245. PRESIDENTIAL CHOREOGRAPHY

Since 9/11, military contractors like United Technologies, which makes Black Hawk helicopters, have seen their profits explode and their executives and top shareholders rake in windfall salaries. And as the rest of us shell out record prices for gas, oil executives claim that “we’re all in this together.” (Alternet)

From the Archives. (31 August 2006) And what about Haliburton and those $40 Cokes?

Spent the day trying not to barf from viewing all the carefully choreographed footage of GWB kissing up to shell-shocked NOLA residents in an obvious attempt to cast his abysmal leadership failures in a more favorable light.

I guess his advisors are finally worried that his pathetic approval ratings might adversely affect the GOP come election time.

Let’s think big picture though boys: this guy and his administration are adversely affecting history—at least until someone manages to add up all the subterfuge and Constitution-be-damned under-the-radar actions they’ve undertaken since 2000.

So what’s the administration’s spin on the 1,700 people who died and the hundreds of thousands of families that lost their homes as Shrub strummed his guitar?

Well, let’s see. This was an opportunity for Amurrrrricans to learn how to respond better to our public image er catastrophes because, damn it, you people actually documented the atrocities that this administration can no longer pretend didn’t happen.

That’s right. An opportunity. Just like getting booted out of the welfare system is an opportunity to find minimum-wage work as a toilet cleaner.

(Now forget what you saw on your TV sets, citizens, and get back to shopping.)


This administration has illustrated to the world what the politics of greed looks like and wouldn’t know what to do with Melvin McLeod’s observation that “the real substance in politics is in the heart, not the head” if it slapped them in their privileged faces.

Thich Nhat Hanh, profound Vietnamese priest, founder of the Engaged Buddhism movement, and prominent author, says that we must learn to see others’ suffering as our own, that this alone is how we can save our world in the twenty-first century.

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So yeah. Today marks one year from the date when our boy emperor observed the destruction of Hurricane Katrina from the safety of Air Force One while the inhabitants drowned.

Meanwhile, Susie Sexpert has posted a blog entry entitled God Is My Sex Toy Co-Pilot.

Her message: zealots must stay in bed with Jesus/ Allah /Krishna as they copulate—which is, she observes, “a threeway you can’t ever quit.”

240. ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS

From the Archives (1 August 2006) “End of life issues are very sensitive, especially if you are the person whose end of life we are talking about.” So said Charles Foti Jr., New Orleans attorney general and obvious opponent of the Schiavo decision.

Foti had a doctor and two nurses arrested on murder charges this week for allegedly euthanizing several elderly and acutely ill patients who were enduring their third day of 100+° post-hurricane conditions in a hospital with no electricity and little remaining food or medical supplies.

These women stayed on duty when the hospital administrators and medical personnel evacuated to higher ground and put themselves in harm’s way for their patients (which is more than anyone can say for our president who strummed his guitar as the ciy drowned).

Foti aparently believes that the doctor should have let those patients die a slow overheated death instead of allegedly putting them out of their misery (which sounds oh so humane to me).

I know. I know. Some of you will say that the good doctor could have called on Bill Frist to cure those patients via video. Or asked Pat Robertson to pray for their rescue. Or called a few legislators in for photo ops. But, hey, seems to me they did what they could in obscene circumstances.

My question is, why isn’t Foti charging Bush&Co with murder?

After all, they are the ones whose incompetence and blatant disregard for survivors resulted in these people having no choice but to fend for themselves and make such hard choices.

And come on. This ain’t like those nursing home owners who left those 34 patients to drown. These women stayed at the hospital after the calls to evacuate because they cared about their patients.

Foti accuses these women of “acting like God,” which I guess tells us just how much his Christianist beliefs color his misuse of power.

•

Meanwhile, Danishgrrrl just called from her ex-mother-in-law’s place in Tacoma to say a mentally ill Muslim man shot five Jewish people at a synogogue because he’s “angry at Jews and the United States.”

Religion kills, man.

•

Visited Jamie last night after her hysterectomy. She’s uncomfortable and wants to be at her own place (which is, unfortunately, up 3 flights of stairs) instead of at her cranky ex’s house, but is stuck there till at least this weekend. She’s got staples in her stomach and is tired of waiting for more detailed biopsy results.

Right now, the oncologist says she may only need radiation treatments though.

I guess, if there’s any good news in all this, it’s that she will be away from her stinky work place for at least 6 weeks.

LISTENING TO: Gossip’s “Listen Up,” (the iTunes music store free download of the week). Before that, I was listening to Neil Young’s “Bird” When you see me fly away without you. ... feathers fall around you and show you the way to go. It’s ooooooover.....

233. THE CAPITAL OF PETTINESS

From the Archives. (June 2006, late) The French novelist and essayist Stendhal called his hometown "the capital of pettiness" and fled to Paris as soon as he could. I fled to New Orleans. With Danishgrrrl. And boy am I glad I did.

I savored every second of uninterrupted time that we spent together.

The city itself was sobering though, an empty shell of a once-vibrant place that I am only now able to even write about.

Flood-damaged vehicles still lie in rusted, crumbled heaps beneath overpasses. Small white trailers stand in the driveways of moldy houses still in serious states of disrepair. Blue-tarped roofs are everywhere. And plywood-covered windows and doors stretch across the entire city, punctuated by the snapped-off trunks of palmettos.

But where are the people? Even in the French Quarter—an area the floodwaters ostensibly spared—there were so few people.

I understand that tourist dollars are important right now and that our conference brought needed funds to the area, but felt as if we were invading the precious few remains of someone’s sacred shrine, that we were surfing on the residents’ collective misery in a gauche and callous way as the shell-shocked looked on, too tired and despondent to even react to our thoughtless invasion.

Empty turnstiles suggested where crowds once gathered and all I could think when I saw them was Here is the church. Here is the steeple. But where the bloody hell are the people?

No crowds filled the riverfront park or waited to board the Algiers ferry or stood in line at the cool aquarium and even the residents seemed baffled by the malfunctioning walk/don’t walk signs that nearly got us killed more than once.

And the over-riding stench of rotting garbage was everywhere.

