Katrina! Show me your titties!

So, Katrina happened. After that title (did you get it? I know its not in good taste, but heck, its funny!), I guess it is a bit pointless for me to say how horrified I am at the surrealness of the whole situation. Five days ago, it was just another hurricane with a pretty-girl name blowing in from the forever-choppy Atlantic. Now, it is the biggest natural disaster to hit the South in a long time.

I couldn't help but notice that the majority of the people affected were poor. And black. I also couldn't help but notice that for the first three or four days, the news networks on cable (CNN, Fox, MSNBC) carefully avoided mentioning that fact and acted color-blind. In today's PC world, news anchors are probably afraid of slipping up and doing a Campanis¹ that could end their career. But ignoring that fact completely is akin to not acknowledging the proverbial elephant in the room. And the longer you stay in said room, the harder it becomes to miss said elephant.

Apparently, Wolf Blitzer, over at CNN, found it impossible to miss the elephant. Quoting him,

... as Jack Cafferty just pointed out, so tragically, so many of these people, almost all of them that we see, are so poor and they are so black, and this is going to raise lots of questions for people who are watching this story unfold.

What do you mean, Wolf..? Like, not Prince black, but Charlie Murphy black? Its like Blitzer not only decided to acknowledge the elephant, but proceeded to beat it with sticks.

¹ Al Campanis, who was at one time, the GM of the LA Dodgers, went on Nightline in 1987, and educated Ted Koppel on the absence of blacks at the higher echelons of executive-dom. According to him, blacks might not have "some of the necessities" it takes to manage a major league team or a similar high-powered position, for the same reason that they aren't "good swimmers". The reason: they "lack buoyancy". His tenure as the GM of the Dodgers ended immediately afterwards.