendencies? Oh, right: because you’re a smug, arrogant asshole.
Yeah, it’s possible to use “crackpipe” in a racist way. “Ray Nagin uses a crackpipe just like all the other black people,” that would be pretty racist. But “Ray Nagin uses a crackpipe,” isn’t necessarily racist. It might be, just as much as “Ray Nagin is an asshole,” might be inspired by racist sentiments. But there’s no way to actually know, without a hell of a lot more context. So, a rational, fair minded person would generally assume the non-racist explanation until shown evidence of racist intent. The irrational person, on the other hand, jumps up and down and screams, “You can’t say that about black people, you racist!” and ignores anything that resembles logic or common sense. Because, you see, that screws up their fantasy where they’re oh-so-much more enlightened than the common plebes who draw all their cues on race relations from smart-alec insults on an internet message board.
And now, at last, we have the Soup formula for identifying racism: it’s anything he says that it is. I’m probably a racist for using the word "enlightened’ in my last paragraph, now. Why? I don’t know: apparently, there are no rules about what makes something racist. We just have to take your word for it, I guess.
I don’t know. You’re the most prominent champion of thinking stupid thoughts in this thread. You tell me why you think them.
No, at best people recognize hyperbole when they see it, and don’t feel they have to constantly self-edit in case some moron, somewhere, takes them literally and… thinks bad things about some corrupt, incompetent pol somewhere. Horrors!
(Can I call Ray Nagin that? Or is that also racist? Lots of people out there think blacks are dishonest and stupid, so I might be furthering a stereotype by saying that. I guess people just should never say anything bad about black people under any circumstance, just in case.)
It’s not a lie. It’s an insult. You would have to be terminally stupid to read the title to this thread and think that it’s a literal accusation of illegal drug use. Yes, there are such stupid people out there, but I’m opposed on general principles to reducing everything I say to the lowest common denominator. And there are some racist out there who are going to think poorly of Ray Nagin just because he’s black. These people exist irrespective of the titles of pit threads in the SDMB, and no amount of self-censorship is going to make them go away.
Again, the only person pursuing a race angle in this thread is you. You’re the one who insists that blacks have to be treated differently than whites. You’re the one who sees Ray Nagin’s name and thinks, “Black man” first, and not, “Louisiana politician.” The only person in this thread who’s showing any racist tendencies at all, is you.
So knock it off.
Ahhh, that explains it. I couldn’t tell the dry cleaner what that stuff was. 
Touché, I do not live in NOLA but have been making judgemental remarks on Nagin. I withdraw the comment about " you’re not from New York".
I’m a bit leery about wading into this mess after all this crap, but considering all the criticism he’s been getting, I thought it would be a good idea to point out some of what he’d done pre-Katrina. I was living in the New Orleans area when Nagin got elected. I lived two blocks across the parish line in Jefferson Parish so couldn’t vote for him, but I saw his first two years in office and what he did every day. And he was showing a lot of promise at becoming, in many ways, a remarkably effective mayor.
He started seriously trying to root out corruption in city/parish government. He fired the entire brake tag department (80 people) en masse. (A brake tag shows your car has undergone a minimal safety inspection.) The brake tag staff was making a fat living off bribes to pass vehicles that would otherwise fail inspection. He fired a whole bunch of people in the water department. He worked with the feds to try to uncover where the corruption ran deepest and see if he could root it out. He was digging into corruption in a number of other city departments, but they didn’t announce where until they could announce results, for obvious reasons. I know even the DA’s office, among others, was getting careful scrutiny, though; no city department was immune.
He tried to establish a decent accounting system for the city. First off, though, he had to find the money. Millions of dollars were simply unaccounted for and unaccountable for. He tried to set the city up on a sounder financial footing, tried to keep track of the city coffers as if he was running a business. It was a serious uphill battle, but he was working on it, and he seemed to be doing a good job at it.
He tried to improve the schools. He brought in a new superintendent, who was rapidly driven out by school board members who, I suspect, didn’t want their under-the-table sources of income disrupted. (Like the one school board member whose dad, a janitor for the district, had made $160,000 the previous year in wages and “overtime.”) Unfortunately, the schools were in such awful shape that he really didn’t have much success – for example, they’d managed to lose something like $180 million in federal funding for the schools simply by failing to do the paperwork timely.
He even started making a serious effort at fixing the streets. That may not seem like much, but in places the streets were so bad you could barely drive down them without tearing the guts out of your car. The streets were actually getting fixed, and not just on the Mardi Gras parade routes; they were getting fixed all over town, especially in many poor neighborhoods where they were the worst.
