Rod Dreher's Blog, page 547

The Cajun Pocahontas

Catherine Font Bihm, delivering supplies to a flooded Louisiana friend (Via Facebook)

Read the whole story about this badass south Louisiana woman.

SEC Solidarity Is A Beautiful Thing

Last year, when Columbia, South Carolina was devastated by flooding, the University of South Carolina Gamecocks came to Baton Rouge to play the LSU Tigers. The Tiger Marching Band honored them in Tiger Stadium by playing their alma mater:

Now look at what the Gamecocks have done for us in Baton Rouge, to show solidarity. It’s the LSU alma mater:

You won’t get people in Baton Rouge to agree on Hillary or Trump, but you will get them to agree that University of Alabama head football coach Nick Saban — who used to coach at LSU — is the Voldemort of the SEC. LSU and Alabama are archrivals. But Saban and Alabama are coming together to help us:

“When natural disasters occur, like the catastrophic flooding in South Louisiana, football and rivalries take a back seat to providing help to those in need,” Alabama head coach Nick Saban said. “So many people came to the aid of the Tuscaloosa community following the tornado, we wanted to try and do something to give back to those who have lost so much in Louisiana. I’m very proud of our players and our organization for wanting to step up and help.”

Alabama football’s equipment truck that travels with the team throughout the season will be at several locations from Saturday, August 20, through Tuesday, August, 23.

God bless that man. I heard from an Alabama reader today who is headed down tomorrow to put supplies on the truck.

This is why a couple of years ago, when my son Lucas and I were watching on TV the national championship football game between Alabama and Notre Dame, he didn’t understand why I told him we were cheering for Alabama. Don’t we hate Alabama? he asked, reasonably.

“Son, we always cheer for the SEC team,” I said.

#SECSolidarity

By the way, a local guy, Corey Michael Schneider, designed this logo, put it on t-shirts, and was selling them for flood relief fundraising today in Baton Rouge. If I can find a link to a site where you can buy them, I’ll post it. Great image, though:

Eating Cake With Hillary Clinton

Check out this 2007 Hillary Clinton for President radio ad, in which she rips into George W. Bush, saying that Katrina victims were “invisible” to him, but aren’t invisible to her. How times change.

Here’s why Hillary Clinton cannot be bothered to come to Louisiana: she’s got a slew of fundraising events set up with coastal elites. From CNN:

What do Cher, Leonardo DiCaprio, Magic Johnson and Jimmy Buffett all have in common? They’re with her.

Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine, buoyed by rising poll numbers and a sputtering Donald Trump campaign, are using August to raise tens of millions of dollars in cash before the fall sprint.

Clinton will embark on a three-day, eight-fundraiser trip to California next week, headlining a mix of star studded events with tech icons, athletes and movie stars.

On Monday, August 22, Clinton will headline a top dollar fundraiser at the Beverly Hills home of Cheryl and Haim Saban, the billionaire owner of Univision and one of Clinton’s wealthiest backers.

Clinton and her aides will then head down the street to another fundraiser at the Beverly Hills home of Hall of Fame basketball player and businessman Magic Johnson. That event, which according to Clinton donors in California is expected to raise millions of dollars, will also be hosted by Willow Bay and Bob Iger, the CEO of The Walt Disney Company, and Marilyn and Jeffrey Katzenberg, the CEO of DreamWorks Animation.

The next day, Clinton will headline two events in Laguna Beach, including a $33,400-per-person event hosted by Stephen Cloobeck, the CEO of Diamond Resorts.

Later in the day, according to invites obtained by CNN, Clinton will headline a fundraiser at the home of Leonardo DiCaprio, the Oscar-winning actor known for his roles in Titanic, The Revenant and The Wolf of Wall Street.

Scooter Braun, the agent that discovered Justin Beiber, and Tobey Maguire, the actor known for his roles in the Spider-Man series, will also host the star-studded event.

Sounds like fun for those celebrities and rich people, flooding the Democratic Party nominee’s coffers with campaign cash. Meanwhile, here in flood-ravaged Louisiana, preliminary estimates claim that as many as 110,000 people lost their homes (or at least suffered enormous damage to them), suffering nearly $21 billion in losses.

Obama golfs with celebrities, Hillary parties with them and takes their cash.

This should not be forgotten. These are the oligarchs who rule us. It’s despicable. Do not believe for one second that there’s any reason why Hillary Clinton cannot get here. Donald Trump got here, spent a few hours, then left. So could she, if she wanted to. But she would di$appoint her donor$.

This who Hillary Clinton is. It’s all about money and access. You know I’m not a Trump supporter, but I absolutely can see why people would vote for him to throw a rock through these people’s collective window.

Hey, it’s hard to know the difference between satire and the reality of the Clinton/Obama response to the floods, but here’s some actual satire:

Screen shot from The Babylon Bee, a satirical news site

Sheer awesomeness from the Babylon Bee, an Onion-like site:

OAK BLUFFS, MA—Carrying a 47-over-par performance to the 18th tee at Farm Neck Golf Club during his vacation on the island of Martha’s Vineyard Thursday, President Obama told golfing buddy Larry David that he was determined to “get one back,” sources reported.

After utilizing his 10th and final mulligan on an errant slice, the commander-in-chief hit a solid drive down the fairway from the red tees on the 435-yard par 5, leaving approximately 275 yards left to the front of the green. Then “the best couple of 3-woods [he has] ever hit,” along with a very lucky bounce, put him in a situation the leader of the free world has not seen in quite some time: a mere eight feet away from recording a birdie.

Recognizing the magnitude of the moment, David asked for permission to hole out his five-footer in order to set the stage for Obama’s birdie attempt, which the President granted.

“This one’s for all the poor folks down in the great state of Louisiana,” Obama reportedly said to David, before addressing the ball. The lefty then flawlessly executed his trademark outside-to-inside, wrist-heavy putting stroke, sending his customized Titleist skipping smoothly—right into the center of the cup.

Whole thing here. 

As I was finishing this post, my mother called with news of lifelong friends from Denham Springs. She had not been able to reach them all week, but they finally called. A retired couple. They’ve lost everything they own, and so have their two adults sons, and their families, all of whom live in Denham Springs. They won’t be able to give anything to any politician’s fundraiser, because they’re now flat on their backs.

