In response, attorney and former New Orleans resident Greg DeNue wrote in: “Dear Mr. Suprynowicz: I enjoyed your article immensely. You hit the nail on the head as to the true problem we are facing -- an entire class of people hooked to the government welfare check I.V.“

I have been pulling my hair out listening to the media talk about the residents of New Orleans, particularly those of the 9th Ward, having ‘lost everything,’ when they really had nothing but their welfare checks to begin with. Trust me, no one will be able to account for all of the money the government is shoveling at people in New Orleans.

“When I was a student attending Loyola in New Orleans, we were required to visit the government projects to acquaint ourselves with ‘the other half’ so to speak, as if some of us did not start off as the ‘other half’ to begin with.

“I visited the St. Thomas More housing projects, and saw inside the apartments of this housing project every conceivable big-ticket item sold at the local Circuit City: big screen TVs, microwaves, Play Stations ... you get the idea. No one worked. No one was ashamed that they were not working. There were no fathers around at all. No one was ashamed of this fact, either. “I also worked at the New Orleans Indigent Defendant Office (what we call the Public Defender’s Office, which, as an intersting side note, was denominated as such by District Attorney Harry Connick, Sr., who maintained that his office was the true Public Defender; hence, the entity charged with the defense of indigents should be called the Indigent Defendant Office), and while at the Indigent Defendant Office, saw wave after wave of morally inert criminals.

“The looters you saw on TV were criminals before Katrina. One would have to be a moron not to realize what happens when no fathers are around, and when kids grow up undisciplined, and uncivilized. I recall the term ‘Liberal Plantation’ being used, and believe a book with that title was published some years ago” (“It’s OK to Leave the Plantation,” Clarence Mason Weaver, 1998) “and am convinced that the residents you talk about in your column, and the people I saw in the inner-city of New Orleans, are, generally speaking, no different when it comes to their mental outlook, than the plantation slaves who waited for the ‘Massa’ to feed them and clothe them.

“Obviously neither I nor you are referencing those people who, because of age or disability, are not able to help themselves. It is the institutionally indolent that I am talking about. The able bodied who refuse to work. It is as if time has stood still for them. My wife worked in New Orleans at Quincy Jones’ TV station, WNOL, and has her own stories to tell ... visiting government schools where some misshapen bureaucrat was too lazy to open the boxes of new books just gathering dust in the warehouse, all the while belly-aching that not enough money was being spent on education, and the teachers all needed a raise.

“We lived in the Garden District and heard machine gun fire nearly every night. I said back in the early 1990s that martial law should have been declared. If you lived in New Orleans and did not have a weapon to protect your family you were insane. The police were notoriously corrupt and incapable of protecting anyone or anything but their interests in the slot machines, which had just been approved at that time. We used to joke that the sound of a siren meant a slot machine had been disabled somewhere.

“Ironically, just prior to seeing the ‘lumpen welfarians’ at the Superdome rioting because they had not yet had been served a hot meal by the government waiters, we had just finished watching ‘Fiddler on the Roof,’ and my wife noted the startling contrast between the displaced residents of the village of Anitefka, pushing their hand carts, with the dormant masses waiting for someone to do something for them in New Orleans. I guess it’s too late to get them all copies of ‘Think and Grow Rich.’ Oh well, pardon my rambling. I had meant to write you some time ago, but your article today about the poisonous welfare mentality, and its effects as witnessed in New Orleans, really struck a chord.”

Thus ends the missive of attorney DeNue, who specifically gave me permission to use his name and his letter, here, as did Buddy Buchanan of Jackson, Miss., who writes in:

“Sir, Yours is the only piece I’ve read in all of this aftermath of Katrina which cuts to the chase and exposes government -- at any level -- for what is really is ... a redistributor of cash. Therein lie all the problems of a class of people whom we’ve raised as, well ... political pets.

“They occupy our largest populated cities, skewing elections of every kind. Their empowerment in being so strategically placed is very close to making the institution of the Electoral College a very dangerous thing. They expect and receive from the government(s) much more than the American people are able to give them. Their entitlements designed to purchase their votes are only perpetuating and retaining a horribly struggling and politically corrupt country ... designed in the beginning to make people free. ... God help us all!”

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And here I thought I was supposed to be a hard-line right winger. Lots of people say so.But the appropriate legal authorities have been consulted, here at the Review-Journal Windowless Corporate Complex and Tri-Lateral Commission Tower, and all agree it just wouldn’t be worth the ink or the bandwidth to write letters of protest to the latest newspaper we’ve found picking up and reprinting my columns without express written permission. That newspaper being ... Pravda.

See http://english.pravda.ru/usa/2001/07/27/11138.html, or http://english.pravda.ru/main/2001/08/03/11705.html.

Hey, given America’s modern rates of complex literacy, I suppose we should be happy for loyal readers anywhere we can find them.