He really was starting to make a difference. He couldn’t be bought, unlike his predecessor, Mark Morial, who like so many NOLA politicians before him left the state after his second term as mayor was up, presumably to make it harder to prosecute him – the feds were looking into his actions very carefully, by all accounts; they’d gone into his office and seized boxes of evidence shortly before Katrina. I suspect most of the corruption probes died post-Katrina, however, simply because so much evidence was lost.
Nagin never was inspired to be a politician; he was a businessman who loved the city and hated the corruption. He was elected by the white business community, who saw him as a way to improve the environment for business in the city. His election was a surprise come-from-behind victory; up until a few days before the election, he was not predicted by anyone to win.
And then all hell broke loose with Katrina. Yes, Nagin has shot his mouth off. But he wasn’t a professional politician. Hell, he was barely a civic leader – he’d been the local vice president of the cable company, not a position one normally thinks of as acquiring heroic status. I cannot imagine how awful it must be to see the city you love and all the hard work you’ve put into trying to clean up its mess be just destroyed literally overnight. He was faced with a situation truly beyond imagining.
Not to disparage what happened on 9/11, but the physical damage was limited to one small area of Manhattan. The entire city of New Orleans was nearly wiped off the map; 80% of homes in the city were underwater. They finally had to ask every citizen in the entire city to leave until the water went down and they could restore some city services, any city services. The death toll was quite comparable in both disasters, but it’s hard to compare them because each event had such a different cause and scope. 9/11 was caused by a small group of terrorists, who had an effect on thousands of people, but they were clearly outsiders, enemies of the US; the mess from Katrina was caused by systemic failures at all levels of government, the American government letting down American citizens when they needed help the most. The sense of betrayal runs very, very deep. New York pulled together when faced with its crisis; NOLA tore itself apart because, overnight, abandoned by everyone, it reverted to the law of the jungle. And the folks who could have sent in the necessary help did nothing.
Nagin was left with almost no support – the police department, which has a long history of corruption all its own, fell apart badly after Katrina; about a third of the department, by reliable account, deserted, and the ones who stayed had no communications, no vehicles, no resources, nothing. Many of their homes were destroyed, too. There were a few National Guardsmen at the Super Dome, but they certainly weren’t enough to make a difference in the city, and they didn’t have communications or any way to call in reinforcements.
City Hall also had no communications; one blogger who rode out the storm in the building I’d worked in to keep his company’s servers up and running, and for days was almost the only live communications from downtown New Orleans, reported a few days after the storm that he had to wade through waist deep water to help City Hall restore minimal internet access. Nagin was let hanging out to dry just like the rest of the city. And a few weeks after the storm, he didn’t even have any money left in city coffers to pay the people who’d stayed to help; he had to lay off 1/3 of the city employees.
He was begging for help. Blanco let him down badly by not getting more National Guard in there sooner, not pushing the feds harder for support, not doing whatever she could to help. She dithered. FEMA dropped every ball they possibly could. Nothing happened for days on end, while people kept suffering. And suffering.
I left NOLA a month before Katrina, so I haven’t seen firsthand how things have been going this past year, although I followed every shred of news I could find for many weeks. I’ve seen the news stories. Yes, Nagin shoots his mouth off unwisely. No, he’s not done a perfect job. But honestly, I don’t know anyone else who, faced with that situation, could have done much more.
He’s really not an evil man. He’s probably in over his head, but I don’t want to forget that he’d done a lot of good before Katrina came along. He deserves a lot of credit for what he’d been doing; unfortunately, it all got lost in the flood. Just like everything else. So don’t vilify him; if anything, he deserves pity more than anything else.
Great post, Mama Tiger, thanks. I couldn’t understand how people could believe their fellow citizens were raping babies in a shelter, and I still can’t entirely, but I keep on forgetting how dysfunctional the entire city was.
Yeah, good post. I don’t much care for Nagin, and definitely don’t think he is qualified for the job, but I can count the number of politicians I think unwaveringly put his people before himself. That mild profanity laden radio interview he did during the storm almost brought a tear to my eye, whereas I felt like hitting something every time Blanco or Bush were on television.
I don’t think what he had racist intentions. Blacks are a huge part of NOLA culture, and it would be a shame to lose a significant part of their NOLA citizens, but the comments still alienated me.
Excellent point of view and information, Mama Tiger. Thank you for wading in .
Mehitabel, this has been discussed and debunked before, both here and in the media. Please provide cite that babies were raped anywhere in New Orleans as a direct result of crowded shelter conditions post-Katrina.
