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“Let Them Eat Pork Rinds”

Hitchens’ commentary on the response of the Bush administration to Hurricane Katrina as a part of the long social history of classes. There are many funny stories recounted in the essay like this English joke,” Two extremely rich men are sitting in companionable silence in their overstuffed armchairs in the upstairs window of the Carlton Club, in London. The silence is broken when the first man calls attention to the situation outside and says, ‘It’s raining.’ ‘Good,’ replies the second man without looking up from his newspaper. ‘It’ll wet the people.’ ”

…or the explanation of the term “beyond the salt” to refer to the lowly section of the table where the salt was not to be passed….or the Queen Mother’s (of England) comment, “I see no point at all in being por.”

He wraps the essay with this:

And then there came a day in New Orleans, a town named for a scion of French feudalism, when the saltwater rose up and didn’t just wet the people but drowned them, and nobody was above that salt except those who could fly over it and look down de haut en bas, while a lot of lowly people were suddenly well below it. Whatever is that distant rumble that I dimly hear?

New learning: Barbara Bush’s comments about the refugees in the Super Bowl during Hurricane Katrina, “What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas…and so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this, this is working very well for them.”

New word: tumbril = cart used to take prisoners to the guillotine in the French Revolution.

Tumbril, Hurricane Katrina Style: