Vampire Sucks Anne Rice's Brain Dry

YES, FEARLESS VAMPIRE MULTIMILLIONAIRE AUTHOR Anne Rice seems to have had her brains Hoovered right out of her shrinking skull. Or perhaps she's been caught by the intellectual black hole of the New York Times Op-Ed and pulled over the event horizon and out of the universe all together.

After a banal 3rd grade history of New Orleans and a list of reasons to save New Orleans it in Do You Know What It Means to Lose New Orleans? Rice reveals that she has absolutely no grasp or knowledge of the immense private and public relief efforts going forward second by second:

"During this crisis you failed us. You looked down on us; you dismissed our victims; you dismissed us. You want our Jazz Fest, you want our Mardi Gras, you want our cooking and our music. Then when you saw us in real trouble, when you saw a tiny minority preying on the weak among us, you called us 'Sin City,' and turned your backs."**

Whoa, whip out the crying towel and get down with your bad self, Annie! If the citizens of the United States want anything from New Orleans right now it would be 1) safety and recovery for all the people in the region, 2) the repair of the petroleum industry in that region, and 3) that the port complex be brought back online as soon as possible. We can put our need for gumbo and jazz on hold until then.

While it is true that in recent years, readers in increasing numbers have been turning their backs on Ms. Rice's potboilers, the same cannot be said of the United States and New Orleans. A cruel man might point out that this is sort of blather is nothing less than the honking of the full bull-goose looney. But I am not a cruel man and prefer to believe that Ms. Rice has simply been fed upon by Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich and turned into another Bride of Dracula. Let's grab a few wooden stakes and go save her. That first book was a doozy!

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** In spring 2005 Anne Rice moved to [La Jolla], California. If you want to catch up, here's a map showing Rice's new digs near Prospect Street in the smarmy realms in which she currently exists.
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Scarier still, the official AnneRice.Com: Messages From Anne reveals this promise: "A Citizen's Comments on the State of the World, 2005: Coming soon, new messages from Anne."
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UPDATE: Jim Geraghty @ National Review drives the stake home: "I’ve heard a great deal of complaint in recent days that the federal government may not have allocated enough money to speed up the upgrades to those levees. This does, however, raise the question of why city and state residents were waiting around for the federal government to send enough money to upgrade this, instead of paying for it themselves. I mean, it was only your homes, businesses, and lives at stake. Perhaps these upgrades would have been expensive. If only this city had some sort of events to attract tourists, from which to collect taxes.

Anyway, your state and local officials decided to spend your tax dollars on something else that they (and presumably you) found more important, and then they waited for the rest of the country to pay for these life-preserving necessities."
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UPDATE: Best headline yet on this sorry episode -- AMERICA TO ANN RICE: "BITE ME"

Posted by Vanderleun at May 6, 2005 6:11 PM