I met Jamar Perry in September 2005, at the big Red Cross shelter in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Dinner was being doled out by grinning young Scientologists, and he was standing in line. I had just been busted for talking to evacuees without a media escort and was now doing my best to blend in, a white Canadian is a see of African-American southerners. I dodged into the food line behind Perry and asked him to talk to me as if we were ofld friends, which he kindly did.
Born and raiused in New Orleans, he'd been out of the flooded city for a week. He and his family had waited forever for the evacuation buses; when they didn't arrive, they had walked out in the baking sun. Finally, they ended up here, a sprawling convention center, normally home to pharmaceutical trade shows and "Capital City Carnage: The Ultimate in Steel Cage Fighting", now jammed with two thousand cots and a mess of angry, exhausted people being patrolled by edgy National Guard soldiers just back from Iraq.
The news racing around the shelter that day was the Richard Baker, a prominent Republican congressman from this city, had told a group of lobbyist, "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did." Josephy Canizaro, one of New Orleans' wealthiest developers, had just expressed a similar sentiment: "I think we have a clean sheet to start again. With that clean sheet we have some very big opportunities". All that week the Louisiana State Legislature in Baton Rouge had been crawling with corporate lobbyists helping to lock in those big opportunities: lower taxes, fewer regulations, cheaper workers, and a "smaller, safer city" -- which in practice meant plans to level the public housing projects and replace them with condos. Hearing all the talk of "fresh starts" and "clean sheets" you cuould almost forget the toxic stew of rubble, chemical outflows and human remains just a few miles down the highway.
Over at the shelter Jamal could think of nothing else. "I really don't see it as cleaning up the city. What I see is that a lot of people got killed uptown. People who shouldn't have died.
He was speaking quietly, but an older man in line in front of us overheard and whipped around. "What is wrong with these people in Baton Rouge? This isn't an opportunity. It's a God damn tragedy. Are they blind?"
A mother with two kids chime in. "No, they're not blind, they're evil. They see just fine"
from: "The Shock Doctrine" -- Naomi Klien