Couldn’t understand how they could BELIEVE it. Get off your high horse and read for comprehension.
I don’t understand your confusion. If the people outside the city believed that it was happening, then why wouldn’t the people actually caught up in the mess not believe it? It’s not like their “fellow citizens” would be anything more than nameless, faceless strangers. And it wasn’t like they had the benefit of other news sources to influence their judgements.
If I was stranded in a building with thousands of desperate people for days at a time, with no food or water or clean toilet facilities, no TV or newspaper access, I’d probably be believing crazy things too.
“Hey, ywtf, Santa Claus and the Michael Jackson are outside passing out water and subway sandwiches!”
“Really? Let’s get in line!”
I’m was born and raised in New Orleans, and have lived in Baton Rouge since 1989 with close ties to New Orleans. My family lives in Metairie only a mile or so from the infamous 17th Street Canal breach. **Mama Tiger’s ** post is spot-on.
While not excusing what he said, which I felt was ridiculously stupid, Nagin was addressing an overwhelmingly majority African-American crowd during a Martin Luther King, Jr. Day event. I can see that he wanted to reassure them that they were not going to be left out of the rebuilding of the city, and he let his mouth overload his ass, as he has on many occasions.
There is no way that anyone can understand how someone could believe some of the things that were believed unless they had experienced being in that particular hell for that particular experience. We mustn’t retcon this… people were sleep-deprived, dehydrated, and extremely traumatized. If you had told me that Al-Queda had blown the friggin’ levees, I’d have at least considered it, and I was 80 miles up the river.
Another native checking in here, though it hasn’t seemed to matter in at least one other thread. I live Uptown in the Carrollton neighborhood near Camellia Grill, Cooter Brown’s, The Maple Leaf, and Jaques Imo’s. I evacuated with my wife and four children and dog before the storm. I returned in mid-September to do relief work with the FDNY and Chicago fire crews. My family returned in mid-October after power was restored to my neighborhood. That’s right. My neighborhood - - one of the least damaged in the city - - was without power for 40 days.
Mama Tiger is correct in almost all respects about Mayor Ray. The inmates had been running the asylum since Dutch Morial (Marc’s father) became mayor in 1978. A lot of crap can happen to a city during 20 years of neglect. Ray was changing that, and those of us who didn’t stand to lose our gravy train loved him for it. Or at least admired him.
Obviously, he’s not a good disaster manager. That, or this disaster is beyond the abilities of most leaders. Imagine if instead of the terror attacks on 9/11 destroying several very large buildings, killing 2,000 innocent civilians, and making a 16 block area a disaster zone, what if the attacks had been - - in a period of several hours - - able to do the following to Manhattan:
[ul]Knock out all regular telephone servive. Knock out all cell phone service, except for text messaging. Knock out most (and ultimately all) fire, police, and EMS radio service.[/ul]
[ul]Knock out all electrical service.[/ul]
[ul]Damage 80% of the structures with anywhere from 1 - 20 feet of water or some other agent. Or, percentage-wise as most damaged structures were single family homes, anywhere from 10% to over 50% of the structure.[/ul]
[ul]Render impassable all but three access points into and out of the island.[/ul]
[ul]Leave tens of thousands of citizens stranded without food, water, or a way to get out of the city[/ul]
[ul]Damage or destroy 80% of the police and fire stations and nearly all of the equipment kept there.[/ul]
[ul]Damage to the point of inoperability 60% of the hospitals.[/ul]
[ul]Damage the natural gas and water distribution systems.[/ul]
[ul]Knock out the water treatment and sewage treatment facilities.[/ul]
[ul]Totally eliminate the city’s revenue stream for 40 days, then reduce it by 80% - 90% for the following three months, and then reduce it to 50% of pre-event levels for the next six months.[/ul]
I could go on - - the debris, the toxic water, the rest of it all - - but I think I make my point. I know my fellow citizens have done little to earn the respect of the rest of the country, and I’m sorry that our Mayor has not exactly been a goodwill ambassador. Still, other than not putting your foot in your mouth, what would you do if you were in charge? How well would you manage?
It took over a hundred posts, but someone finally got called a racist in this thread: me.
