The cBS headline: “Small Amount of Looting at Texas Blast Site,” follows a script ably dissected by social comentator Rebecca Solnit on how authorities promote division among residents of a disaster area to enhance their power at the expense of community feeling and cooperation. DRUDGE cooperates by enhancing the tale with the headline: “Looters Raid Homes.”
The original cBS story depends on the nebulous quote of one police sergeant who can’t get specific because he apparently has nothing to be specific about. Ah, but the coppers have things well in hand. “Very secure” now they say, keeping even homeowners away from their damaged homes.
Which, of course, also is going on in Watertown, Mass, where postal worker Michael Demirdjian has been barred from his home, which contradicts the WaPo’s headline that residents have been told to stay home behind locked doors. This supposedly to aid the search for one bombing suspect, though I suspect “the authorities” there are simply reveling in their ability to order people around—shutting down schools, businesses and whole neighborhoods.
Looks pretty hysterical from afar. And counterproductive since, as Solnit makes plain with historical evidence, it turns people who might have helped in the search into passive sheep either isolated from one another or herded from one place to the next by armed and strutting bureaucrats who are absolute strangers to the area and in the best of circumstances couldn’t find their posteriors with both hands.
UPDATE: Forget TSA’s airport excesses, the bureaucrats have turned Boston into a “Prison City.”
MORE: Life in the Police State “…as convoys of heavily armed officers and troops arrived by the hour.” You couldn’t pay me to live in Massachusetts.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 