Online Petting Zoo of Homeless New Orleanians: Another Reason for New Orleans to Distrust Social Media and Hate the Internet
Jon Steward interviews Lee Seigel author of Against the Machine.
A few days ago in the bloggers listserv, local blogger Mominem shared an email message he received. It was a press release from a man from Memphis, Tennessee who runs a website where he humilates and torments the homeless. The press release was announcing his pending arrival in New Orleans.
The nice thing about the bloggers listserv is the collective processing power, because I only took a cursory look and found it tasteless. I did not realize that it was so aggressive. Then Greg Peters posted the mission of the organization.
Um.
“Street-People.com was created to chronicle the stories of the homeless and raise awareness of the continuing problem of homelessness through the use of humor. Here they are entertainment, like creatures in an online petting zoo without the urine smell.”
I think this is about one step removed from Bumfights.
Wayne Andrews is a 40 year old employee of a Mephis marketing firm who uses his business trips to fuel his hateful little blog, where he posts his stories and photographs of the most disturbed homeless people.
Our departed friend Ashley Morris as moniker for people like this. Yet, I want maintain the Think New Orleans G rating. So, I’ll call him simply a mook.
He is an example of an growing cadre of like minded people. People who are holding up New Orleans as an story of a moral failing and city and people deserving of their fate.
This justification can be felt at every level by the flooded. Whether it is Ed Blakely saying that we need to be put on birth control, or Bay Buchanan closing the window of compassion with the careful rationalization of Katrina fatigue, or merely a weekend urban planner who doling out the hackneyed perspective that the destruction of post-war New Orleans is a golden opportunity to experiment with bulldozers and condos.
These sentiments, and many more, are all underscored on the premise that we had it coming. If not because we are sinful, then it is because we racist, lazy, ungrateful or underinsured. There are many such premises. They are all simple and wrong. They all state that we only have ourselves to blame.
It’s A Just World After All
Intrepid gadfly Karen Gabois went and put the press release sent to Momenem before homeless advocates in New Orleans, who in turn put it before New Orleans City Business, which is fast becoming my favorite New Orleans publication. They have a great sense of what is newsworthy for those of us below the flood line. It is becoming an important second source of news and information in a one newspaper town.
Richard A. Webster is a staff writer for City Business. He wrote Memphis man to expose N.O. homeless on controversial Web site. He managed to contact not only Wayne Andrews author of street-people.com.
Street people, as defined by Andrews, are drunks and drug addicts, the people he calls parasites and cockroaches who would rather leech off of society then seek or accept help.
When he is in New Orleans, Andrews said he will do his best to differentiate between the homeless and street people through one-on-one interviews. Those who lost their homes because of the hurricane will not be featured on his site.
As for the others, it’s open season.
We’re becoming accustomed to people promoting themselves or their interests using New Orleans as their backdrop. Just look at the absurd campaign where children are asked to write essays in a contest called Which lucky child deserves to have their home rebuilt or restored? In this contest, a general contractor will build a home for the child who writes the best essay explaining why their family deserves a home.
We seem to be attracting a new level of vindictiveness, however. We are becoming a whipping boy for the theory that anyone who suffers has somehow, somewhere done something to bring that suffering upon themselves. My friend Lance Hill put me onto this when he invited me to the Storm Bridge workshop at Southern Institute of Tulane University. This workshop talked about how the experience of the storm and the flood provided a common experience through which different groups of people could relate. It was here that I became aware of the “just world hypothesis.”
In an essay by Claire Andre and Manuel Velasquez The Just World Hypothesis is described a need to see victims as deserving of their fate in order to maintain a belief that the world is just.
The need to see victims as the recipients of their just deserts can be explained by what psychologists call the Just World Hypothesis. According to the hypothesis, people have a strong desire or need to believe that the world is an orderly, predictable, and just place, where people get what they deserve. Such a belief plays an important function in our lives since in order to plan our lives or achieve our goals we need to assume that our actions will have predictable consequences. Moreover, when we encounter evidence suggesting that the world is not just, we quickly act to restore justice by helping the victim or we persuade ourselves that no injustice has occurred. We either lend assistance or we decide that the rape victim must have asked for it, the homeless person is simply lazy, the fallen star must be an adulterer.
