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Man of the Year
By now you’ve seen him over and over again. Clucked over by news pundits pondering the sad state of our union. Photoshopped to sometimes hilarious, sometimes utterly lame, effect on sites such as Fark.com. In countless navel-gazing end-of-year montages in all the major magazines. There he is, with his rakish smile and neglected hair, in the LIFE magazine retrospective on Hurricane Katrina. There he is, with his face photoshopped onto the body of an overweight moshing girl, on an Internet website devoted to WWW celebrities (or “Internet Famous People”, as one of our esteemed former staff members liked to put it). You’ve seen his likeness used in side-by-side comparisons that expose the inherent bigotry of our major news outlets. (The toofless white trash couple with the big cartload of disposable diapers and Miller High Life “found” their ill-gotten booty; he “stole” his.) Lately you’ve seen his mug on the header button for MY very own political page. You’ve laughed over his brass balls or recoiled in distaste from his desperation and bottom-of-the-barrel shamelessness. He’s pushed all your buttons, wading along with that seen-it-all smile and that tub of Heinie (with the couple of PBRs peeking impishly out from underneath all that high-priced imported shit). And you don’t even know his name.
I’m talking, of course, about a man who needs no introduction. He’s the “Looter Guy”, that nappy-haired, grinning black man hauling a tub of stolen Heineken through the filthy, rising floodwaters on the streets of what had just the day before been New Orleans.
One would assume that efforts to locate the now-infamous “Looter Guy” have been duly made. If not, they definitely should, and a check should be cut and photo-ops arranged. He, not Bono or the Gateses, should have been on the cover of TIME at the beginning of the year, being heralded as Man of the Year. Who better embodies the TRUE spirit of America, with its persistent optimism in the face of adversity, its party-animal nature, its ability to stand knee-deep in shit and manage to shrug and say “Fuck it, it’s five o’clock somewhere, I’m crackin’ one open.” Sure, we may want to LOOK at someone like Pat Tillman, or that lady who talked the disgruntled employee from ending a hostage situation, and say, “That person is what America is all about. I am raising my children to do what THAT person would do,” but we know that we’re mostly not that good. We’ve safely categorized the Looter Guy as a little hunk of comic relief – or, more odiously, some kind of proof of the morally deficient nature of American blacks – but the thing that gives his image its power and keeps him appearing and reappearing when not only New Orleans and Katrina, but the year 2005, is mentioned in the media, is the shock of recognition we feel when observing his antics. If I myself were in his shoes you would see me hauling a bucket full of prescription bottles and imported water, since I don’t drink alcohol, but I’d still be hauling SOMETHING that would give me a buzz and take my mind off losing everything, only to find out the government had built a dam that they knew would break and more or less left me to die in the untreated sewerage that spilled forth from the breach. No, I’m not the kind of person who would normally shoplift or loot. No, I don’t go staggering around with a massive buzz on all the time (despite what my essays might lead you to believe). But be honest – what would YOU do, in that man’s shoes? You’d wade your overfed American ass down to the nearest flooded-out bodega and grab yourself a few cold ones to suck down while you sat among what remained of your property and waited for help to arrive.
Not that a lot of us can admit to this recognition. It’s easy for white, middle-class, middle-of-the-road types to look at that picture and defensively, reflexively, say, “Tsk, tsk. Look at the kinds of choices poor black people make. No wonder they ended up the way they did. Why wasn’t he trying to help his neighbors? Why did he have to steal? Why couldn’t he, if he HAD to steal, have confined it to water, food – necessities?” Why indeed. If you are a human being, possessing a human soul and its attendant weaknesses, you know goddamn well why. Because he’s poor, he’s lost everything, he’s stranded – and he’s HUMAN.
You’d be far more likely to do what he did than you would to wrack your brain trying to think of something “constructive” to do. You’d be far more likely to get blind, stinking drunk than you would to try and present a “proper role model” for your kids. In short, you’d do what he did. Don’t play.
Even fucking St. Bono woulda grabbed the nearest bottle of Jameson’s and started chugging.