I’m telling you now, if either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama come down here now, they are likely to be booed. It won’t be racism, or being against the Democrats. Our governor is a Democrat, and as far as I can tell, he’s done a very fine job responding to this disaster. If Clinton and/or Obama is booed, it’s going to be for reasons of class. Mark my words.

UPDATE: You cannot make this up! Hillary Clinton is on Martha’s Vineyard tonight at a $100,000 a plate fundraiser at the home of Lady Rothschild:

The wife of British Sir Evelyn de Rothschild is hosting a dinner-party fundraiser for about 30 guests, who will pay up to $100,000 per couple.

The Democratic presidential nominee and her right hand, Huma Abedin, are expected to spend the night at the oceanfront home featured last year in Architectural Digest. Lynn is one of Hillary’s most fervent supporters.

By the by, I was just texted this photo of a Louisiana cemetery by a friend who is in Denham Springs doing relief work this afternoon. “Even the dead weren’t left alone by this thing,” he texts. Enjoy your dinner with Lady Rothschild, Hillary!

Here is a new map showing the size of the flood here. It’s massive. Everything in blue is normally dry land that went under:

UPDATE.2: The Baton Rouge Area Foundation tells me tonight that Hillary Clinton supporters have donated $400,000 to BRAF’s relief efforts after Hillary asked them too. BRAF is grateful for that, and so am I.

Flood Volunteer Opportunities in BR

Above, an updated map showing flooding in the Baton Rouge metropolitan area. Note that this is ONLY the Baton Rouge area; flooding was extensive also around the city of Lafayette, to the west. Please understand that what you are looking at in blue are not natural lakes. That’s flooding.

Readers in the Baton Rouge area, I’m passing on information that some of you have sent requesting volunteers.

Here’s one I received early this morning from a north Baton Rouge reader who spent the past few days with his elderly mother in a Baton Rouge hotel, because their house was flooded. I’ve redacted certain information for the sake of privacy, but if you are in a position to help this lady, e-mail me privately (rod — at — amconmag — dot — com), and I’ll put you in touch:

There is a lady who prepares the morning breakfast buffet here at the hotel who has been working every day.  Her house was deeply flooded.  The hotel won’t even let her stay here!  She has an adult son who had surgery just before the flood, and has no one to help her get things out of her house.  She was only able to go over to the house yesterday and it is a mess of course.

I am not asking you to take this on, but if you do know of any resources – if anyone has contacted you to get hooked up with someone who needs help or whatever – I am gonna give you her contact info, and if you can put her in touch, please talk to her.  Whomever helps will need to wear quality masks to avoid inhaling mold.

I have the lady’s contact information. E-mail me if you’re serious about helping, and I’ll share it with you.

Here’s another I received from someone at Our Lady Of The Lake College in Baton Rouge, the college attached to Our Lady Of The Lake Hospital. Unfortunately I got it too late to be included early this morning, but there’s still an opportunity on Sunday to help this college community restore its members:

If you can volunteer, I’m going to gather groups at two times: 8:15 and 9:45.  What I’ll ask you to do is show up in the parking lot of the Liberal Arts Building (5345 Brittany Drive).  Once I see who is there, I’ll divide people up into teams, give them supplies (tools, masks, gloves, food, and drink), give them an address, and send them out with a team leader.

Feel free to bring friends, spouses, or anyone else you know who wants to help.  If we work really hard, we can leave our friends and colleagues with a home that just needs to be renovated.  You should wear ratty old clothing and probably bring a towel to sit on for the ride home.  If you have your own work gloves, pry bars, utility knives, or masks, please bring them (if not, we’ll provide what you need).

For those in the OLOL faculty and staff, I need a few more supplies in the morning.

​​I need two more coolers, with ice in them.  I’ll provide the drinks.
about 8 more pairs of work gloves.
If anyone has a dolly or wheelbarrow, please bring it — water laden stuff is extra heavy
Some more masks.  I’ve got enough for our visitors, but want to make sure everyone has one if needed.
Some more garbage bags.
Maybe a pump sprayer or two.

By the way, we will have some other volunteers coming on Sunday at 11:30, so if you aren’t available on Saturday, we’ll have a chance to help on Sunday.

I will keep this list up for rolling updates throughout the weekend.

Populism And The Great Flood

I’m going to try one more time to express what I think the Louisiana flood and the response of our national media and national politicians (meaning Trump, Clinton, Obama) say about the state of the nation. I note here the news that came late this afternoon: that President Obama will finally visit us on Tuesday, after the end of his vacation.

He will be fortunate if he is not booed. He had better have his advance people find a guaranteed friendly audience. Had he come down any day this week, he would not have been booed. I hope he is not booed next week. But I’m telling you now, don’t be surprised if he is. And no, it will have nothing to do with his race, or his political liberalism, though I am sure that’s what the media and the liberal commentariat will claim. It will have everything to do with the fact that he wouldn’t leave the golf course while the people of Louisiana were overwhelmed by this flood that put 40,000 people out of their houses, and left those houses in ruins.

To put that number in terms Obama can understand: it’s as if four times the number of households in Martha’s Vineyard were destroyed. Or if 10,000 more households than there are in Cleveland Park, the upscale district of Northwest Washington DC, were ruined. Or if slightly more than two times the number of households in Takoma Park, Md. (“a nuclear-free zone”), were obliterated. Or if roughly the entire population of Berkeley, Calif., suddenly found itself homeless.

If Berkeley were wiped off the map, even with almost no loss of life, don’t you think the national networks would have been all over it from the beginning? Don’t you think the president would have found a way to get there, ASAP? Of course they would have, and of course he would have. Come on, don’t make me laugh.

A couple of weeks ago, Peggy Noonan wrote a really good column capturing the current mood. It was titled, “How Global Elites Forsake Their Countrymen.” Excerpts:

The larger point is that this is something we are seeing all over, the top detaching itself from the bottom, feeling little loyalty to it or affiliation with it. It is a theme I see working its way throughout the West’s power centers. At its heart it is not only a detachment from, but a lack of interest in, the lives of your countrymen, of those who are not at the table, and who understand that they’ve been abandoned by their leaders’ selfishness and mad virtue-signalling.