Bourbon Street is a sad spilled beer of a place populated by a few mullet-wearing bleached-blond types clutching plastic and looking down the vast and empty streets, trying hard to find the party they’ve been promised. They whoop it up momentarily but, with so few of them there, their gesticulations are herely sad and overly desperate gestures, signifying nada.

Only Cafe du Monde seemed vibrant, still alive.

The place is surrounded by tropical courtyards maintained behind gorgeous wrought-iron gates, and the balconies still boast overflowing flowerpots set against beautiful pastel-tinted stucco .

Plenty of restaurants still offer gumbo and shrimp with remoulade sauce and crawfish etouffée too.

Danishgrrrl and I even stumbled upon a festive wedding parade be-bopping its way down Royal Street with a brass band leading the way.

That felt hopeful at least.

But what felt most hopeful (um, besides the fact that I learned oh so much that will help me do my job more effectively) was the fact that Danishgrrrl and I got to spend so much uninterrupted time together without the kids or our everyday obligations or deadlines and are now practically glowing in each other’s presence.

Sadly, we must now resume our workouts after all that Creole food that we consumed in the shell-shocked shambles of the once vibrant city that is now America’s shame.

READING: The Piano Tuner, which my reading group will discuss tonight.

BEST-OF SPAM (Subject Line): Your penis reminds a computer mouse? (Well, the florescent blue trackball on my Mac mouse IS a little like one of those dolphin dildos. And I do finger the little gray clitoris on my PC mouse when I need to doubleclick. Still, I’d have to say that my penises—‘cause who wants to be limited to one?—are much more shaftlike than any mouse I've seen. Dude.)

228. SHE’S A HOUSE ON FIRE; I’M A HURRICANE

Remember that it only takes one hurricane in your neighborhood to make it a bad season” says Conrad Lautenbacher from the National Hurricane Center.

From the Archives. (May 2006) I hate to bring this up but hurricane season is upon us and guess who’s still in office, tuning his guitar.

I was thinking about the Katrina debacle last night after discovering some chilling yet somehow beautiful New Orleans footage and videos at http://www.filmstripinternational.com and http://www.chrisvids.org.

This made me remember how weird it was to drive from DC to Charleston after a hurricane nearly destroyed the city.

Signs as far away as Charlotte were bent to the ground and debris littered the roadside for hundreds of miles.

It got worse the closer I got to the coast. Then I reached Charleston and discovered that the damage was even worse than I had imagined,that the city had been effectively transformed into a bombed-out wisteria-dripping ruin.

Still, years later, when a local weather station warned that a hurricane was heading my way I said “Are y’all crazy? Hurricanes don’t come this far inland.”

Boy was I wrong.

Our seventy-year-old windows shook in their casements as Mud and I kept looking at each other and asking Is THIS when we fill the bathtub with water and stand in the stairwell with the mattress over our faces?

It was the only time I hated the fact that our house was filled with French doors.

The rain pounded against our thirteen-inch stucco walls so hard that they were saturated clean through. And, even though we scoured the neighborhood, we never found the patio furniture that the wind carried away or mangled beyond recognition.

(And did I mention that plants we’d never planted sprouted up everywhere even as we wondered what became of our tomatoes? Or that I was so damn desperate for a cup of coffee in our powerless town that I actually ground my beans with a rolling pin?)

All of which is a precursor to my saying that being in New Orleans next month is going to be mighty damn weird and I can’t believe that Bush isn’t doing more to prepare for this season (and that I can’t find some long-distance way to make plans to work in a neighborhood while I’m there) .

Meanwhile, Pat Robertson has announced that his god told him that a tsunami will hit the Pacific NW this year (which, to my undying delight, caused owlbear1 to write “Oh mighty Thor! I beseech thee to wack Pat Robertson’s pee pee”).

Meanwhile, tickets for Madonna’s new tour are a mere $350 apiece.

Puhleeez! I mean sure Madonna is great and like a virgin and yogatastic and all that and she survived that unfortunate equestrian accident unlike Christopher Reeves and I am sure that it is oh so fantastic to watch her because she is, after all, Madonna, but we are talking about HUNDREDS OF DOLLARS here and the biggest irony of all is that her tour includes a video montage of Bush, bin Laden, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al. juxtaposed with starving African children (all of whom could be fed and clothed for years if Madonna donated her profits to this cause).

Meanwhile, David Sirota points out in In These Times that the same neocons who preach the so-called culture of life are paid boocoodles of money from the health-care industry to look the other way when sick people skip a trip to the physician because they can’t afford to go.

He asks “Why do we hear so much about how well-off America is, yet our country has the highest number of uninsured citizens in the industrialized world?”

Why isn't that question asked? Because you can't answer it honestly without exploring how Corporate America has bought off enough politicians to make sure our government helps corporations perpetuate this travesty.

....I'm not naïve. I know that corporations exist for one reason and one reason only: the relentless, single-minded pursuit of profit, no matter who gets shafted. That is their stated purpose in a capitalist society, and that's fine. But in our country, corporations aren't supposed to pursue this purpose in a vacuum, unchecked, unregulated, unopposed. There is supposed to be a counterweight, a government separate from Big Business whose job is to prevent the corporate profit motive from destroying society.

That government once passed laws protecting the environment, so the profit motive wouldn't end up eliminating breathable air. That government once protected workers, so the profit motive wouldn't result in Americans toiling in sweatshops. And that government once demanded better wages, so the profit motive wouldn't result in a race to the bottom for poverty-level paychecks. But that government, as we all know, is long gone. Our government has been the victim of a hostile takeover. Over the last thirty years, Corporate America has applied its most effective business tactics to the task of purchasing the one commodity that's not supposed to be for sale: American democracy.

So yeah. Next time you’re watching one of those feel-good Blue Cross Blue Shield look-how-we-love-our-customers ads, remind yourself that HMOs doubled their profits in 2003 and spent $600 million on lobbying efforts and campaign contributions that year.

Sirota also points out that “Frist’s family was forced to pay $1.7 billion in criminal and civil fines for trying to rip off Medicare while running the nation’s largest for-profit hospital chain“ (a chain where I toiled in their crummy kitchens for 7 long years).

And to think it was once considered primitive to feast on the poor.

BEST-OF SPAM: Do you want your dick to be wallpaper for a computer? (Um. I’m not even sure how to answer that?)

171. HYMNS FOR THE SORTA-COMMITTED, OR, ONWARD CHRISTIAN RESERVISTS

From the Archives

(November 2005) And now is the time to post Muhammed Ali’s famous quote outlining why he refused to serve in Vietnam:

Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No, I'm not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end.

I have been warned that to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality.... If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people, they wouldn't have to draft me, I'd join tomorrow. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I'll go to jail, so what? We've been in jail for 400 years.

Seeing a picture of a New Orleans resident of African descent holding up an anti-war protest sign that read No Iraqi ever left me to die on a roof. (which references Ali’s No Vietnamese ever called me “nigger") is a good reminder of why this sentiment is still relevant.

So, turns out John Edwards focused on an issue that could actually weaken the Republican Party, especially because he was fortunate enough (well) to have a hurricane showcase his cause. Our TV screens have been filled with evidence of just how the 37 million impoverished Americans live while our president gives tax cuts to the super rich, and let’s hope that shows up at the polls.

Americans are suddenly aware of poverty again and embarrassed by the fact that our government can’t (or won't) take care of its own struggling citizens

(Well, actually, it’s more accurate to say that our government stalks the poor in order to reward the wealthy in a kind of reverse Robin Hoodism.)

Meanwhile, I’ve had Baptist hymns whispering in my skull all day after attending a co-worker’s mother’s funeral and so am pasting some sarcastic new hymn titles below. They’re funny, especially if you grew up with the Broadman hymnal:

HYMNS FOR THE SORTA-COMMITTED
• I Surrender Some
• There Shall Be Sprinkles of Blessings
• Fill My Spoon, Lord
• Take My Life and Let Me Be
• It is My Secret What God Can Do
• There are Scattered Clouds in My Soul Today
• Just as I Pretend to Be
• My Hope is Built On Somewhat Less
• It Is Fairly Well With My Soul
• When the Saints Go Sneaking In
• Onward Christian Reserves

READING: Jeanette Winterson’s Lighthousekeeping
SANG IN SHOWER: “Fill My Cup Lord” (sigh)
BEST OF SPAM: Be the "biggest" of all of your friends! (Oh, is that the one you want me to use tonight dear?)

164. THE OFFICIAL LANGUAGE OF DREAMS

From the Archives

(October 2005) I just finished reading Andrei Codrescu’s essays about New Orleans, some of which you may have heard on NPR.

When Codrescu talks about Jimmy Swaggart and Jimmy’s cousins Jerry Lee Lewis and Mickey Gilley, he says with whom [Jimmy] is co-emperor of the lower middle class.

Here are other favorite passages (the first of which could also be a comment on a Jeanette Winterson novel):

There are certain cities and certain areas of certain cities where the official language is dreams. Venice is one. And Paris. North Beach in San Francisco. Wencelaus Square in Prague. And New Orleans, the city that dreams stories.

And this could be a comment on the low country cuisine of my childhood:

There is a closed-eye rapture in the act of swallowing raw oysters au deux, the rapture of legend and rumor, no doubt. And in the swallowing of shrimps and the sucking of crabs there resides the ever-so-slight perversity of devouring our origins, a kind of reverse cannibalistic philogeny.

And this, sadly, could be a statement about my workaholic tendencies, but my spirit rebels against this ultimately dysfunctional soul-killing tendency of mine and forces me to write and create again, to save myself:

Vacations are desperate things even if you are not old and retired. I have always felt keenly the unbearable pathos of tourism, the lonely masses of the twentieth century shuffling through each others’ cities in small, insulated units looking for innocence. It’s there somewhere, riddled with the holes the clock punched in it.

And this comment stopped me in my tracks. I hope Commander’s Palace survived Hurricane Katrina:

The turtle soup at Commander’s is said to be over one hundred years old. They say that the turtle-soup pot has never gone out since the restaurant opened on these premises in 1888. One time there was a fire and the first thing the cooks did was to take the turtle-soup pot outside. Then the building burned down. There is something indescribably comforting in knowing that you’re eating from the same pot with your dead ancestors.

And finally, some post-Katrina words from Codrescu:

AFTER THE DELUGE: A LETTER TO AMERICA
There will be a little bit of New Orleans everywhere when our refugees move into your communities.

Here are some of the changes:

Your food will get better. In the past ten years, thanks to Asian and Latin flavors brought in my immigrants, American food improved. Now it will reach sublimity.

Instead of canned music you will have the real live thing. Clubs will mushroom and street performers will make your town a livelier place. Start working now to remove the tight-ass rules that forbid street theater.

Get ready to hear strangers open up to you in public places and tell you stories. You will remember that once upon a time, before television, people used to say hello to strangers and tell them stories.

Several times a year there will be festivals and parades that will remind you ritually that it’s okay to be alive and you don’t have to work like a dog without any joy in this lifetime.

There will be new coffeehouses, bars, and community centers where you will, hopefully, forget to be a couch potato. Sure, you might become a barfly instead, but I’ll take a living human drunk over a phony electronic-pixel vampire. Many people will shoot their televisions; that’s inevitable.

Speaking of shooting, the gun business will boom, as it is doing right now. Other businesses will boom as well, as skilled manual laborers from New Orleans pour in. (Just don’t expect them to finish anything on time.) The real estate market is booming already. Schools will be filled to capacity and there will be a need for more teachers. There will also be more jobs for doctors, nurses, firemen, policemen, and criminals.

You will experience an overnight growth in self-esteem as our refugee poets and writers begin to use your city as a source of material. You will also experience an equal plunge into embarrassment when they reveal what they found out.

You will no longer experience any faith in your government—if you still have any. Our refugees will teach you how to be self-reliant, depend on your community, and live without any faith in the government.

The bums who run the country now will be swept out of power, first Bush and his cronies, then all the spineless officials and bureaucrats wasting your money in Washington.

You will be renewed by the intelligence of a whole culture, just the way we were renewed by the refugees of Europe after the Second World War.

On the downside, you will start smoking again.

I’ll take a living human drunk over a phony electronic-pixel vampire. Yes indeedy.

