Recently, National Review Online luminary and former illegal alien John Derbyshire wrote a post which said "The World's Smartest City... is not New Orleans" and linked to this article.
This gratuitous slap comes a few weeks after Derbyshire's first visit to New Orleans where, basically, he strolled through the Riverfront Mall, couldn't find a book store, and promptly declared the city "unattractive" and "lifeless".
Unattractive? Really, John? You wanna go there, do ya?
Actually, New Orleans is one of the nation's "smartest cities" according to this ranking of most-educated cities. But Derbyshire doesn't care about these sorts of things. He has his own pet theories that he's searching to reinforce.
Kevin Allman properly vivisects Derbyshire's earlier piece here. Go read it. My favorite portion of Allman's commentary is his response to Derbyshire's complaint that "I didn't see a bookstore the whole two days poking around New Orleans." Kevin simply says:
Aside from the fact that I can think of, say, six bookstores within a few blocks of Jackson Square (including the one in the home of William Faulkner), did it ever occur to you to ask someone?
That's rich. On his virgin visit to New Orleans, Derbyshire poked around town for two "whole" days, went to the mall, couldn't find a bookstore, and then considered himself qualified to declare that New Orleans is "lifeless", and was so before Katrina.
No wonder that Prof. Brad DeLong designated the Derbster as the "stupidest man alive" for being a former "illegal alien" who now criticizes illegal immigrants.
Anyway, I shan't pass judgment, but will print a lovely quote from Derbyshire, who felt it necessary to inform his readers that New Orleans "is the blackest American city I have been in." Who the hell cares? Well, Derbyshire does:
I believe race is a real thing, that races differ-- statistically-- in important ways, and that private racial discrimination is not immoral, and certainly should not be illegal. In the current American climate, I think that makes me a "very mild, tolerant racist." (-- John Derbyshire, 2003)
I'm sure Derbyshire has some cute little rationale about how New Orleans' "blackness" makes the city dumber than cities that are less "black". "Statistically" speaking, of course. How do the other NRO writers react to Derb's jab at our city's smarts? A Kos diarist summarizes:
Fellow Corner resident Mark Steyn chimed in: "Derb, I’m with you on New Orleans-- welfare swamp enlivened by occasional transsexual hookers". 01/25 12:30 PM
...
Jonah’s reply: "Now That's a Slogan. Mark describes New Orleans as a "welfare swamp enlivened by occasional transsexual hookers." I love it!" 01/25 12:47 PM
Of course, the "welfare swamp" myth must persist for conservatives, no matter what the real facts are. A 2005 City Journal article explained how N.O. was comparable to other metropolitan areas like NYC (where NRO headquarters are):
Despite the president’s rhetoric, and despite those indelible images from the Superdome and the Convention Center, New Orleans is just as much a black success story as a black failure story.
Yes, New Orleans has a 28 percent poverty rate, and yes, New Orleans is 67 percent black. But nearly two-thirds of New Orleans’s blacks aren’t poor.
...
Despite the images of collective helplessness broadcast after Katrina, New Orleans does not have a stratospherically high government-dependency rate. In 2002, it had 6,696 families on cash welfare, or 3.6 percent, compared with New York City’s 98,000 families, or 3.2 percent. In 2000, 7.8 percent of New Orleans households received Supplemental Security Income, compared with 7.5 percent in New York.
Anyone familiar with New Orleans knows that the city is filled with hard-working people—most of them black. Welfare reform, in New Orleans as in the rest of the country, worked; between 1996 and 2002, Louisiana cut its welfare rolls by 66 percent. The only virtue of New Orleans’s tourism-dependent economy is that those with few skills who want to work can work; the city’s unemployment rate was 5.2 percent during 2004, lower than New York’s 7.1 percent.
I guess I should take comfort in the fact that if self confessed "racists" and "homophobes" like John Derbyshire-- or any of the other conservative pantloads at NRO-- actually liked and understood New Orleans, it wouldn't be the city that it is: a stupid, lifeless, bookless, mall-rich, pigmented, transgendered, welfare swamp... right? Or, at least, that's the characterization that NRO writers would have their "intelligent" readers believe.
In short, the contributors at NRO think New Orleans deserves random ridicule and juvenile cheap shots while it recovers from the biggest (man-made) catastrophe in U.S. history. I'm sure they were doing the same thing to NYC after 9/11, right?
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Michael at 2 Millionth has more on the City Journal article here.