On Wall Street, where they used to make statesmen, they now barely make citizens. CEOs are consumed with short-term thinking, stock prices, quarterly profits. They don’t really believe that they have to be involved with “America” now; they see their job as thinking globally and meeting shareholder expectations.

In Silicon Valley the idea of “the national interest” is not much discussed. They adhere to higher, more abstract, more global values. They’re not about America, they’re about . . . well, I suppose they’d say the future.

In Hollywood the wealthy protect their own children from cultural decay, from the sick images they create for all the screens, but they don’t mind if poor, unparented children from broken-up families get those messages and, in the way of things, act on them down the road.

From what I’ve seen of those in power throughout business and politics now, the people of your country are not your countrymen, they’re aliens whose bizarre emotions you must attempt occasionally to anticipate and manage.

 

This.

More:

Affluence detaches, power adds distance to experience. I don’t have it fully right in my mind but something big is happening here with this division between the leaders and the led. It is very much a feature of our age. But it is odd that our elites have abandoned or are abandoning the idea that they belong to a country, that they have ties that bring responsibilities, that they should feel loyalty to their people or, at the very least, a grounded respect.

Read the whole thing.

In my earlier “Trump On The Bayou” post, I wrote that Trump’s visit to Louisiana today showed us respect — and that that meant a lot.  I am one of those conservatives who finds great fault with Trump, and who is not going to vote for him (or for Hillary), but who credits him with two things: 1) putting certain issues that the elites of both parties ignore on the map, and 2) all but destroying the Republican Party.

I quit calling myself a Republican after being infuriated by what George W. Bush’s handling of Katrina said about the GOP (meaning outrage that even after 9/11, the man Bush put in charge of FEMA was a political hack). That caused the levee to break inside, releasing a torrent of doubt and disgust with Bush and the GOP over Iraq. It was self-disgust too, because I had allowed myself to believe them, and to support the war.

I did not call myself a Democrat because I am not a liberal, for one thing, and for another, because the problems with the Republican Party do not correspondingly make the Democratic Party good. When the financial crash happened on Bush’s watch, a lot of people were very quick to blame him and the Republicans, and that was fair. But it was only partially fair. The deregulation of Wall Street that led to the crash was a project of the Congressional Republicans (chiefly Sen. Phil Gramm) and Bill Clinton. There’s a reason why Hillary Clinton is totally mobbed up with Wall Street, in a way Donald Trump will never be.

I have never been an Obama-basher, even though I didn’t vote for him either time. (I wrote in Wendell Berry as a protest in ’08, and didn’t vote for president in ’12 — not acts of political virtue, given that the Republican was guaranteed to win the states I lived in at the time). Obama has been a better president than I expected him to be, overall, and heaven knows the Congressional Republicans have far too rarely made one sorry that the GOP doesn’t have the White House.

I say all this to let you know that even though I’m a conservative, I don’t have much faith in politicians of the right, or the left. In fact, it’s hard to think of a major institution in American life that I do trust at the institutional level — not even the church, even though I am a devout and practicing traditional Christian. I wanted Trump to be a game-changer, and he has certainly been that, but again, the mediocrity and awfulness of the GOP and the Democrats don’t make Donald Trump into our political savior. He’s not. Once again, I don’t expect to cast a vote in a presidential election. I have no confidence in any of them.

I’m not asking you to share my dispiritedness. I’m just telling you where I’m coming from. But I digress.

So, let’s return to the quoted material from Peggy Noonan, especially this:

From what I’ve seen of those in power throughout business and politics now, the people of your country are not your countrymen, they’re aliens whose bizarre emotions you must attempt occasionally to anticipate and manage.

In that light, consider how people here in Louisiana would interpret the fact that on Tuesday, while local rescuers were still pulling people off of roofs, and after a long, hot weekend that stretched law enforcement in the city and region to the max (half of BRPD officers lost their houses to the flood), the Obama Administration issued a memo telling Louisiana agencies that we had better not be racist in providing disaster assistance. The administration says in the memo that there is ample evidence from Katrina, Rita, and disasters elsewhere that agencies at the local level discriminated against minorities.

If true — and I assume it is — the administration is right to be watching out for this. It shouldn’t have happened, and it must not happen again. But man! After spending a day in a shelter and around the city watching local law enforcement, the National Guard, and others busting their butts to help people of all races, to see that memo made me furious. It’s like, Is that really what you think of us? That we’re just a bunch of rednecks dying to discriminate? 

It’s like: The people of your Louisiana are not our countrymen, they’re aliens whose bizarre emotions we must attempt occasionally to anticipate and manage.

In a Wednesday post, I looked at themes in the collected tweets of Obama, Clinton, and Trump since the floods started on Friday. If all the houses and businesses of Berkeley, Calif., had been washed away in a tsunami, would President Obama not have troubled himself to make a public appearance to talk about what happened? Wouldn’t his staff at least have tweeted out a semblance of sympathy? His staff, in his name, put out 14 tweets in that period of time. They were about:

Climate change: 2

Judge Merrick Garland: 5

DREAM Act (for immigrants): 1

Paid family leave: 1

Vehicle emission standards: 2

Gun violence: 3

Louisiana floods: 0

Obama doesn’t manage his Twitter feed personally. I get that. But he surrounds himself with people who didn’t see us. Nor did he see us. Not really. And this was noticed.

If all of Takoma Park burned to the ground in two days, wouldn’t Hillary Clinton’s staff cared enough to tweet about it? Of 84 tweets she and her staff put out in her name in that same time period, exactly one had to do with the Louisiana flood (in it, she recommended that people donate to the Red Cross). She tweeted congratulations to US women Olympians three times, and tweeted out about immigration seven times.

As for Trump, it was what you would imagine. Nothing about Louisiana’s floods, but ten of his 35 tweets in that time period were him whining about how unfair the media are to him.

Look, I get it: social media is not real life.  The real work of rescue and recovery was and is being done at the local level. Yay, little platoons! But what presidential candidates talk about, on social media, on TV, and in their speeches, reflects their priorities, political and otherwise.