SANG IN SHOWER: Lyle Lovett’s “If I Had a Boat” (a song Rosa just taught me)
LISTENING TO: My tummy rumble because I am hongry!
READING: “2005 Legislation Affecting Local Taxes” (sigh)

156. CUI BONO

From the Archives

(September 2005) Cindy Sheehan points out on Truthout.org that over 200 innocent Iraqis have been killed this week alone. Maybe GWB should ask his mother to make a statement about those murdered Iraqis after her next self-improvement workshop. Let me guess. Babs says They were underprivileged anyway.

Meanwhile, here I sit at my keyboard typing away and there I will sit in my safe automobile later, singing along to the radio as my tax dollars blow off another Iraqi's legs. It's all so clean, so sanitized, almost as if the entire country is one great big gated resort community at Epcot where the real-life consequences of our policies happen behind a sanitized curtain.

It amazes me that the same president who suspends federal wage laws for workers who are rebuilding the Gulf Coast has the gall to authorize another massive supplemental spending bill that will give more no-bid contracts to his incompetent chums at Halliburton and Bechtel, to donors who have done nothing but bungle Iraqi reconstruction at our expense!

Makes you wonder how Al Gore, a democrat familiar with the Tennessee Valley Authority model, would have handled the hurricane and those contracts, doesn’t it?

William Greider notes in The Nation that

in the totality of the Gulf Coast destruction, the economy and the society have been collapsed. As New Dealers understood, you cannot fix one without fixing the other. And only the federal government has the resources and authority to lead such a complex undertaking.

A new New Deal, that's what he's talking about.

Joshua Holland points out stark differences in how the two parties (shhh! don't tell Nader) are responding to the Hurricane Katrina debacle in Alternet's "It's the Governance, Stupid!"

Illinois Democrats Rahm Emmanuel and Barack Obama (please elect this man president) are pushing legislation to get tax refunds to hurricane victims faster but Republicans Jon Kyl (AZ) and Jeff Sessions (AL) are trying to find a dead person with enough money to pay estate taxes so they can push another repeal of what the GOPers insist on calling "the death tax."

I guess it hasn't occurred to the Republicans that few southerners—few people outside their circles, in fact—are wealthy enough to pay that tax to begin with.

Jim McDermott (D-WA) is working to extend benefits to children in need of relief even as the obscene Rick Santorum (R-PA) works to extend benefits to his donors.

Santorum got busy in the days following the disaster by advancing legislation that would keep the National Weather Service out of the business of predicting the next deadly storm, Holland notes.

And conservative legislators are pushing an amendment to cut the non-defense budget by 2.5 percent, even as Democrats propose "comprehensive, long-term aid to the stricken areas for housing, keeping kids in school and healthcare."

Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that GOP leaders and White Housers see opportunities in Hurricane Katrina to push controversial legislation "giving students vouchers to pay for private schools, paying churches to help with temporary housing and scaling back business regulation."

Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK)—who would no doubt insist that global warming couldn't possibly have raised water temperatures and thus increased Katrina's strength or that all those disappeared barrier swamps could have protected New Orleans from such devastation—has actually written a bill that allows the EPA to suspend environmental regulations during Gulf Coast reconstruction, giving the oil industry a big break. I can just see it: come on down and enjoy the newest New Orleans cuisine: oil-glazed alligator.

Ted Kennedy (D-MA), bless his heart, wants to create a Gulf Coast Redevelopment Authority based on FDR's Tennessee Valley Authority model.

(See, I did eventually loop back to Al Gore.)

William Greider notes that other

bold Democrats are doing what they haven't dared to do for many years, even decades: They are invoking their New Deal legacy and applying its liberal operating assumptions to the present crisis.

Former Senator John Edwards proposes a vast new jobs program, patterned after the New Deal's Works Progress Administration (WPA) and Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), in which the displaced and the poor are hired at living wages to clean up and rebuild their devastated communities. In the week after Katrina, Representatives Dennis Kucinich and Stephanie Tubbs Jones swiftly rounded up 88 House co-sponsors, including some from Mississippi and Louisiana, for a similar initiative.

As the dimensions of this challenge become clearer, reformers will discover other New Deal models they can emulate and adapt to present circumstances. For instance, in the 1930s Roosevelt's Reconstruction Finance Corporation was a central player in rebuilding the industrial economy, because it acted like a public-spirited investment banker empowered to channel startup capital to collapsed companies, provide temporary protection from creditors and impose equitable terms on how the private firms relate to social priorities. This time cities and schools need similar help.

Neither local school systems nor small-business employers can recover unless their communities have a large, reliable base of wage incomes—that is, government-financed jobs to sustain customers and taxpayers. You can't rebuild homes without tools and materials or temporary relief from mortgage defaults. You can't reopen schools if their tax base is gone. You can't prevent poor people from sliding back into desperate conditions unless government creates ladders of upward mobility. Recognizing such social-economic connections was the essence of New Deal innovation. Serious politicians need to jump-start their imaginations. This born-again New Deal spirit isn't backward-looking but instead can seize the opportunity to address grave issues—such as the myriad ecological dangers spawned by our hydrocarbon economy—that status-quo politics neglects, like the New Orleans levees.

And here's something worth noting:

The catastrophe, as many seem to grasp, is one of those big moments that jolt public consciousness and alter the course of national history. I would go further and describe it as an exclamation point that marks a dramatic breakdown for the reigning right-wing orthodoxy, the beginning of its retreat and eventual demise. This by no means insures the restoration of progressive alternatives, but events have at least reopened the argument conservatives thought they had won. A profound political question is suddenly on the table: Must the country continue to give precedence to private financial gain over human lives and public values?

That's a question worth repeating.

Ironically, Republicans rose to prominence by promising to liberate the citizenry from the government's intrusive powers, but now intrude on our private lives legally thanks to their fear-of-terrorism legislation. They have certainly succeeded in liberating us from public assistance, eh? And the sad reality is that the GOP leadership couldn't even intrude enough into our lives to move available water, medicine, food, and security to a place where the citizens are in harm's way.

Even Newt Gingrich is worried about his party right now and warning his co-conspirators that they'd better change their tune or face big losses. (Of course, the Newt is also urging the president to turn the Gulf Coast into a humongous tax-free zone for subsidized businesses and, like Sen. Inhofe, wants to relieve the oil industry [currently being sued for price gauging the citizenry] of those meddlesome environmental regulations that at least attempt to keep us healthy and safe.)