In Andrews case, it is not enough to justify indifference and call the homeless person lazy.
He must go further and adjust his malice and dehumanize his victims. The homeless person is not merely lazy, no. He is a “parasite” and a “cockroach.” Not all homeless people, of course, but those that Andrews deems street people. Then they are fair game, because by his definition they are no longer human.
Wayne Andrews is a 40 year old man who is a caricature of the just world hypothesis.
Against the Machine
I’ve not yet read Against the Machine. I’ll laughably say, however, that I watched the Jon Steward interview. In it Lee Siegel described the Internet as dehumanizing place where we are apt to project the little goblins dancing around our minds onto the distant, faceless persons we encounter in chat rooms, blogs and web forums. When we have only a slight digital representation on of person we can flesh that person out by ascribing motives and assigning blame. Then with the immediacy of the Internet we can attack this opponent of our imagining.
This is so common in an unmoderated forum, like those of nola.com.
It is not uncommon to have someone disrupt the comment section of this website with a comment directed at “you people.” No examples because nola.com, no hairs are split here. The comments are deleted. Those comments are deleted. It is easy to spot an unhinged response.
It is easy to sense when someone has not actually read the article or the other commentators. They’ve punched “Katrina”, “Nagin”, “public housing” or some other hot button into a search engine. They’ve clicked a search result and landed here. They are now venting their spleens.
They’ve not stopped to consider what’s written, except maybe to pick out a keyword that they can repeat in their diatribe. They respond to arguments that are not made. These comments very often begin with “You people believe…”, because they have to set up their attack by ascribing motive, since the basis of their attack does not exist in the article or the forum.
The racist bile coursing through the comments of nola.com exemplify this sort of outlet of rage. This happens because there are no decent people to face. The commentators would be unable to maintain their rage if faced with decent people starring back with slack jaws and knit brows. When all you have is a textbox and your own inadequacies to inform you, there is no decency to maintain.
The Straw Men Under the Bridge
The website Andrews created is designed to harness this indecency. His angry website attacks and degrades these dehumanized “street people” so that you may join in and further attack and degrade them. For those of you offended by people who are so hopelessly mentally ill that they cannot care for them selves and without a family to care for them, this is your opportunity to voice your offense. If someone has asked you for spare change, you can now go to a website that will assure you that this is a validation for the pure hatred that others might ask you to reconsider. You can voice your offense under the thin rationalization that these people are “parasites and cockroaches” who are somehow harming society. You can voice your offense security in your anonymity in an online environment where no decent person will step in to question your decency.
It’s a easy racket. Here is someone who takes a digital camera on business trips to create a face book of the homeless. He invites you to mock them. He is a position to ascribe whatever failings he can imagine upon his digitized victims. He obviously has the support of followers who are eager to justify their hatred of the most unfortunate.
Yet, he can’t maintain this assertion that he is the real victim of the “parasites and cockroaches” when a proper journalist calls him. From Memphis man to expose N.O. homeless on controversial Web site.
“Yeah, they’re human beings but how is the rest of this frickin’ society able to go to bed at night knowing this is how we let people live in our country?” he said. “Turn that around on (Gadbois) and ask her what she’s doing to solve the problem. We’re supposed to be the greatest country in the world and yet we have people allowed to live in urine under trees with an alcoholism problem. And I’m the bad guy? I’m the guy who’s actually getting something done. I’m attacking the situation.”
When faced with traditional media talking to him about his work, he has to dawn a fig leaf and say that his work is “attacking the situation.” as opposed to his stated desire to attack the impoverished, the addicted and the mentally ill. This does not jibe with his assertion that these people are “parasites and cockroaches.”