… At its heart it is not only a detachment from, but a lack of interest in, the lives of your countrymen, of those who are not at the table, and who understand that they’ve been abandoned by their leaders’ selfishness and mad virtue-signalling….

 

Mad virtue signaling. You can just see the Hillary social media staff thinking, “Let’s tweet about female Olympians to show that Hillary really cares about women’s empowerment.” At least with Trump and his signaling (vice-signaling?) there is no real pretense of interest in the lives of his countrymen, except insofar as he can see his own reflection in them.

But: Trump got to Louisiana before Obama or Clinton. And in so doing, he struck a chord resonating profoundly with the emotional and political climate of the moment. The president is coming down on Tuesday, but he’s missed his moment. Trump got here first. When Obama arrives, the thing a lot of people will be thinking is, “You’re the President of the United States. What took you so long? How come you let Trump beat you here?” As for Hillary, forget about it.

The Baton Rouge Advocate is not a particularly conservative newspaper, ideologically speaking, but it is temperamentally very conservative. Today, unusually,  it hit Obama with a second editorial today, denouncing his absence. Excerpt:

After Hurricane Betsy ravaged Louisiana in 1965, President Lyndon Baines Johnson flew to New Orleans to comfort the victims. Standing in one evacuee shelter darkened by an electrical outage, LBJ shined a flashlight into his face so that his fellow Americans could see the leader of the free world who had come to bring them hope. Speaking into a megaphone, he offered encouragement to residents who had lost everything.

“My name is Lyndon Baines Johnson,” he told weary listeners. “I am your president. I am here to make sure you have the help you need.”

Those were the days. Then again, LBJ grew up in rural Texas.

Here is the world Obama and Hillary live in. It’s a link to a pathetic column by an SJW turning the flood into a chance to beat his own, um, dead horses. Excerpt:

In launching these critiques, some have contrasted the coverage of the flood with wall-to-wall coverage of the Olympics, the ongoing presidential sideshow, and the riots in Milwaukee. Having your suffering ignored or cast aside only intensifies the pain you feel. And, yet, comparing one’s suffering with the suffering of others, calculating them according to hierarchies of pain, reinforces the logic of oppression. In other words, the standards that determine what belongs on the news (so-called “news values”) are deeply rooted in oppressive ideologies—regional biases, financial capital, racism, classism, sexism, and more—which constantly rank whose lives (and deaths) are more valuable, more “newsworthy,” more profitable for mass distribution.

Comparing the newsworthiness of our suffering to that of others is the precise method by which the news devalues the lives of black, brown, poor, immigrant, transgender, and queer people.

I am not, in other words, only frustrated by the lack of national news coverage or public awareness of the floods in Louisiana. I am frustrated by the lack of coverage and awareness of how the floods in Louisiana do now and will continue to disproportionately affect poor people, immigrants, people of color, people affected by de facto segregation, homeless people, and queer people.

How, exactly, does this guy know anything about the demographics of this flood? Does he know that Livingston Parish, the hardest-hit parish in the entire state, is 95 percent white? He should; his mother lives there, though he concedes that he’s only visited the house once. How, exactly, does this flood disproportionately affect queer people? He’s gonna queer this flood? The Baton Rouge area doesn’t have many immigrants, relative to many other cities. There were some at the shelter I worked at on Sunday — a few Vietnamese folks, a handful of Latinos, but the shelter’s population looked like this region of Louisiana: a bit more than half white, the rest black. But God forbid that demographic facts should get in the way of progressive prejudice. He concludes:

I hope these will not be the only stories the media will miss. I hope there will also be stories of renewed awakening and commitment to the liberation of all people; stories of Louisiana finding ways to rebuild that don’t compound its histories of racism, classism, sexism, and heterosexism; stories of people joining together to address systemic injustice; stories of a recovery where no one is left behind.

The story of the Louisiana flood is of people joining together to address the fact that 100,000 people, more or less, suddenly didn’t have a place to live, and have lost almost everything they own. But this guy can’t see that, because he’s not looking. I don’t believe that Obama and Clinton are quit so ideological as that, but I think that’s how they see the world. And there’s no place for a lot of us in that world.

Trump is Trump: he only sees himself. But the Republican Party elites may well go back to their own blindness, their own not-seeing-us, after Trump passes. Republican commentator and bona fide #NeverTrumper Pete Spiliakos warns:

Let me tell you about some of the Trump supporters I know. They aren’t the cartoons you see on the internet. They would sooner cut their own throats than send a tweet. They don’t believe that Trump is going to Make America Great Again. They are undeceived about Trump’s many flaws and they aren’t shy about admitting them.

What they see in Trump is someone who has at least some hope of getting a response out of a sluggish political system. They would agree with Martin Gurrithat Trump is a wrecking ball, but they would argue that only a wrecking ball will get the attention of our comfortable and self-serving political elites.

But Trump is not just a wrecking ball. They also see Trump as a businessman who has actually done things. This is what can’t be erased by all the talk of Trump’s bankruptcies. While some of Trump’s companies went out of business, he still built those companies. He built residencies in which people lived, and casinos in which they people were entertained. Even if some of those businesses eventually went bad—even if all of those businesses had gone bad—Trump would still compare favorably with politicians whose only visible skills are giving speeches and cashing checks. These Trump supporters suspect that, one way or another, things are going to end badly with Trump. But they are absolutely certain of being utterly ignored by any of the conventional politicians who ran for president this cycle.

That doesn’t make these Trump supporters right about Trump. He is too unprincipled, reckless, and malicious to be trusted with any kind of public authority. But it also doesn’t make them wrong about the unresponsiveness of the political system. As Ramesh Ponnuru pointed out, increasing immigration is very unpopular with both the general public and Republican primary voters, and yet most of the 2016 Republican presidential candidates supported increasing immigration.

Now we have (some) anti-Trump conservatives arguing for a purge and humiliation of Trump’s current supporters. Political consultant Rick Wilson’s twitter account produces a steady stream of Trump criticism. All of it is deserved, but Wilson goes too far when he promises:

So when it’s over, Trumpkins, remember: You’re not purging us. We’re purging you.The problem is that there are far more Trump supporters than conservative dead-ender Trump opponents. (Disclosure: I am a conservative dead-ender Trump opponent.) Any center-right majority is going to involve former Trump supporters as a majority or near-majority of the coalition.

