police force tattered

LI has been tough on the New Orleans cops. However, this WP article gets past our authority suspicious radar. The description of the current state of the NOLA police force reads much like Cormac McCarthy’s description of Glanton’s scalphunters in Blood Meridian:

“They sleep on the concrete sidewalk or in their cars. They scavenge for food from abandoned stores and cook by fire. They wash the laundry by hand and leave it to dry on lines hung from lampposts.
This is what life has been like for New Orleans police officers since Hurricane Katrina tore apart their city nearly two weeks ago.”
LI has a feeling that we should be studying this reduction of the American way of life: who knows what city or situation will emerge as the next object lesson in massive, contemptuous mismanagement, blessed by a governing class that lives in the monied equivalent of light years away from the mother ship, the homeland, or whatever you want to call our native muck and grease. They are the fly over people, and we are the flown over.
Here’s a little reminder of what was happening as the President was, according to the NYT’s flattering account (see our Saturday post), being handed actual news copy that contradicted the smiley faced reports of his aids (news copy that the NYT’s DC reporter assures us, in hushed, awestruck tones, that the President actually read!):
“For David Holtzclaw, 42, a tough-talking, macho police officer who has been on the force for nearly 25 years and has seen many dead bodies, it's about a baby. He was helping at the convention center one night when a man came up to him carrying his baby in a filthy blanket.

"The baby's lips were blue," he remembered. He hadn't eaten in days, and the mother was unable to breast-feed because she was ill.
Holtzclaw didn't know what to do. There was no hospital, no paramedics to call. He rushed the father and baby into his car, and began speeding west, away from the water. He stopped in St. Charles Parish and called an emergency medical service crew, which picked up the child. He found out later that the baby did not survive.”
It is a safe bet that we can mark that child down as one of the uncounted. Not that the state is unkind – we hear they are moving heaven and earth to keep pictures of such dead children away from the tv cameras.