You know you are in Mississippi

One good thing might grow out of this is a bit less tolerance for looting and disorder. The insurance commisioner’s comments that seemed so ridiculous yesterday are starting to sound very sensible today.

The NPR guy (and I must say, the NPR coverage has been quite reasonable in my opinion. Maybe it is that they don’t have pictures but they don’t seem to focus on whining nearly as much as the TV networks.) was interviewing some Louisiana official about the insurance situation. The guy was so articulate but had such a poetic way of speaking in a thick deep-south drawl. The NPR guy was really warming up to him and kept the segment going. The guy was making a really interesting argument about how charging high re-insurance rates had made it possible now to handle the crisis financially and that all the people who had been complaining should now see what a mistake they were making.

Then the NPR guy asks him about looting. The commissioner answers, “well, you know, people like that, I just think that people who would do that ought to be shot. I wish they would just shoot them.”

The NPR guy thinks he is talking about police, but no. “I just think that when they see something like that, I just wish they would get their gun and shoot them.” He adds, just to show his isn’t a complete Neanderthal, “Now, you don’t have to kill them, but I just think they ought to shoot them.

Instead of getting all self-righteous the NPR guy tries to give the guy an out by assuming that he is just speaking figuratively about law enforcement taking strong measures and suggest that the local sheriff has said he will expand the jail system to keep looters incarcerated. The guy says, “no, the jails, they will get full up and, uh, no, just go on and shoot them.”

You know you are in Mississippi.

An interesting thing about the above dialogue is the way the commissioner assumes that “people” a) refers to his listeners and b) refers to law abiding citizens that should have the authority to shoot the bad people, who apparently aren’t listeners to NPR. That is, the Commissioner implicitly thinks that there is a thing called society that is competent to use deadly force and that these are the people in his audience. No appeal to people not to loot. That kind of person isn’t listening to the broadcast or is beyond the appeal to reason.

Of course he may be thinking that such people are listening and aiming his comments toward potential looters. He communicates to potential looters not only the cost of looting but also the degree of contempt they are held in by “people” that is the part of humanity that can be considered worthy of the name humanity. Who knows? Maybe if instead of chin scratching about what makes people loot we just talked about what we ought to do to them we would have a better effect then asking what is troubling them?