Could New Orleans' social breakdown happen in other U.S. cities?
Tags: europeansOn the prestigious pages of the Times of London, Martin Samuel and a Mr J. R. Dunn from America are duking it out, rhetorically speaking.
First, Samuel offers "This diseased city was sunk by benign neglect" (also here):
…The satirical magazine The Onion once published a mocking travelogue. “Woman who ‘loves Brazil’ has only seen four square miles of it”, read the headline. Some of the syrupy tributes to Nawlins from writers who couldn’t tell a housing project from a science project were reminiscent of that. The obituaries were all Tipitina’s, voodoo, streetcars named Desire and give my regards to Bourbon Street. Package-deal country, in other words…
…Every visitor [to New Orleans] is given a map of a grid the size of Romford [apparently a city in England or something] and warned never to venture outside. Beyond that lies the true city, only visited in colourless government surveys and reports, coldly documenting a place beyond care, while doing nothing to address its disease…
…There is no minimum wage and the waiters and dishwashers propping up the tourist trade are not well rewarded… [perhaps he's referring to illegal aliens]
…The suggestion has been that the breakdown of society witnessed in New Orleans could not happen elsewhere. Wrong. The city has extreme problems of violence and deprivation, but the economic apartheid inflicted on America is a wrong turn away in most cities…
Mr. Dunn responds by post (also here):
Sir, I disagree with Martin Samuel’s contention (Comment, September 6) that “the breakdown of society witnessed in New Orleans” could occur elsewhere in the US because of the “economic apartheid” inflicted on American cities.
New Orleans is the most corrupt city in the most corrupt state in the Union, a situation with roots in its early status as a French colony and still uncorrected after two centuries. The state is run as a plantation with taxpayers as its cash crop.
The social results, in normal times, are abject poverty, rampant graft, lack of native industry and the slow, easygoing “Mediterranean” feel so prized by tourists. In times of disaster it leads to the complete collapse that we have witnessed…