A bigger problem is the smug and unjustified moralism. Wilson says that the lessons of the “detailed” 2012 Republican National Committee autopsy were ignored. But that autopsy was not so detailed that it offered any advice on how the Republicans could update their obsolete and rich-centered economic agenda. That part must have slipped their minds.

Read the whole thing. Elitism is not just a problem with the Democrats. As Peggy Noonan said. I was e-mailing with an anti-establishment conservative friend the other day, who said that the real danger is that after Trump flames out, there’s a very real risk that the GOP will learn all the wrong lessons from the Trump phenomenon. Yep.

I wish I could adequately express to you how exciting it has been to watch and to be part of the little platoons all over this region, not waiting for the government to tell them what to do, but getting busy helping their neighbors. I’m just finishing up writing the Benedict Option book, in which I talk about the politics of our future being localism and the “anti-politics” of Vaclav Havel, Vaclav Benda, and the Czech dissidents. This flood experience feels vindicating.

 

‘Please, Please, I Can’t Stay Here No More’

My friend Father Peter Kang from Grace Episcopal Church in St. Francisville wrote this beautiful tribute to Grace’s pastor, Father Roman Roldan, pictured above. Here’s what he said:

Since its doors opened and began taking in flood victims, Fr. Roldan has been tirelessly volunteering at the impromptu shelter in Celtic Studios. I went in with him yesterday after a clergy meeting in Baton Rouge and caught a glimpse of the important work he and other volunteers are doing.

When I first walked in to Celtic Studios, I was a little overwhelmed with the sheer number of people – thousands of displaced victims, hundreds of community volunteers, hundreds of personnel from the military, police, red cross, FEMA, Verizon, Duracell, Tide… All compressed into a slowly shuffling, shifting, sitting, sleeping sea – of people. Where does one even begin?

Yesterday, as I understand it, there was a small altercation between evacuees in one of the housing locations. (I actually think that with so many people staying together in one place, still reeling from the trauma and stress of the past week, it is amazing there aren’t more such incidents).

In a cot near the scuffle sat an elderly woman. “You might want to go check on that one,” Fr. Roldan was told, “she looks a little shaken up.”

She had been in the shelter since it opened 4 days ago – no family nearby, no savings to speak of, and seemingly nowhere to go. Like so many others, she had lost everything – all her worldly possessions – soaked through and destroyed in the flood.

In the course of their conversation, Fr. Roldan (a trained clinical social worker) realized that she had already qualified for housing assistance, that there were state resources available to relocate her, and that there was no reason for her to be in the shelter aside from the need to submit the proper forms and documentation.

“Please, if you can, get me out of here.” She sounded desperate. “Please, please, I can’t stay here no more. Please get me out of here.” With a big smile and some jovial hand gestures, Fr. Roldan assured her: “Don’t worry, my friend, I will help you. I’m going to get you out of here.”

It took hours. Navigating red tape and bureaucracies like a ninja, by the end of the day she was out of the shelter and into a new apartment. She had only two pillows and a blanket from the shelter – no bed, no chairs, no dishes, cups, pots or pans – but she was grateful nonetheless just to have a place of her own. Fr. Roldan then put out the call and tonight she sleeps on a donated air-mattress and has some basic provisions to see her through the coming days. There’s still a ways to go, but this is at least a start.

With so many people in similar situations, so much unmet need, so much heartache and frustration – a case like [this] may seem only a drop in the bucket. And in the big picture, we may ask, what difference does such exhausting effort actually make? I suppose for the statistician, it’s true, it does not change grand totals very much. But for this woman, I am sure, it makes a world of difference.

It can be hard sometimes when beholding events of such magnitude to remember – that behind every number is a face, a particular individual, a person created in the image of God, of irreplaceable value and worth, whom we are ever called to love. And despite what we may think or desire, none of us has the power or ability to move the seas, to re-form the world. But all of us can put a drop in a bucket, and in so doing, make a world of difference.

Amen. God spits in the mud and rubs it on our eyes, and we can see. I love these stories! Pass them on — they’re happening everywhere around us here in south Louisiana these days.

Love (Of Music) In The Ruins

That’s Mark Chasuk, a Baton Rougean who found a ruined piano in a once-flooded street, and made beautiful music from it.

Mark Chasuk is #LouisianaStrong.

Say, folks, at least ten families in Sequitur Classical Academy, the classical Christian school in Baton Rouge, were profoundly affected by the flood. That list may grow as we learn more. School starts again on Monday. Students from those families may have lost schoolbooks, school uniforms, underwear, toiletries, and more — including their houses. If you are looking for a flood charity to give to, please consider the GoFundMe just set up to help these families. I especially appeal to homeschoolers and classical schoolers in my readership. The need is great.

I told you yesterday that Brian Daigle, Sequitur’s headmaster, was leading a group of boys from the school, and other volunteers, in mucking out houses. They helped save the life of a grandmother of one of our students, whose house it was; she had a heatstroke, and the boys led the paramedics in over the water, and led them all back out, with the stricken lady on the boat. She went to the hospital, and survived. You’re far away, and can’t help our community with that, but if you can help replace the books, uniforms, and other things these Sequitur families have lose, please do.

Here is a map from Arcgis showing the extent of the flood damage in East Baton Rouge Parish (and only EBRP). Unlike the one I posted the other day, this is not a map of flood-prone areas, but a map of places that are believed to have flooded this time. Note well that under normal times, this area has no blue on it:

Sign Of The Times In South Louisiana

On the front door of a gym:

The Face Of Louisiana

Mickey, making chili for the hungry in Denham Springs (Photo by Julie Hatcher Ralph)

Posted on Facebook last night by my Starhill friend and neighbor Julie Hatcher Ralph, considered by some to be a saint simply by putting up with that crawfish-eating husband of hers:

The past few days I have been helping out as I could around St. Francisville, which is just the most amazing community that has pulled together like a well-oiled machine to meet each and every need that presents itself here. I got a call yesterday from my friend *** who wanted to come over from Fairhope and bring a car load of supplies and go around doing her thing, interviewing people and telling their stories. So as I started thinking and praying about where we needed to go, something kept urging me to go to Denham Springs. Which I thought was curious because I didn’t really know anyone there, or have any connections there, and I couldn’t imagine how this was going to shake out if Lynn and I just pulled into town searching for a place to serve and plant ourselves for the day.