Actually, it’s good that the invective is finally showing a little variety. Typing “incredibly stupid” over and over is no way to champion the right to insult people. Of course, neither method exactly demonstrates that one represents the rational and fair-minded side of the controversy, but you can’t have everything. Let’s skip all that and go to some recent arguments:
(A)Because no attempt was made to justify the slur, it’s only an insult, not an accusation. I can’t see why reckless disregard for the truth is a point in its favor, and I don’t know why an insult can’t also be a bigoted derogation. In fact, the phrase is neither: it’s an epithet, which is what you get when you append an appellation (such as “crackpipe”) to a person’s name (say, “Ray Nagin”). The purpose of an epithet is to identify the owner of the name with the qualities implied by the appellation, as in “Philip the Fair,” or “Machine-gun Kelly.” The qualities implied by the word “crackpipe” are, oh, let’s quote somebody from post #74: “Of course it implies crack use.” Okay then.
It’s actually worse than an accusation. An accusation at least lays out some facts which can be evaluated and admits the possibility of a forthcoming defense. An epithet simply assumes the facts and treats the matter as settled. “Crackpipe X? Who’s X? Some guy who smokes crack, apparently.” Quick quiz: if I start calling my neighbor “pedophile John Smith,” no elaboration, no attempt to prove or even explain it, what’s the judge going to do when I explain that I was merely insulting him with no regard for the truth?
And let’s not lose sight of the fact that “crackpipe” is not some random word pulled out of the air. It parrots, exactly, a widespread, well-known, decades-old, false, negative racist stereotype about blacks and crack cocaine. Remember how it goes? The stereotype lends plausibility to the lie, which in turn becomes anecdotal evidence for the stereotype.
(B)It’s not racist unless you can show there is no possible reason other than race for the slur. Might be a little too big a burden of proof, I think. For one thing, it makes it impossible if the people who cast the slurs take the trouble to simply lie again. Convenient for them, not so hot for getting at the truth of the matter. Let’s see if we can find something better. First off, once you’ve eliminated the most common legitimate reason for saying something, that there’s reason to believe it’s true (as we have), you’ve eliminated a lot. Next, you should always ask. Look at what happened in this thread when the OP was asked: he said he did it “because Ray doesn’t use his first name.” So the truth is out, the stated reason is nonsensical, but we have one more clue: the phrase itself. It wasn’t true, it wasn’t fanciful, it wasn’t vague, and it had nothing to do with the reasons why the OP was angry. And out of all the possible word combinations in the language, it just so happened to be the one that’s a common defamatory racial stereotype. Now, what’s probably true?
But you know what? It doesn’t even matter, because appealing to a racist stereotype about black people in order to denigrate a black man is bigotry, and it is wrong no matter what one’s motives are. Even uttered in ignorance, such slurs are not acceptable, and need to be resisted, and the ignorant educated. As far as I’m concerned, whether a person is a racist is a matter between him and his own soul (pause to reflect that the only poster casting the r-label around is…not me).But whatever’s going on inside somebody, we cannot tolerate racist words and actions.
©But I can call a white guy “crackpipe.” Why are you interfering with my attempts to achieve equality, you nasty racist? Ugh. My absolute least favorite pro-bigot fallacy. Not just because it’s so stupid, either. I think it’s mostly the smarm factor: that phony pious wide-eyed insistance that all they want is be a good non-racist by treating everybody exactly the same.
Except that’s not how you avoid being a racist. You avoid being a racist by not saying and doing racist things, including repeating unfair racist stereotypes. You don’t achieve equality through uniformity, you achieve it through a sympathetic understanding of our differences. Equality would be making sure that everyone in the room has fairly distributed drinkable water. Treating everybody the same would be filling the room to a depth of exactly six feet. Okay for the tallest of us, kinda rough on kids and people in wheelchairs. Who’s that up on the ladder? Why, it’s the guy who says equality means treating everybody the same!
Equality is nonpreferential access to medical care. Treating people the same is removing everybody’s appendix.
When it comes to racism, the poverty of this definition of convenience is even more apparent. Say the following things to a WASP: (1)“Pinch those pennies, big nose!” (2) “Nice tie – where’d you steal it?” (3) Is swimming the Rio Grande good exercise?" (4) “Hey, where’s your monkey?” Note the puzzled looks you get. Then say them to, respectively, (1) my friend David, who is Jewish; (2) my friend George, part Roma; (3) my friend Paul, a Mexican-American; and (4) My friend Chuck, whose ancestry is Italian. The same words affect different people differently (By the way, for those of you puzzled at the odd insistence by some that the N-word is uniformly racist no matter who it’s directed at, this is why: they knew they couldn’t get this argument to fly otherwise because nobody would believe that treating people all the same by calling everyone nigger was non-racist). As it happens there are lots of negative racist stereotypes inflicted on blacks and other minorities in the U.S., not so much for whites. Treating everybody the same in this regard is like treating a poor man and a rich man the same by taking $100.00 from each.
