I was pretty sure, from the way it began, that Bill Whittle's latest would make me even more depressed than I already am. But for some reason it had the opposite effect. I feel beleaguered by pink, but perhaps that's just part of the initiation into grey. One of many strangely uplifting passages:
So, on one hand, we have a very blue city – New York – confronted, out of the clear morning of a perfect fall day, with no warning – with a terror attack, and they march toward the sounds of screams and falling bodies and die by the hundreds. One the other hand, we have New Orleans law enforcement – also blue – whining about wet shoes and helping themselves to the happy period of lawlessness that followed an event that had been expected for no less than seventy-two hours.In New York, we had a governor who got every available resource on the ground as fast as it could get there, and in Louisiana we have a governor who...cried. Governor, your job is to not cry. Your job is to be strong. We have plenty of civilians crying. You want to cry, cry in the car on the way home like everybody else did four years ago. Crying Governors, race-baiting mayors and looting police do not a Finest Hour make.
In New Orleans we have a mayor who left some 400-500 buses sitting fueled and underwater in the Ray Nagin Memorial Motor Pool saying that evil white conservative America was selling out his people within 24 hours of the catastrophe, from a safe and dry and adequately toileted location, while four years ago we had a Mayor who ran to the site of the disaster so quickly it is a full-blown miracle he was not killed when a building collapsed literally on top of his magnificent, combed-over head.
(Cross-posted by Demosophist to Demosophia, Anticipatory Retaliation and The Jawa Report)
Launched by Demosophist at September 6, 2005 01:49 AM | Missile TracksWhittle's essay is certainly uplifting to those of us who are inherently "grey."
However, I have to wonder how grey New Yorkers would be if 9/11 had not been a human agent of adversity, but a natural disaster. Certainly, much of the first-responder infrastructure of NY would have performed as heroic as it did.
I also have to admit that NY under Katrina would have fallen just as shamelessly into the blame-game and been used for political purposes by the MSM to smear the president and advance their political agenda.
In view of that, I would paint NY a pink, rather than the grey that was revealed after the real event of 9/11.
So, I take a little issue with Whittle's rather simplistic view, as good as it is. I believe that the pink/grey classification fits when we are confronted as Americans against outsiders. But the whole color scheme falls apart when we face something like Katrina.
Despite that, I have to applaud the sensible New Yorkers who booed Richard Gere off the stage a few days after 9/11 when Mr. Gere, the expert on Foreign Relations, counseled New Yorkers to reserve their actions and attempt to understand what the terrorists feel...
Posted by: William Thrash at September 10, 2005 07:43 PM