And then I saw my friend ***’s post on FB late last night about how her church in Mandeville was providing hundreds of lunches today in Denham Springs, so I sent her a message to see if we could plant there. Turns out, it was her friends Mickey and Lanette, who we just happened to have spent some time with last Christmas, who live in Denham Springs, and who were one of the very few homes spared last week. She said Mickey needed some help with meals…needed all hands on deck…and we could be of use.

Well, when we got there around 10 am, they (as in just their family and a couple of friends) were in the process of preparing 300 sack lunches in their home, to take over to their church, to serve people who would “drive thru” and pick them up. See, their church, like most every building in Denham Springs, was flooded and is now contaminated. So no meals can be prepared there. Further, there are no organizations or shelters or donation centers like the Red Cross set up there yet, so the only hope of getting meals and supplies to people (90% whose homes and cars were destroyed), is through people like Mickey and Lanette. So all week long they have worked tirelessly and nearly single-handedly preparing lunch and dinner every single day for around 300 people. Today, those peanut butter sandwiches we made were taken within about 15 minutes,and then luckily we had the sandwiches that St. Timothy sent up, so we didn’t have to turn anyone away. As these people pulled up weary, worn, and wringing with sweat, they took those brown bags with such gratitude….one lady broke down crying saying she just couldn’t believe they were doing this for her. And those were just the people who drove up. Mickey also makes sure that at every meal, he has people (sometimes just his wife and kids) delivering meals around the community to people who either don’t know food is there, or can’t get there because they don’t have cars.

Tonight he made chili. A huge vat of chili under his garage. Again…300 plates assembled at his house, stacked in our cars and delivered to the church to be handed out in the drive-thru and delivered around town. This weekend they’re planning to feed around 1000 people each day.

Neither Mickey nor Lanette are on Facebook, so I’m not sure if they’ll see this. And they probably wouldn’t want the attention anyway because they’re not doing it for any reason other than, that’s just what you do. Their church is destroyed, most of their friends’ homes are destroyed, their schools are closed indefinitely, Mickey’s office is still flooded, but their faith is strong and their compassion is overflowing.

This story is playing out all of Louisiana. It’s just beautiful.

I know now why I went to Denham Springs today. And I’ll be back tomorrow.

Pray for Mickey and Lanette and this wonderful community. And if you’re still looking for a place to help out or send a donation, you can go here to help the church that Mickey and Lanette love and the community they are serving so well.

https://amite.ccbchurch.com/w_give_online.php

 

As I said the other day, we are living through the flood, but it’s also a flood of grace. God spits in the dirt and the mud washes away the blindness of people’s eyes.

Here’s a photo Julie took of one street in Denham Springs. Just one. For miles and miles all around you see streets like this here. People piling most of their worldly possessions on the street, a wet, stinking, steamy trash pile. Each pile represents a family’s life:

Trump On The Bayou

Louisiana right now pic.twitter.com/gdSBqjvnFu

— Campbell Robertson (@campbellnyt) August 19, 2016

Today is the Feast of the Transfiguration on the Orthodox Old Calendar, so I’ve been in church up in Starhill most of the morning. When I got out, I saw on my iPhone that Donald Trump had turned up in Greenwell Springs, in the flood zone, and heard a rumor that he was headed to Livingston Parish. I thought about chasing his entourage to hear what he had to say, but decided I had more important work to do. I’ll hear it through the media.

I’ve just arrived home, and have not yet checked the Trump news, though I’ll do so after I make the point I’m about to make. I don’t want to prejudice my opinion by a read of what he’s already said to the media here. Unless he really blows it (always a possibility), this visit will likely be a big plus for Trump politically, for reasons that J.D. Vance, author of the new #1 New York Times bestseller Hillbilly Elegy, mentioned in his Fresh Air interview a couple of days ago.

Excerpt from that interview:

[HOST TERRY] GROSS:You describe yourself as conservative, and you’ve written for The National Review, a conservative magazine. You’ve become kind of famous for an article or two in which you try to explain why, you know, a lot of poor people would be voting for Trump. And in your writing and in your discussions, you’ve called Trump’s promises the needle in America’s collective vein. You’ve described Trump as the new pain reliever, trying to make comparisons between, you know, narcotizing pain and what Trump is trying to do in explaining things away, easy solutions. Do you know a lot of people who are going to be voting for Trump or – yeah.

VANCE: I do. A lot of people in my family are going to be voting for Trump, a lot of my neighbors and friends from back home. So it’s definitely a phenomenon I, I think, recognize and frankly saw coming pretty early. You know, it’s interesting that I don’t think the Trump phenomenon is exclusively about the white poor.

I think that it’s more about the white working-class folks who aren’t necessarily economically destitute but in some ways feel very culturally isolated and very pessimistic about the future. That’s one of the biggest predictors of whether someone will support Donald Trump – it may be the biggest predictor – is the belief that America is headed in the wrong direction, the belief that your kids are not going to have a better life than you did.

And that cynicism really breeds frustration at political elites, but, frankly, that frustration needs to find a better outlet than Donald Trump. And that’s why I’ve made some of the analogies that I have because I don’t think that he’s going to make the problem better. I think, like you said, he is in some ways a pain reliever. He’s someone who makes people feel a little bit better about their problems. But whether he’s elected president or not, those problems are still going to be there, and we’ve got to recognize that.

GROSS: So when you’re having a discussion about the presidential race with someone in your family, someone who’s going to be voting for Trump, what is that conversation like?

VANCE: It typically starts with me making a point that I just made, which is, look, maybe Trump is recognizing some legitimate problems. He’s talking about the opioid epidemic in a way that nobody else is. But he’s not going to fix the problem. You know, better trade deals is not going to make all of these problems just go away.

