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Some of the NOLA residents who were evacuated have started circulating a bizarre, but slightly believable, conspiracy theory: that the 'big money' pople blew up the levees to clear space for urban redevelopment.
From BoingBoing:
In the Houston Astrodome last Saturday, I met a man named Robert. He invited me to take a seat beside him on a cot pushed against the wall - his home for the previous three days and the foreseeable future. Robert had lived in New Orleans for all of his 55 years, and was in the St. Bernard projects when Katrina washed it all away. "After the storm," he told me almost as soon as I sat down, "they blew the levees up so they could flood New Orleans." I asked him who "they" were.
"The money people," he answered. "The big money." "Why?" I asked.
Robert shook his head at my naiveté. "They had to get the poor people out so they could get the space." He gestured to the thousands of people in the dome around us, almost all of them African-American, crammed onto cots a few inches apart. "Now they got their space.
"We survived the storm," Robert went on. "We survived the wind and the rain. After the storm passed, the water started rising, and all you heard was 'Boom!' " The explosions, he said, were the levees blowing. "Ask any of these people. The hurricane wasn't that bad, but the opportunity came up."
It was a real estate grab, Robert explained - gentrification with a genocidal edge. And if he was more than slightly paranoid - he didn't want to tell me his last name, and grew visibly nervous when a white stadium employee began sweeping the floor within earshot a few feet away - his theory made a certain kind of sense, far more than any of the official excuses for government inaction. I would later hear similar speculations again and again in New Orleans, and saw them written on the walls. Just across the canal from the flooded 9th Ward, on a corner heavy with the scent of death, these words were scrawled across an abandoned garage: "Fuck Bush They Fucking Left Us Here Them Bitches Flooded Us . . . Them Bitches Killed Our People."
A poster in the comments box underneath the article, a Flordidian who's been through many hurricanes, explains how transformers are likely to short out during hurricanes, producing loud bangs, which seems like a more plausible explanation (explosives would leave forensic evidence). But still, there seems something a little creepy about how the American government has handled NOLA and the subsequent No Man's Land. |
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