It seems obvious that GOP leadership is concerned not with protecting the average citizen, but with protecting wealthy donors—those 20 percenters who use over half of our goddamn resources that we can't get to flooded people in the richest country in the world.

Holland says it best: these acts are the very essence of poor governance: placing cronyism and ideology over the needs of devastated communities.

Maybe, just maybe, enough citizens will ask cui bono (who gains?) now, while the Republicans stew in their own fetid juices.

What’s that Molly Ivins line? Our legislators are a bunch of rubber-nosed woodpeckers in a petrified forest—and the only saving grace in this horrible mess is that the truth has finally caught up with the assholes/the truth has come home to roost.

151. CONSIGNED TO INSIGNIFICANCE

From the Archives (September 2005)

There is no United Nations—John Bolton, Bush’s newly appointed ambassador to the UN.

That’s the same Bolton who wrote, in The Wall Street Journal, that the US is under no legal obligation to abide by international treaties, even signed and ratified ones such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which Bush is defying.

Deleting The use of force should be considered as an instrument of last resort is one of 450 changes that the Bush administration is demanding be made to the UN’s action agenda that culminates at this month’s summit.

Not surprising, given the reality that this administration has an “‘invade first, choose your justifications later mode of crisis resolution” (Phyllis Bennis, author of the forthcoming Challenging Empire: How People, Governments, and the U.N. Defy U.S. Power, as quoted in TomPaine.com’s “A Declaration of War”).

Bennis continues:

The U.S. proposal package is designed to force the world to accept as its own the U.S. strategy of abandoning impoverished nations and peoples, rejecting international law, privileging ruthless market forces over any attempted regulation, sidelining the role of international institutions except for the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO, and weakening, perhaps fatally, the United Nations itself.

(Warning. This entry [obviously] consists of many news excerpts peppered with blatant opinions peppered with a miniscule amount of half-hopeful poetry and an undercurrent of glee about my benign breast lump and more than a little fury about our failure to help hurricane victims.)

So I wonder if all those photos of impoverished people sitting on their car seat chairs in their one-room shacks in New Orleans by their TVs that are sitting on red plastic milk crates will cause enough sustained outrage to force this administration to at least couch their abandonment of impoverished people in pretty talk? Will these images help well-intentioned Americans realize that our policies create impoverishment? Or will this only be news until the next story comes along?

Interestingly, my conservative sister Dee e-mailed me to say that she and her conservative husband are considering letting a hurricane family live with them in their gated golf course community. Of course, their list of qualifications is so long that it’s unlikely that ANY family would qualify for this, um, pleasure.

As for me, I’d be happy to host an honest lesbian who doesn’t need me to entertain her 24/7. FEMA can send her lover along too (which is important to note, since queers are not only losing their homes, but being separated from their lovers by FEMA, which has announced that it doesn’t recognize nonlegal unions when dividing refugees up for dispersement).

(Note to FEMA: you may want to send queer refugees somewhere other than Utah or South Carolina too.)

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Bush&Co has given the UN what it believes to be a stark choice: adopt the US changes and acquiesce to becoming an adjunct of Washington and a tool of empire, or reject the changes and be consigned to insignificance. But the UN could choose a third option. It should not be forgotten that the UN itself has some practice in dealing with US threats. President George W. Bush gave the UN these same two choices once before—in September 2002, when he threatened the global body with ‘irrelevance’ if the UN did not embrace his call for war in Iraq. On that occasion, the UN made the third choice—the choice to grow a backbone, to reclaim its charter, and to join with people and governments around the world who were mobilized to say no to war. It was the beginning of eight months of triumph, in which governments and peoples and the UN stood together to defy the US drive toward war and empire, and in doing so created what the New York Times called “the second super-power.” ... This time, as before, the US has threatened and declared war on the UN and the world. As before, it's time for that three-part superpower to rise again, to defend the UN, and to say no to empire. (Bennis again)

Why do I suddenly want to move to Vancouver and disassociate myself from this empire?

So that article about the UN prompted some damn interesting posts, including

to any member of the House of Representatives who might, by small chance, be logging on to this website: Please, PLEASE impeach this maniac before he starts World War III. What are you waiting for??? WHAT??? You've got the evidence, WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU WAITING FOR???? ... Let me see if I got this straight....Bill Clinton, who in hindsight, let's face it, was not that bad a president, lied about having an affair with a half-witted intern and you impeached him, right? Right? OK. Now, George W. Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction, invaded a country that was a threat to no one but itself, resulting in the deaths of possibly hundreds of thousands of men, women and little children—and what??? I'm sorry but am I missing something here? Please explain yourselves. Explain your hypocracy to the mothers and fathers of the almost two thousand dead American kids who have been killed in this fiasco (and that number will at least double by the time this fucking nightmare of an administration is over—that's a conservative estimate)....—Tom Degan

and

American citizens of conscience now face the choice that others have faced. Like a white South African during apartheid, or a German citizen during the Third Reich, etc, you are privileged members of a community who's [sic] leaders are committing crimes against humanity in your name. What are you going to do about it? Failure to face your moral quandary implicates you in these crimes, which are multiple, egregious, escalating. Action or inaction, both are choices.—Boris

and

Why do they want to bring the third world nations up in standard of living while bringing the first world nations down??? So you have a one world low income work force to pick from at a low cost, so you control the water and natural resources of the various nations, so you have an income sufficient in the third world to increase by billions the number of consumers available to purchase your goods and thus increase the wealth of the few. [and it is not lost on me that Bush et al. bypassed the minimum wage for construction workers in the hurricane-stricken areas today] ... It’s not a benign organization. So we have two different issues here. While the average person has an idealistic view of bringing third world poverty to an end and resources sharing to other nations, its not the case with those who control these things. They are simply using the flowery language of idealism to promote their greed agenda as well. - Do not be fooled by either side. The UN is corrupt as is the Bush administration and they are beginning to fight among themselves with us out here being totally ignored. Just ask yourselves ‘why is aids still a blight upon Africa?’ Why hasn't the UN addressed that well before now. It’s been 20 years and nothing is being done? It’s intentional.—Pepper

Then there’s the guy who, somehow, found a tie to marijuana (because someone had to...) and asserts that petroleum would be useless if only people ended cannabis prohibitions:

End Cannabis prohibition. I know it sounds simplistic, but if people were to re-valuate the most useful agricultural resource on Earth, then petroleum would be worthless. If that ever happens, BushCo will lose its economic superiority, which affords political control.