“Treating everyone the same” is code for “an excuse to engage in conduct that hurts others a lot more than it does me.” It’s the philosophy of the bully – and the bigot.
(D)By complaining about this small example, you’re helping racism by making it less likely that anyone will pay attention when real racism occurs. This, on the other hand, is my favorite pro-bigot fallacy, just because it is so much fun to deconstruct. First, a quick check: is there any actual evidence offered that this is actually so? No? There never is. Okay, here we go: (1) Take a close look at what it says: “Hey, don’t squawk about the small stuff, or you could get hurt a lot worse.” This isn’t an argument, it’s a threat. (2) There’s no ethical reason to tolerate small-scale racism, and every reason not to. (3) As a practical matter, not fighting small acts of racism merely emboldens bigots to try more and bigger things. (4) We’re not talking about calling out the National Guard for a false alarm, we’re talking about a guy, me, saying to some other guys, “This is bigotry and it isn’t cool.” I’m not calling on any third party to do anything, so there’s no reason anyone would resent this. (5) It assumes that seeing an example of small-scale racism won’t generate sympathy in the average person, which is a pretty repulsive view of humanity and at best unproven. (6) It implies – no, it says --that black victims of racism shouldn’t dare complain or try to do anything about it unless they can get an outside group of whites to approve. This actually makes the crackpipe thing take second place, I believe. (7) It assumes that people who would not help fight small instances of racism would help when the stakes and risks are higher. This is the opposite of the way people behave. (8) The best part – the theory depends on its ability to predict the attitudes and behavior of – me. I’m the third-party white observer who stepped forward to object when the OP made a bigoted remark about the mayor of New Orleans and promoted a baseless slur against black people generally. So I’m being told that I will have outrage fatigue and won’t speak out against larger examples. I’m unimpressed. (9) Maybe the argument was drawing on personal experience, i.e., “well, me and my buddies wouldn’t.” Quel surprise. I think most victims of racism aren’t necessarily counting on any particular white person’s help anyway, still less on those who have a ratings system for how big racism has to get to be worthy of their attention.
(E)You can’t say it’s racist unless you know the motives of the person who uttered the slur. Same as (B) above, same answer. The motive might help decide whether a person is racist, but his words and actions can be judged independently. Plus, this standard gives a pass to anyone who’s willing to lie twice, when he’s already lied once.
(F)The King of Soup wants to decide what racism is – no fair! All I said was the statement of fact that there was no magic list such that, so long as you didn’t use any of the words on it, you couldn’t possibly say anything racist. I don’t want to decide anything: if I see bigotry, I’ll say so, and explain my reasons why, even when people say mean things and make scary faces at me. Other people can listen or read, or not, and decide for themselves. The reason there’s no magic list is that context is ever changing and stereotypes are born all the time, and also because the only people who want one are those who spend their time figuring out how to safely denigrate minorities, and that’s a group people who think seriously about racism aren’t too anxious to please.
I think that’s it, excepting for repititions and personal abuse. I do think everybody should thank Miller, though, for his restraint in his last post. It was good of him not to regale us with further fantasies involving scenarios in which it would be perfectly okay for him to call black people shiftless and lazy.
So there’s hope. Ta.
Thanks, lisacurl and Ivorybill, for validating that I was actually presenting a fairly accurate picture of Nagin and NOLA. I’m not a lifetime native; I only lived there for four years, 2001-2005, but I fell madly in love with the city. I’m really grateful I had the chance to know it the way it was; it probably will never be the same again. Papa T. and I would move back in a heartbeat if we could.
Ivorybill, next time you eat at Jacques Imo’s, have something good for me! Damn, that’s a exceptional restaurant. An exceptional restaurant in a city of exceptional restaurants.
We’re going to make a trip to NOLA next spring for French Quarter Festival; maybe we can have a mini-Dopefest. I’m already scared of what we’ll see.
New Orleans as I knew it died on August 29 of last year. It will come back, but it will be a shadow of itself. It may be better in some ways, worse in others, but above all, it will be profoundly different. It will never, never be the same. A large part of my grief this year has been coming to terms with that. I can’t go home again. Home is forever changed.
You know, I’m really being a jerk.
King of Soup, I apologize. Your intentions here are noble, and I shouldn’t be attacking you for them. I disagree that the OP was racist, although you do have valid concerns. I don’t think either of us approached the topic as well as we should have. If you’d like to give it another go in GD, we can see if we can produce more light and less heat. Or we can just drop it, if you’d prefer.