And typically my family actually recognizes that. That’s what I find so interesting. They don’t think that this guy is going to solve all their problems. They just think he’s at least trying and he’s saying things, primarily to the elites, that they wish they could say themselves. So it’s really interesting. There’s a recognition that Trump isn’t going to solve a lot of these problems, but he’s, at the end of the day, the only person really trying to tap into this frustration.

And it’s, you know, I – so my dad is a Trump supporter, and I love my dad, and I always say, Dad, you know, Trump is not going to actually make any of these problems better. And he says, well, that’s probably true, but at least he’s talking about them and nobody else is and at least he’s not Mitt Romney. At least he’s not George W. Bush. He’s at least trying to talk about these problems.

And I think it’s amazing how low the bar has been set by the political conversation we’ve had for the past 20 or 30 years that this guy, who many people don’t think is going to solve the problems, is still getting a lot of support from people who are blue-collar white folks.

I find myself exactly where J.D. Vance is politically (as he indicates elsewhere in this interview): unable and unwilling to vote for Hillary Clinton, grateful to Trump for raising issues that standard Republicans have ignored, but having no trust at all in his ability to make any real difference at all in the lives of the people whose hopes he has excited.

Having said that, this is why Trump’s visit today will have been politically smart.

As I’ve been detailing all week, the people in south Louisiana are seething with anger at the national media for ignoring or downplaying the immensity of the suffering we’ve been enduring here since the floods started a week ago today. And not just at the national media: President Obama has been playing golf all week on Martha’s Vineyard while nearly half of Louisiana is underwater, or struggling to make sense of destroyed lives in the wake of the flood. He hasn’t said diddly about it, nor, except for one tweet, has Hillary Clinton, despite her big talk at the Democratic convention about how we’re all stronger together. She (or rather, her staff) found it more compelling to tweet about US women gold medal winners in Rio than tens of thousands of Louisianans now homeless.

I have not seen a poll, obviously, but anecdotally, I can tell you that lots of people here are furious at elites in the national media and in national politics, and I’m talking liberal Democrats here in the Bayou State too. The broad feeling is that we don’t matter to them, that we are just a bunch of rednecks and coonasses and country people in flyover country whose problems are far less interesting than Donald Trump’s tweets and Ryan Lochte’s misdemeanors. Trump has been part of this dynamic too in the past week, more preoccupied with his self-demeaning, pissy fight with the media than in paying attention to the country he supposedly wants to govern.

But unlike the president or Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump is here today, viewing the devastation and visiting with victims and relief workers. Donald Trump is at present not in a position to do anything other than write a personal check for relief work. If he were president, as a bureaucratic matter, he probably couldn’t do much more than what Barack Obama is doing, which is to open the floodgates of federal disaster aid. But as a presidential candidate, he has done something much appreciated, besides bringing the media down here to show the rest of the country more of what we’re dealing with: he has shown us respect.

In June, only five days after the horrendous massacre at Orlando’s gay nightclub, Obama went to Orlando to console the relatives and friends of the dead. As CNN reported at the time:

The role of consoler in chief was a repeat assignment for Obama, was has now traveled to 10 American cities — including four in the last year — scarred by mass shooting events. In Orlando, he met at a downtown arena with both families of victims and survivors of the terrorist attack, many of whom suffered serious injuries but emerged from the massacre alive.

I applaud Obama for going to Orlando, and for going to all these places. It’s part of his job. But it has not escaped notice here that Obama has managed to beat a path to the sites of horrible events like the one in Orlando, but he hasn’t even emerged from his Martha’s Vineyard vacation to make as much as a public statement about Louisiana’s suffering. Why don’t we merit the same respect?

Maybe it’s true that, as Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards said yesterday, it would be too much of a hassle to the rebuilding efforts to have to deal with a presidential visit right now. I don’t believe that for a second. If the president wanted to come, he could come. Everybody knows that. Louisiana just isn’t a priority to him, at least not as much of a priority as the golf greens on Martha’s Vineyard.

You can call it mere political theatrics if you want, but symbolism is important. It’s very important. There are some things you can’t just phone in, or demonstrate by sending a card and flowers. Not sure how it is where you live, but around here, going to a wake or funeral is called “paying your respects” to the dead and his family. There is nothing you can do to bring the dead back. Maybe you’ve sent food or flowers to the family, or made a generous donation to his favorite charity. All that is great. But there’s no substitute for being there. One’s presence says, “I am sharing your suffering. You matter to me.”

Once again, here’s J.D. Vance from Fresh Air. We are not “hill people,” but this is very much true of the culture of south Louisiana, by the way:

And when I was a kid, the first time I realized that there was something really unique about Jackson and its people, as I write in the book – there was a funeral motorcade passing by. And my grandma said, we have to get out. We have to stand at attention. And I said, you know, why, Mamaw? Why are we all doing this? Why does everybody stop and stand at attention when a funeral motorcade passes? And she said because, honey, we’re hill people, and we respect our dead. And it made me realize that there was something very important about this identity of hill people that both my grandma and the rest of Jacksonians took on as a certain, you know, as a certain self-identifier.

Here in Louisiana, I’ve never seen anybody get out of the car when a funeral motorcade passes, but people do pull over if they can, and if they can’t, they turn on their headlights as a sign of respect. Not as many people do it as used to, but it’s still done. It’s considered low-class and callous not to.

J.D. Vance’s people are Scots-Irish, as are a lot of people in my part of Louisiana (the Cajuns are a different people). Scots-Irish culture is very, very proud. They cannot stand taking charity from anybody. It’s a shame/honor culture. In J.D.’s book, he talks about white welfare scammers he knew back home who had convinced themselves that they weren’t scamming at all, that welfare cheats were other people, not themselves. The point is, it’s considered shameful not to be able to do for yourself. One of my friends who has been going out into Livingston Parish this week doing relief work said the church team has encountered lots of people who wanted to pay for the free dinners they were passing out. These are people who have lost their houses, and probably didn’t have insurance. Still, they considered it shameful to take a hot meal from a church. They did so, in the end, but that little fact tells you a lot about the culture of a people. They have been rendered all but helpless by the flood, and they despise that about themselves.

