Parting Ways (Derbyshire Fired From National Review)

[KamaAina]

42. Derbyshite on New Orleans. And this WAS in National Review.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/219661/big-easy/john-derbyshire

Race. From the tourist’s-eye view, New Orleans is a black city. The servicepeople at the airport, the hotel, concessions, stores, museums, and fast-food outlets are uniformly black. Most of the people you pass on the street, outside the tourist precincts, are black. I think this is the blackest American city I have been in....

What happened to this young couple was unspeakably horrible, and there is of course no excusing such barbarism. It is hard, though, not to shake your head at the couple’s unworldly naivety. What kind of people did they think they were going to encounter when they got down and dirty with “the community”? The Times-Picayune story quoted a neighbor of the couple saying this: “They would never do it, but they should have answered the door with a gun.” Hard to disagree with that — either part of it....

Normally I wouldn’t have indulged this, but heck, it was her birthday. It did make me feel slightly sad, though, that a bright and lively young person, taken to a city with three centuries of history stacked up, should seek out a shopping mall, of the kind that is exactly the same, with the same vendors — Brookstone, Banana Republic — as in every other mall everywhere in the USA. This one didn’t even have a bookstore I could hang out in. Come to think of it, I didn’t see a bookstore the whole two days poking around New Orleans.

He must not have poked very hard. There's one right behind the big cathedral, in the house where Faulkner once lived. And another down the block on Chartres, and...

What a .