Denmark Vesey: Left. Right. Left. Right. Hegel Is On The March. The Plantation Meme Shifts From Sympathy to Pity to Scorn • Enter The Looting Narrative

Friday, January 15, 2010

Left. Right. Left. Right. Hegel Is On The March. The Plantation Meme Shifts From Sympathy to Pity to Scorn • Enter The Looting Narrative

Haitians argue over goods looted from a store in downtown Port-au-Prince. The woman holds in her top the share she claims. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times / January 14, 2010)

U.N. officials said today that looters had broken into a warehouse in Haiti's ruined capital, Port-au-Prince, where the World Food Program stored 15,000 tons of food, but the losses appeared to be limited, the Associated Press reported.

U.N. officials warned that residents of impoverished Port-au-Prince are becoming more impatient about the lack of assistance they've gotten since the magnitude 7.0 earthquake devastated their city Tuesday.

4 comments:

Sasha said...: This was followed by a story on CNN last night about how the prisoners "escaped" from the ruined prison and are now "running free."; Jan 15, 2010, 3:53:00 PM
the good nurse said...: anybody remember the movie "trading places" staring eddie murphy?
trust me, if any of us were in the same situation as our brothers and sisters in Haiti we would be "looting" as well to stay alive....
the media "loves" to spin these types of tragedies involving people of color to make us appear savage-like...damn shame.; Jan 15, 2010, 4:36:00 PM
Denmark Vesey said...: You are absolutely right Sista Nurse.

I saw it on the horizon the moments after the quake hit the news.

The coverage always starts off sooooo empathetic. Soooo understanding.

Then it shifts to the Goody Two Shoes riding to the rescue.

Then it shifts to questions about "why" did this happen.

Then the meme implies the Haitian people are ultimately responsible for their entire plight.

Then the imagery shifts from photos of reunited mothers and dust covered daughters ... to aggressive threatening dangerous black men on the verge of looting, violence and rape.

2 Weeks from now the Plantation will walk away shaking its collective head.

There will be periodic media coverage of the "corruption" and the failure of the dollars to reach the people of Haiti.; Jan 15, 2010, 4:47:00 PM
uglyblackjohn said...: I've been through two hurricanes and evacuated from one.

There are always people who prepared for disasters and have Brita water filters (bottled water "spoils" after a while), bleach, Aspirin, multi-vitamins, those little solar powered landscaping lights (only last a few hours but they don't require batteries) and a lot of peanut butter.
(But this survival kit is hard to use when it's burried under tons of rubble.)

Then there are always people so dependent on others that they cannot function without someone telling them what to do.

Ideally, enough from the first group have built relationships with those from the second group and can offer assistance.

Disasters are stessful and in great stress ones true self is often exposed.
The good will continue to do good and the bad will continue doing bad things.; Jan 15, 2010, 7:23:00 PM

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"There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."

The founders of the American state understood that the proper functioning of a democracy required an educated electorate. It is this understanding that justifies a system of public education and that led slaveholders to resist the spread of literacy among their chattels. But the meaning of "educated" has changed beyond recognition in two hundred years. Reading, writing, and arithmetic are no longer sufficient to decide on public policy. Now we need quantum mechanics and molecular biology. The knowledge required for political rationality, once available to the masses, is now in the possession of a specially educated elite, a situation that creates a series of tensions and contradictions in the operation of representative democracy.

Margaret Sanger. Woman, Morality, and Birth Control. New York: New York Publishing Company, 1922. P

Lord Bertrand Russell, The Impact of Science On Society (Routledge Press: New York, 1951).

"At present the population of the world is increasing at about 58,000 per diem. War, so far, has had no very great effect on this increase, which continued throughout each of the world wars.. War has hitherto been disappointing in this respect, but perhaps bacteriological war may prove effective. If a Black Death could spread throughout the world once in every generation, survivors could procreate freely without making the world too full. The state of affairs might be unpleasant, but what of it?"