A good example is here, and John Protevi (French Studies, LSU) sends the following apt comments in response:
Rich Lowry, one of the new breed of empty suits masquerading as a conservative pundit, does the utterly expected and, taking rumor and sensationalist media coverage for fact, cites the "massive lawlessness" in New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina, and then, not to be outdone in his cliched allusions, cites Hobbes. A great philosopher, the poor Englishman, who actually lived through a civil war, would doubtless blanch at the nitwits who cite him whenever they want to indulge a little authoritarian fantasy. The real story of New Orleans is not the scattered criminality, but our willingness to believe the wildest of rumor (like the "riot" at the Riverplex or the "civil unrest" of Chancellor O'Keefe's email to the LSU community or the "carjackings" someone solemnly told me happened "right there on Essen"). The real story of New Orleans is not the every man for himself, "man is a wolf to man," fantasy of Lowry and the other Hobbes-mongers, but the thousands and thousands and thousands of the brave and loving people of New Orleans who refused to leave their old, their sick, their young, their helpless, and who walked miles through the floods to safety, pushing wheelchairs and floating the sick on "looted" air mattresses, along with the hundreds of rescuers, professional and volunteer alike, who found FEMA incompetence a far worse foe than the waters. The real lesson is not that we need order from above to prevent the anarchy that is supposedly close by, but that the solidarity that holds us all together, the civic and human bonds that led all those thousands to stick together, needs only support from a government that needs to be recalled to its proper function as the organized expression of that solidarity.
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