Everything that is made from petroleum can be made better, cheaper, and with less pollution from Cannabis (hemp, 'marijuana' etc.). That is the real reason it is prohibited.

Ending the anti-natural prohibition of the "herb bearing seed" called Cannabis is the fundamental challenge of our time. Among the grave harms being inflicted on humanity by constricting the free market in the world's most useful and potentially most abundant agricultural resource are the following:

1. Induces essential resource scarcity of fuel, food, and shelter for humans, animals and future generations.
2. Institutionalizes a black market economy.
3. Corrupts governments, locally and globally.
4. Creates essential resource disparity, that inevitably leads to wars over energy, water and other essential natural resources.
5. Creates an economic vacuum that has addicted and corrupted our economic system to be dependent on toxic, unevenly distributed and finite resources to provide for our essential needs.
6. Degrades the environment on regional and global levels. "Global Broiling" is the best example of the far reaching effects that mankind's [sic] addiction to chemicals is having.
7. Creates poverty, where abundance could easily exist.
8. Causes malnutrition, illness and death from nutritional deficiencies.
9. Threatens everyone's food security.
10. Perverts human values and social evolution toward violence.
11. Responsible for the rise of GMOs, having created protein shortages.
12. Economically empowers the least conscious [sic] people on the planet.
13. Disrepects Science and spiritual traditions of "Thanksgiving" for the blessings of the harvest.
14. Institutionalizes disrespect for Nature.
15. Inhibits free spiritual evolution.
16. Robs us of our Natural Rights, upon which our government was founded.
17. Robs other creatures, with whom we share this planet, of an unique and essential food resource.
18. Fosters conditions of untruth, and spreads propaganda, which ultimately harms people.
19 Accelerates the spread of HIV/AIDS between infected mothers and nursing infants.
20. Creates a "forbidden fruit" which makes adolescent experimentation with 'marijuana' more likely.

Ending the anti-natural prohibition of the "herb bearing seed" called Cannabis is the fundamental challenge of our time. Yep, that’s what he wrote.

Wars. Famine. Hunger. AIDS. Cancer. Illiteracy. Unfant Mortality. The New Gilded Age. But legalizing cannabis is the challenge of our time. (Just remember. You heard it here first.)

The poet Muriel Rukeyser said the universe is composed of stories, not of atoms—and I’d be fascinated to hear this guy’s story. My hunch is that it doesn’t involve much poverty or illiteracy or random assault.

149. LETHAL INEPTITUDE, OR, NOBODY’S COMING TO GET YOUR ASS

From the Archives (September 2005)

Nobody’s coming to get us. The secretary has promised. Everybody’s promised. They’ve had press conferences. I’m sick of the press conferences. For God sakes, shut up and send us somebody!—Aaron F. Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish in Louisiana (Monday)

[Evacuees] were underprivileged anyway—Barbara Bush, touring the Houston Astrodome relocation site. The blue-blooded ex-first lady/current first mum asserted that many of the poor are faring better than before the storm hit and that they actually prefer public digs in the Astrodome. The full quote: So many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway so this is working very well for them.

Meanwhile, our country is doing a heckuva job providing Barb with big tax cuts on the backs of the impoverished.

Paul Krugman says that the government’s “lethal ineptitude” is the consequence of “ideological hostility to the very idea of using government to serve the public good” and gives this example: the USS Bataan, which has 6 operating rooms, hundreds of hospital beds, and can produce 100,000 gallons of fresh water per day, has been sitting in water off the Gulf Coast since last Monday with no patients! He also points out that, after 9/11, all the country really needed from the president was a speech, which he managed to deliver once someone pointed out that it wasn’t very presidential to continue reading a children’s book (and after a speechwriter told him what to say).This disaster required action however and Shrub has failed miserably ... with ideological hostility to the very idea of assisting others for the public good perhaps guiding the way.

(I keep waiting to hear something about faith-based hurricane relief. You know it’s coming.)

John Tierney also points out, correctly, that local officials also failed miserably and should have organized an evacuation themselves, since they already knew that 3/4 of the population lived in extreme poverty and had no way to get out of the city. He compares their approach to the advanced planning of (the much smaller) Newport News, VA emergency preparedness team, which has notes about which residents need additional help. Their plan includes going door-to-door to handle evacuations. If residents resist, they hand them magic markers and ask them to write their social security numbers on various body parts so that someone will be able to identify their bodies.

(A effective strategy, that.)

Meanwhile, FEMA ordered 25,000 body bags and a ghastly poem about Saint Gabriel LA (the small town where refrigerated trucks are carrying thousands of bodies to the temporary morgue they’ve set up there) is forming.

(Headline: The bodies of 32 dead residents found at St. Rita’s Nursing Home are now being trucked up to Saint Gabriel LA. All those streets named after all saints who couldn’t protect anyone. Sad.)

Came across this interesting commentary online:

Scraggy residents emerge from waterlogged wood to say strange things, and then return into the rot. Cars drive the wrong way on the Interstate and no one cares. Fires burn, dogs scavenge, and old signs from les bons temps have been replaced with hands-scrawled threats that looters will be shot dead.

David Brooks notes that Katrina was a natural disaster that interrupted a social disaster. It separated tens of thousands of poor people from the run-down, isolated neighborhoods in which they were trapped. It disrupted the patterns that have led one generation to follow another into poverty.

He points out that, when low-income families are moved into middle-income neighborhoods instead of living only among others in poverty, then the children are much more likely to graduate from high school and attend college, move out of poverty. After awkward adjustment, they are also more likely to learn how to move socially in a professional environment.

So what’s barely getting reported while the hurricane gives us all post-traumatic stress syndrome? Two queer biggies (plus a rumor that FEMA is separating gay couples). First, the California state assembly approved a bill that defines marriage as between “two persons,” effectively legalizing gay marriage, but the governator vetoed the damn thing.

These social conservatives want it both ways! When the courts doesn’t rule in favor of their bias, then they complain that radical judges write law in accordance with their own social agendas and insist that legislators should decide the law, not judges.

