A World of Cheese, For your Pleasure

I think the issue is interference in the decoding, and it's the same problem here and on Scalzi's blog.

I actually don't see the complaints about the absolute poverty list as qualitatively different from the complaints about the relative poverty list Scalzi presented. Both seem to be based upon a taboo violation -- one doesn't talk about poverty without magical recitations about the "exceptions" and "personal responsibility" and all that other stuff.

Some people wish to believe that their good fortune is earned through the quality of their person or intelligence, while their bad fortune is external, the end result of a chain of chance. At the same time, they seek the "lucky break" that those even more fortunate have received, unearned. Further, they want to believe that the poor fortunes of others are somehow explicable -- if only they didn't do what I'm too smart to do, they wouldn't be in that mess. Thus, I know I'll never be in that mess.

Many individuals see their good fortune as earned and their bad luck as unearned. At the same time, they see the good fortunes of others as unearned and the bad luck of others as richly deserved. This is where the taboo comes from.

In discussions of relative poverty, this argument even has a small amount of traction; one can make, in a tightly constrained way, better or worse choices. Absolute poverty -- and indeed, this is part of why the term "absolute poverty" is used to differentiate the sorts of things I mentioned from the poverty faced by people in the West -- eliminates any such psychological protection from Fortuna. And thus, people get upset and think such obvious banalities about the inability of 10 year-old whores posting to blogs means something.

All of this, of course, comes from people asking why didn't people simply leave New Orleans before the hurricane hit. In fact, there's a racist talk show host whose name I won't mention that suggest "those people" are getting everything they deserve. Which leads to my own addition to the list:

• Being poor means either being unable or not even allowed to leave a disaster zone.

In this account of some people who were trapped in NOLA after the events there (link provided to me by Paolo), people who had nowhere to go camped out in clear view of passing helicopters and cameras, as well as the local authorities that were at best, refusing to help them. (If anyone can show me that this account is bogus, please let me know.) These authorities lied to the people saying that there were rescue buses waiting for them at the Pontchartrain bridge in order to get them to move (and stop embarassing them, I'm sure). They were greeted by gunfire and the following statement:

They responded that the West
Bank was not going to become New Orleans and there would be no Superdomes in
their City. These were code words for if you are poor and black, you are
not crossing the Mississippi River and you were not getting out of New
Orleans.

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Today, President Bush admitted incompetence and failure in dealing with this hurricane. This is him taking responsibility:

I must say that I am a little shocked that he is admitting some kind of mea culpa, but I guess it's not like he had a choice. He can't really say that the residents were terrorists or anything. He can't blame it on the darkies, at least not the external ones. No one can blame it on the liberals. It's him. Apparently some of the Army people made mention of that fact that they could not complete their duties adequately because almost all of their people were in Iraq. I wonder if Bush is going to be taking more shit for this, then.

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In other news, a couple was charged with negligent homicide when they left 34 people to die in their nursing home. They "turned down an offer from local officials to take the patients out by bus, and did not bother to call in an ambulance with which they had a contract", the attorney general said. The vics were in an advanced state of decomposition.

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Shouldn't former head of FEMA Michael Brown be facing jail time, or at least huge fines?