There is a connection between that feeling and the incredible sense of personal and communal responsibility you’ve seen around here in the past week — of the Cajun Navy rushing into the flood waters in their boats to rescue people. Of folks setting up shelters without waiting for the government to tell them what to do. Of churches not waiting for instructions from on high, but responding instantly. After church in St. Francisville today, I stopped by a local hotel to check on a friend who had been flooded out of his house. Talking to the manager, she said the hotel was jammed with flood refugees.

“I tell you what,” she said, “that Methodist church and Healing Place [a non-denominational charismatic church] have been coming through every day. They have been feeding people, now. It’s something.”

It’s not just the Methodist church and Healing Place alone. I know that other churches in town, like the Baptists and the Episcopalians, have been very active too. She was just mentioning the ones who have been into her hotel. I’m sure the churches have divided the hotels in town up among themselves. The point is, for all our many problems, there is still a strong civil society down here, and you’re seeing it in action now. Most people — not everybody, but most people — are moved not only by a sense of compassion, but by a sense of respect: respect for their neighbors, respect for virtue, and respect for themselves. You do not want to be the kind of man or woman who looks away from your neighbor’s travails, and does nothing, and gives nothing, even though you have things you could do or give. It’s low-down.

So, look, about respect: if you are in south Louisiana this week, and you are witnessing all around you suffering like this state hasn’t seen since Katrina, and you personally know someone (usually more than one person or one family) who lost a house or more — and just about everyone knows somebody like that — you are overwhelmed by the enormity of it all. You know too that this is not going to end quickly, that tens of thousands of people here have months and months of agony to endure. You don’t understand why outsider elites in the news media and in national political leadership don’t seem to care. It’s a great thing that the president wrote us a check — seriously, it is needed and appreciated — but there’s no substitute for showing up. There’s just not.

President Obama has not shown up. He’s been golfing instead. Maybe it’s just me, but I hope he doesn’t come now. He’s shown his hand already.

Donald Trump was late to get here, but he’s here now. What’s Hillary Clinton’s excuse?

Trump no doubt certainly came here out of crass political motive, but the point is, he came. 

The fact that so many people in the elite national media, and among elites generally, don’t understand why this matters only validates the sense of alienation and outsiderness that gave rise to Trump in the first place, and that kept the media and the GOP elites in Washington from seeing him rise. I’m reading things online, people saying things like, “Surely nobody in Louisiana thinks Trump is going to do a thing for them. They can’t be that stupid, can they?” No, we’re not that stupid. But really, are you so dumb and disconnected from what it means to be human that you can’t understand that there’s more to life than writing a check and sending out government bureaucrats to fix things? Read your J.D. Vance!

OK. Having written that, I just checked Google News to see what’s being written about Trump’s visit. From the Washington Post‘s dispatch:

“We knew you’d be here, Mr. Trump! We knew you would be here for us!” one young woman shouted.

“We lost everything, but we knew you would come! This makes it all worthwhile,” said another woman.

And:

Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee, said Friday that she spoke with [La. Gov. John Bel] Edwards by telephone and called the situation in Louisiana heartbreaking. She also made a thinly-veiled reference to Trump’s visit and the questions about Obama not coming to the region.

“My heart breaks for Louisiana, and right now, the relief effort can’t afford any distractions,” Clinton, the Democratic nominee, said in a statement posted on Facebook. “The very best way this team can help is to make sure Louisianans have the resources they need.”

Boom, there it is.

Assuming that it really would make things more difficult for Obama to be here this week, he could at least use his bully pulpit from Martha’s Vineyard to talk about our situation. But honestly, Hillary Clinton has no excuse at all. If Trump can fly in on a dime, visit a relief operation at a church, drive around some of the devastated area, what’s her problem?

UPDATE: Reader Buck Farmer comments:

It is good Trump showed up. I despise the man, I fear for what disease he represents for our society and our Republic, but I am glad he showed up.

I grew up in New Orleans. After Katrina, my family fled with three or four others to friends in Baton Rouge. The loss, the confusion, the helplessness combined into a staggering unreality. One of us refugees who used to have a restaurant coped with it by cooking gumbo. That was the best I have ever had, and I would not be surprised if it is marked in my memory as the best I will ever have.

One of our hosts is in hospice now. My mother wants to visit, but the interstate is closed. We all know the importance of being present.

I’ve lived among and within the global transnational elite for nearly a decade now, nestled in the cosmopolis that knits together that “fabled nexus of money, influence, and condescension” that makes every world city parochially similar. I believe in the good of the Cathedral that neo-reactionaries scorn, in liberalism, in prioritizing humanity above our tribes, in the fundamental priority of personhood. I am a universalist in the tradition that stretches back to the struggles of early Christianity even if my universalism has abandoned much that is Christian.

And despite all that, I am beggared to explain the obliviousness of my fellow elites. We need Jonathan Haidt’s message and J.D. Vance’s. There is more that binds us together than keeps us apart. A society that has an “unnecessariat” is not a human society.

Our media has abdicated any duty for the welfare of the whole in favor of the entertainment of the individual and the reinforcement of the banalities of an atomized and stunted life.

Thank you, Rod, for continuing to cover the situation on the ground.

UPDATE.2: Uncle Chuckie comments:

I think you are touching on it but still missing why this is so important for the Trump image and what he means to people.

“We knew you would come.”

It was not, “Thank you for coming.” It was, “We knew you would come.”

Abandoned by the media. Ignored by the President and the Clinton thing. Forgotten, left to die in the muck and their ruined homes. But not forgotten. There is one man who does not forget. One man who cares. And they knew he would not forget them. He would come. And he did.

Yes, for us cynics a cynical, political gesture. But not for the people who said that. They put their faith in him and he did not fail them. Don’t waste time talking about Obama’s FEMA director. Forget Hillary who can barely stand up much less risk getting the cuffs of her pantsuit dirty. Forget all the rhetoric about things that the voters could not care less about.

Remember this. The image of a giant of man standing in the dirt hugging someone who has lost everything saying that everything was going to be all right because he was there and he had not forgotten them when everyone else has.

And when Hillary watches the returns on election night knowing that prison doors await her, when the pollsters shake their heads wondering how they could have been so wrong, when Trump wins, know that this image, and the words, “We knew you would come,” was the reason.

I don’t believe Trump will win, not by a mile. But Uncle Chuckie has spoken truth here.