US media hails martial law general in New Orleans

In search of reassurance, the media has latched onto an unlikely hero—the US Army general who is overseeing what amounts to martial law in New Orleans, directing thousands of heavily armed troops in this largely deserted American city littered with floating corpses.

The media is systematically promoting Lt. Gen. Russel Honore. He is portrayed as the antidote to the miserable incompetence and negligence exhibited by every level of government in the first four days following the hurricane, when the poor, the elderly, the sick and infant children were left literally to die in the streets without aid.

Honore was first hailed by New Orleans’ Democratic Mayor Ray Nagin as “one John Wayne dude,” a characterization that the television networks, followed by the print media, gleefully echoed. Now he is the subject of lengthy panegyrics in the press, extolled as the city’s savior. Among the sickest and most fawning of these tributes was a piece published Monday in the “Style” section of the Washington Post.

“There’s the swagger, and that ever-present stogie,” it reads. “There’s the height and heft of his physique. And that barking voice with its font of perhaps impolitic obscenities... not to mention his penchant for not suffering fools, as is the prerogative of a three-star general.”

No cliché is spared in extolling the martial law commander. He doesn’t speak, he “barks.” He doesn’t walk, he “strides.” He is, the Post reporter tells us, “a soldier’s soldier, the man you want in the trenches with you, the kind of man who’ll cover your back.”

The tone of the article, written by Post reporter Lynne Duke, is that of a lovesick schoolgirl, lacking a shred of objectivity, much less critical skepticism. Duke’s colleagues working the story in New Orleans may have a somewhat more jaundiced view of the general, having been subjected to harassment and restrictions at the hands of the military.

Honore’s “barking” has not infrequently been directed at anyone questioning the government’s role in New Orleans. A prominent target of his “impolitic obscenities” has been reporters asking why relief did not come sooner.

He declared last week that he would impose “zero access” for the press on the long-delayed operation to recover the city’s dead. The general claimed that it was a matter of “dignity,” though, given the failure to do anything to collect corpses rotting in the sun for 10 days, this seemed less than credible. The general was forced to rescind his censorship order in the face of court challenge by the CNN cable news network.

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http://wsws.org/articles/2005/sep2005/hon-s13.shtml