Proof that nothing changed after Sept. 11.

In the Atlantic Monthly a few years back, Robert D. Kaplan went to Liberia, Sierra Leone, and other failed jurisdictions of West Africa and concluded that many of the “citizens” of these “states,” roaming the streets raping and killing, belonged to a phenomenon called “re-primitivized man.”

Anyone watching TV in recent days will have seen plenty of “re-primitivized man,” not in Liberia or Somalia, but in Louisiana. Cops smashing the Wal-Mart DVD cabinet so they can get their share of the booty along with the rest of the looters, gangs firing on a children’s hospital and on rescue helicopters, hurricane victims being raped in the New Orleans Convention Center… . If you’re minded, as many of the world’s anti-Americans are, to regard the United States as a depraved swamp, it was a grand old week: Mother Nature delivered the swamp, but plenty of natives supplied the depravity.

Not all of them, of course. But it doesn’t really matter if it’s only 5 percent or 2 percent or 0.01 percent if everybody else is giving them free rein. Not exactly the most impressive law enforcement agency even on a good day, the New Orleans Police Department sent along some 80 officers to rescue the rape victims trapped in the Convention Center, but were beaten back by the mob. Meanwhile, the ever more pitiful governor was, unlike many of her fellow Louisianans, safe on dry land but still floundering way out of her depth, unable to stand up to the lawlessness even rhetorically or to communicate anything other than emotive impotence.

Read it all.

And here’s a video that further illustrates Mark’s point: