Class, Race and Katarina

Jack Shafer indirectly destroys the Jonah Goldberg’s argument about “playing the class card”:

To be sure, some reporters sidled up to the race and class issue. I heard them ask the storm’s New Orleans victims why they hadn’t left town when the evacuation call came. Many said they were brokeÂ:”I live from paycheck to paycheck,” explained one woman. Others said they didn’t own a car with which to escape and that they hadn’t understood the importance of evacuation.

But I don’t recall any reporter exploring the class issue directly by getting a paycheck-to-paycheck victim to explain that he couldn’t risk leaving because if he lost his furniture and appliances, his pots and pans, his bedding and clothes, to Katrina or looters, he’d have no way to replace them. No insurance, no stable, large extended family that could lend him cash to get back on his feet, no middle-class job to return to after the storm.

This is the central issue. Nobody, of course, is arguing that anybody who is forced to evacuate–whether from a large mansion or a tiny one-bedroom apartment–is not suffering an awful fate. But there’s still a huge difference between people with insurance and the resources to start a new life, and people who have lost everything, and have no means to get it back. To pretend that there’s no difference between absolute and relative deprivation and that most of the media should continue to ignore the distinction –especially coming from someone as well-connected and priveleged as Goldberg–is morally obscene.