He’s casting about for a justification for this little Internet property that he’s created for himself. His victims are “fair game” because they are “parasites and cockroaches” on the one hand, but he is “raising awareness of homelessness” on the other.
Understanding the Spectrum of Recovery Good and Evil
In his piece, Mr. Webster interviews the obvious antithesis to Wayne Adrews, Martha Kegel, executive director of Unity of Greater New Orleans, an organization that has placed 200 of the former residents of the Duncan Plaza homeless encampment in perminant housing.
He also quotes Karen Gadbois, keeper of Squandered Heritage, whose contributions to the community and the recovery are too many to mention. She is one to watch. She is active on all matters of dignity.
Karen has become an important bridge between the recovery underground of blogs and mailing lists and the traditional media. I am grateful that Mr. Webster took the time to write this story for New Orleans City Business.
This is an issue of decency and dignity. It is a grossly exaggerated example of someone seeking to make a point of our the misery of the flooded. Andrews has taken making a point of our tragedy to the extreme. He has done so for the most trivial gain.
He can serve as a reminder.
Wayne Andrews can serve to remind us that when an individual or organization comes to New Orleans with their own set of justifications and assertions, looking for material to buttress their argument, rather than seeking to assess the needs and contribute to the recovery underway, that they are no better than an angry 40-year-old employee of Memphis marketing firm and his website dedicated to the hatred of the inhabitants of our society’s lowest rung.
Wayne Andrews inhabits the far side of the spectrum of people who work help and people who will rationalize. He is a caricature of the just world hypothesis.
On the other side of the spectrum, we have the people from abroad who are working with us, side by side, to create a just world through labor, enterprise and ingenuity.
Wayne Andrews can teach us to differentiate between those that rationalize that the world is just and those that work to make the world just. It’s not difficult to tell the two apart, really. You can spot the rationalizers because their lips are moving. You can spot those truly committed to make making the world decent and just because they are moving everything but.
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Mr. Andrews is a disgusting little man, I should know as he is me. His website full or rage and hate for his fellow man, or did someone finally figure out how to play the media game? American media rarely writes about the good news. In general American media writes about a story three times then it is old news never to be covered again unless some sort of tragedy occurs.
After donating money, serving as a volunteer, and working on fundraisers for many homeless programs I realized something. They are not working! New Orleans is a unique situation in all of the places street-people.com has visited because of the hurricane it has both homeless and street people. Realize there is a difference.
The point of street-people.com is by using stories that are intentionally in bad taste to get people to realize the difference, begin to think why the programs don’t work, and in a small measure change behanvior. Our team of agents who submit stories do so not to mock people but to point out the differences that homeless people are seeking a hand up and are willing to improve their situation with a little help. Street people are chronic. They will live on the streets in the manner they choose until they sink to their lowest level and have to get off the streets because they have addiction, mental health, or are just plain lazy. Our point of writing articles that are in bad taste about these people is to get the public to realize giving them a dollar does not help their situation but most likely makes it worse by allowing them to stay on the street.
Realize most of the street people end up getting arrested and instead of getting the help they need for addiction or mental illness - they get a three day vacation paid by tax payers to the jail with meals and showers and then are set back on the street. What is a better use of our resources putting these people in jail or into a program for long term care.
If you read, really read, what street-people is about you will learn this is what we are preaching. The garish and outlandish claims of bum stink are to capture peoples attention. Street-people.com uses the MTV approach. Everyone tunes in to “Real World” to be a fly on the wall and see who will sleep with whom, street-people.com gives people that same tasteless viewing but subtle plants the message that our society is broke.
Again, our site does not target “homeless” people but street people. Our writing maybe in bad taste but our point is valid. I think if you read our prior stories from our last visit to New Orleans in January 07 you will see our true focus. As I stated in the press release and articles - New Orleans is being decended upon by street people who are tapping into the resources of those impacted by the hurriance and drawing attention away from those who are really trying to overcome the tragedy.