I've pretty much blown off all I need to get done this afternoon to listen, enraptured, to the webcast of the Garland Robinette Show on WWL radio in New Orleans. What I'm hearing is a talk-show host absolutely on fire, full of righteous indignation and desperately -- literally desperately -- trying to make a difference. And it makes for amazing radio.
Here's the background: Orleans Parish (same as a county, and Orleans Parish equals the city of New Orleans) District Attorney Eddie Jordan dropped charges against a man accused of gunning down five teen-agers last summer because he said the key witness had disappeared and was unwilling to testify.
He never told the cops what the problem was before dropping all charges. After the police chief got the news from the evening news, it took New Orleans cops just a few hours to track down the witness elsewhere in Louisiana.
And she's still willing to testify.
AND THAT'S THE SMALL STORY that tells a big part of the Big Story of why the criminal justice system in New Orleans has all but ceased to function after Hurricane Katrina. Before Hurricane Katrina, the criminal justice system in New Orleans had only more or less ceased to function.
Robinette -- who for years was a popular anchorman on WWL-TV and launched his radio show just before Katrina -- wants Eddie Jordan gone. Out of office. Now. And the host has a simple rationale for his big push today: He's afraid public outrage will eventually die down like it always has in New Orleans -- and Louisiana -- meaning that things just never change.
"What you're seeing and hearing today is an uptick like what you see on an oscillograph," Robinette told his radio audience. "This has been going on for 30 years, and we only get upset whenever it's a white person that gets killed, or a tourist."
He's afraid that Mayor Ray Nagin's public outrage will result in nothing more than his convincing the state's attorney general to "investigate" when Jordan's resignation is the cure for this particular civic illness.
"We don't need an investigation that's going to allow us to forget," Robinette said. "We don't need an investigation that's going to allow us to calm down."
AND THAT, the radio host says, is what the city's power structure is counting on -- the anger dying down.
"It's just a bunch of black kids gettin' blown away, right? That's what the white community should think. But the white community is furious."
Robinette says he learned a valuable lesson about problem solving as a soldier in the jungles of Vietnam, when a grunt's life depended on dealing with big problems. What he learned was there's three kinds of problems: Those you can solve, those you can partially solve . . . and those you can't solve and need to get the hell away from.
"You ever shot anybody?" Robinette asked a caller. "Do you know what it's like to kill somebody? It's a horrific thing, and it's incomprehensible that you're gonna let somebody who's done that walk the streets.
"I DON'T WANT TO BE RACIAL," he said a bit later. "This is not racial. This boggles the common sense as far as the behavior of anybody on a survival basis."
Robinette insists Nagin must march into Jordan's office and say "Young black men are being slaughtered. . . . The ability for us to live in this city is being threatened by you. We need you to resign."
When Jordan, in all likelihood, refused to do so -- being that the mayor can't make another elected official quit -- the broadcaster says the mayor needs to call a press conference to tell an outraged citizenry that, in their name, he asked the DA to quit and the DA refused.
And Robinette wants the citizens of New Orleans to put the heat on C. Ray? (Not Lately) Nagin to that effect.
"I'd like before I die -- after living in this place my whole life -- to see something done along these lines," Robinette said. "Because it's the same thing, just different people. . . . It's just one man's opinion, but I want to see this district attorney resign."
If you're in New Orleans and agree with Robinette, here's the contact info for your mayor:
ray.nagin@mayorofno.com
(504) 658-4900
UPDATE: Listen to the show in podcast form off of the WWL website. Here are the individual file links:
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