New Orleans is scary and you can't make me go there

I've never been interested in experiencing Mardi Gras in New Orleans (or anywhere else, really, for that matter). To each his own, of course, but drunken street parties aren't my idea of a way to let the good times roll.

A dear friend of mine waxes rhapsodic about New Orleans on a regular basis. He's been there several times, mostly for business, and always adds a day or two of vacation onto the business trip so that he can enjoy the food and music. As a vegetarian I'll pass on the jambalaya and the andouille sausage, but I guess I enjoy a beignet and a cup of hickory-coffee as much as anybody else does.

That said, someone please explain to me why I should ever visit New Orleans, and do your explaining without sounding like an apologist freak. Dig this recent article by A.C. Thompson in The Nation:

Facing an influx of refugees [after Hurricane Katrina], the residents of Algiers Point could have pulled together food, water and medical supplies for the flood victims. Instead, a group of white residents, convinced that crime would arrive with the human exodus, sought to seal off the area, blocking the roads in and out of the neighborhood by dragging lumber and downed trees into the streets. They stockpiled handguns, assault rifles, shotguns and at least one Uzi and began patrolling the streets in pickup trucks and SUVs. The newly formed militia, a loose band of about fifteen to thirty residents, most of them men, all of them white, was looking for thieves, outlaws or, as one member put it, anyone who simply "didn't belong."

Awesome. What's even more awesome is that nobody's been investigated or prosecuted, and the vigilantes were operating with the blessing of the police. The situation was treated as completely to be expected, and not a damn thing has been done about it since 2005. But wait, there's more:

"I'm not a racist," [one of the murderous white guys] insists. "I'm a classist. I want to live around people who want the same things as me."

Dude said that with a straight face, honestly believing it is a perfectly reasonable thing to say, believe, and kill people about. He doesn't want people who aren't of his class near him. Therefore, it is acceptable to shoot at people who aren't of his class when they appear in his neighborhood, even if they appear in his neighborhood because their homes have been destroyed in a hurricane. He probably calls himself a Christian, too. And another:

"I'm not a prejudiced individual, but you just know the outlaws who are up to no good. You can see it in their eyes."

I'd quote more, but it's like shooting fish in a barrel. You can read "I'm not a racist, but" statements only so many times before you want to take the dead fish from the barrel and start slapping the speakers with the fish. The article continues with white vigilantes acting out a Red Dawn wet dream on two African-Americans who were trying to find an evacuation bus:

After two shots erupted, Collins and Alexander took off running and ducked into a shed behind a house to hide from the gunmen [. . .]. The armed men, he says, discovered them in the shed and jammed pistols in their faces, yelling, "We got you niggers! We got you niggers!" He continues, "They said they was gonna tie us up, put us in the back of the truck and burn us. They was gonna make us suffer [. . .]. I thought I was gonna die. I thought I was gonna leave earth."

Apparently thinking they'd caught some looters, the gunmen interrogated and verbally threatened Collins and Alexander for ten to fifteen minutes, Alexander says, before one of the armed men issued an ultimatum: if Alexander and Collins left Algiers Point and told their friends not to set foot in the area, they'd be allowed to live.

White residents of Algiers Point weren't much more friendly to the African-American neighbors who actually lived there:

Roughly twenty-four hours [after a neighbor threatened him with "you loot, we shoot"], as Bell sat on his front porch grilling food, another batch of armed white men accosted him, intending to drive him from his home at gunpoint, he says. "Whatcha still doing around here?" they asked, according to Bell. "We don't want you around here. You gotta go." [Bell] was gripped by fear, panicked that he was about to experience ethnic cleansing, Louisiana-style. The armed men eventually left, but Bell remained nervous over the coming days. "I believe it was skin color," he says, that prompted the militia to try to force him out.

And where were the police? The ones who didn't skip out ahead of the storm or who weren't doing their own "foraging" are engaging in don't ask, don't tell. For the purposes of this article, The Nation had to sue the coroner to get autopsy records, many of which were missing or incomplete.

Oh, blah, blah, blah, New Orleans government is corrupt, racism is bad, tell us something we don't know, blah. Well, I still won't put it on my list of places I need to see before I die. Bleurgh.