Then California legislators recognize discrimination when they see it and expand the definition of marriage to include civil contracts between any two people—a fair-minded definition that addresses the problem of offering benefits to some couples who fall in love while denying them to others and that honors the 14th Amendment —and the governor says he’ll veto the legislation because the courts and the voters should decide.

(Uh, polls indicate that the legislature roughly mirrors popular opinion, Governator.)

Part of why we have a three-tiered government is so that biased voters/the tyranny of the majority does not discriminate against the minority. This is called democracy in action and equal justice for ALL (as opposed to just the Christianist majority).

Today’s New York Times editorial “Where’s the Governator Now?” puts it better:

Mr. Schwarzenegger ... seems to have forgotten that this nation was foudned as a republic, in which the citizens elect legislators to govern on their behalf. Such representative democracy is especially important when it comes to protecting the fundamental rights of minorities, who may face bigoted hostility from some segments of the electorate.

Then there’s the troubling custody battle going on in Virginia and Vermont. Judges in those states disagree about custody rights for a 3-year-old born to a lesbian couple that had a civil union ceremony in Vermont, then broke up after having a child.

The Vermont judge has ruled that the women should “be treated no differently than a husband and wife” and established a visiting schedule, then he held the biological mother in contempt of court when she failed to comply with the schedule. The Virginia judge, meanwhile, ruled that the biological mother has sole right to decide who can see her child and that her former partner has no parentage or visitation rights.

This is a direct conflict between state courts and the case is on its way to the Vermont Supreme Court now, so chances are good this one’s destined for the US Supreme Court.

Finally, here’s a quote from the biological mother that goes a long way toward explaining why she is asking a court to not honor her legal commitment to her wife the way it would honor another married partner’s rights: When I left Janet I left the homosexual lifestyle and drew closer to God.

148. GOT ANY EYEWITNESS VERIFICATION OF THAT SAVAGRY?

From the Archives

(September 2005) My designer pal who moved here from New Orleans sent the following, along with this message: I can't bear hearing people talk about WHETHER or not New Orleans should be rebuilt, so the first person account below means the world to me.

She attached a photo of Liuzza's, the corner restaurant/bar in the neighborhood where she and her son used to live.

Josh Mann Paillet, who has a beautiful gallery in the French Quarter writes

Just got out last night. I could have stayed, my supplies would have lasted for seven more days. But, the fires have started. The reports of looting downtown are exaggerated. Yes, they broke into the grocery stores, drugstores, gas stations, for food, etc. Canal street had a few hours of thugs doing sports shops, but all other shops and the ENTIRE FRench Quarter is safe and untouched. The storm did glass and roof damage and trees UPTOWN. Just needs to be swept. Looks LESS dirty than a typical Mardi Gras day.

I was never threatened. 99.9% of our people are heroic, stoic, and human beings of great quality.

THE FLOOD did NOT get into the Fr. QTR and along the river to AUDUBON PARK

I stayed and helped and photographed and bicycled these areas every day. NO shooters, some idiots, but everyone doing the best to get along and survive. Other flooded areas, it is very desperate and there are some battles going on, but very isolated.

From Monday to late yesterday there were NO military, red cross, fema, or anyone with supplies DOWNTOWN. Even the N.O. Police and Fire Dept were largely absent.

I stayed in the Qtr at A Gallery. The building and contents is presently fine. I will be going back soon to help the other people.

The Amazing people of NEw Orleans will survive and rebuild. The media stayed on Canal Street and are missing the real story. Unfortunately, the "looting" story is all they had downtown and its repetitous playing of that footage has setback recovery. IT FALSELY scared off the rescuers, I guess.

Too many rumors reported without eyewitness verification. Bad business, needs to change. Please spread the word. Bush and his people have been bad to us. Every hour matters to the remaining people

THe surrrounding region is overwhelmed with recovery. Baton Rouge has 200,000 people to help. LSU is a triage center.

EVERYONE is pitching in. The entire situation is complex and difficult for everyone. Many shortages, gasoline especially.

BY the way, Since early Tuesday, access into New Orleans via the downtown Miss. River Bridge has been clear to Baton Rouge.

Everyone else got in that way, why not the military? Four hours away by CAR is Fort Polk, one of the largest bases around. Bring the boys home, especially the National Guard.

New Orleans needs your love and positive thoughts.

Email and spread the word. Contact your leadership in Washington and keep the pressure on. Especially today and tomorrow. Remember that these people are the heart and soul of the New Orleans everyone loves.

See you soon,

JoshuaMann Pailet

Hillary Clinton was asked on today’s Today Show where the money to rebuild New Orleans should come from and she said (after noting that she has introduced legislation to restore FEMA to a Cabinet-level, independent status, as it was in the Clinton Administration)

[the money] comes from the first instance in not making those tax cuts for rich people like us permanent. You know, it means let’s get back to shared sacrifice. Let’s take care of each other. Let’s plan for the future. Let’s do what is necessary to put Americans first again.

LISTENING TO: Jennifer Daniels’s Day to Live: Well, if you’re asking me for an answer, I can only point you in the way I’m going, but now, if you are willing, you’re more than welcome to come. I hope you’re heading in the same direction. We’ll go feeding fishes by the sea and betting more than we have to give. It may be a better day to die, but it’s a good day to live.

146. SQUATTIN’ WITH CROSSES, OR, IS THIS THE NEW CIVIL WAR?

From the Archives

(September 2005)

Col. Terry Ebbert, director of homeland security for New Orleans, after reporting that armed thugs now control the city and are raping and assaulting stranded tourists and other survivors, looting and hijacking vehicles, said

the whole recovery operation had been carried on the backs of the little guys for four goddamn days. The rest of the goddamn nation can’t get us any resources for security. ...We are like little birds with our mouths open and you don’t have to be very smart to know where to drop the worm... It’s criminal within the confines of the United States that within one hour of the hurricane they weren’t force-deeding us. It’s like FEMA has never been to a hurricane.—New York Times

The whole coastal area of the state has been destroyed, virtually destroyed. It was quiet. It was eerie. It was horrible to behold.—Sen. Thad Cochran (R-MS)

I’ll say it again, after pointing out that Sen. Cochranm, who used the word “behold,” definitely grew up hearing the King James version of the Bible read aloud: I just LOVE how southerners string words together.

Stan Goodenough describes Katrina as The Fist of God:

What America is about to experience is the lifting of God's hand of protection; the implementation of His judgment on the nation most responsible for endangering the land and people of Israel. The Bible talks about Him shaking His fist over bodies of water, and striking them.—Deborah Caldwell, “Did God Send the Hurricane?” BELIEFNET 9.1.2005

On Sunday, Bridgett Magee of Slidell, LA told the Christian website Jerusalem Newswire that she saw the hurricane as a direct coming back on us [for] what we did to Israel: a home for a home. (Deborah Caldwell, “Did God Send the Hurricane?” BELIEFNET 9.1.2005)

Interestingly, the White House is referring to the hurricane and flooding as a catastrophe of biblical proportions too.

And here’s a nice twist on the standard specious reasoning: God brought the hurricane to punish America for its homophobia and for not burning Pat Robertson at the stake.—SSEGALLMD (ALTERNET)

"It was not enough for the president to bank his plane and look at the window and say 'O, what a devastating site,'” Senator Frank R. Lautenberg (D-NJ) said in a statement on Thursday. "Instead of looking out the window of an airplane, he should have been on the ground giving the people devastated by this hurricane hope." (The New York Times).

I was beginning to wonder if I was the only one who had noticed that, for days now, we have been inundated with discomforting noblesse oblige images of white people either rescuing black people from the flooded waters or white people describing thoseblack people in need of rescue as savages. Well, today, the New York Times finally reports that there has been a growing sense that race and class are the unspoken markers of who got out and who got stuck. Just as in developing countries where the failures of rural development policies become glaringly clear at times of natural disasters like floods or drought, many national leaders said, some of the United States’ poorest cities have been left vulnerable by federal policies.

In New Orleans,

the disaster’s impact underscores the intersection of race and class in a city where fully two-thirds of its residents are black and more than a quarter of the city lives in poverty. In the Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood, which was inundated by the floodwaters, more than 98 percent of the residents are black and more than a third live in poverty.

No one would have checked on a lot of the black people in these parishes while the sun shined, said Mayor Milton D. Tutwiler of Winstonville, MS. So am I surprised that no one has come to help us now? No.

"I assume the president is going to say he got bad intelligence"—Charles B. Rangel (D-NY), who noted that the danger to the levees was clear. "Wherever you see poverty, whether it’s in the white rural community or the black urban community, you see that the resources have been sucked up into the war and tax cuts for the rich."

Is this what the pioneers of the civil rights movement fought to achieve, a society where many black people are as trapped and isolated by their poverty as they were by segregation laws? Prof. Mark Maison asked. If Sept. 11 showed the power of a nation united in response to a devastating attack, Hurricane Katrina reveals the fault lines of a region and a nation, rent by profound social divisions.

"Most of the people that live in the neighborhoods that were most vulnerable are black and poor, so it comes down to a lack of sensitivity on the part of people in Washington that you need to help poor folks. It’s as simple as that."—Charles Steele Jr, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference

Meanwhile, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice is really enjoying the US Open and those Broadway shows.

Meanwhile, concerned citizens are paddling their own canoes down to New Orleans in throngs and going building to building to rescue people. A volunteer citizen navy with its very own flotilla!

People can be so cool sometimes.

145. WE ARE ONLY COMING THROUGH IN WAVES

From the Archives

(September 2005) My family is an old Mississippi family. I had antiques, 150 years old or more. They’re all gone. We have just basically a slab, Anne Anderson of Gulfport told NBC. Behind us we have a beautiful sunrise and sunset, and that is going to be what I’m going to miss the most, sitting on the porch watching those.

Rebuild. With a porch, Anne. Rebuild!

My house is flooded, said Rhonda Green, 44, who had reached the highway safe, but damp. I’m talking about deep-freezer-floating-in-the-water flooded.”

Spoken like a true southerner!

These little tidbits are reaching us, but where’s the rest of the news? This is fucking eerie.

Meanwhile, here's a choice piece off the web:

Letter to Pres. Bush:

What? You want me to donate?

Gee, I dunno. Sending money to the Red Cross to help a red state is a real problem for me. Would the "Christians" down there take money from a card-carrying Liberal from hoity-toity Connecticut? What if they knew I were Gay; would they take my money then? Anyway, I thought I heard some preacher somewhere saying that Hurricane Katrina was God's wrathful punishment against the Bible Belt for turning away from evolution, for their homophobia, for their anti-environmentalism, for opposing universal health-care, for supporting the Invasion of Iraq, for interpreting the Bible literally, for a history of racism, and, especially, for the Catholic diocese down there in New Orleans throwing another Christian church (UFMCC) out of a building they own because of theological disagreements. Maybe it was Jerry Falwell or "ole squint-eye" Pat Robertson. Didn't Falwell blame 9/11 on us? And didn't Robertson agree with him? Will they take my money now? I really need to know.

Since Bush, Cheney, et. al. are making billions from gasoline prices and war profiteering, I'd like to know how much they are contributing first, before I donate. Is anybody asking these questions? Is anybody asking the president of "Personal Responsibility" why he insists that the globe is not warming even though the gulf waters are hotter than ever and are directly linked to Katrina's force? How much are these fat cats donating?

Hey, what about the tax cuts for the rich? Shouldn't the rich be the ones to kick in? I haven't heard about a covey of rich white folks getting it together, giving up their tax cuts, to provide millions in aid to Hurricane Katrina victims. Maybe they're all down in the superdome with Falwell, Dobson and Robertson - hot, smelly, filthy, crowded superdome - handing out food to the poor??? Guess not. Say, why can't the Corporations that have bought what used to be a Democracy for and by the people globalize the relief effort? Are the holders of outsourced jobs donating?

Maybe after Bush privatizes my Social Security I'll feel more disposed to act like a good Christian and send money. Oh, if I'm not by chance a Christian at all, would my money be accepted? It's a real quandary.

Frank Chisholm
East Lyme, CT 06333

143. EVIDENCE-FREE ZONES

From the Archives

(August 2005) Have been logging onto weather.com off and on all day to follow the hurricane and just read that two massive oaks outside the almost 300-year-old St. Louis Cathedral on Jackson Square fell on either side of the huge marble Jesus, snapping off the thumb and forefinger of his outstretched hand.

This reminds me of a random fact I’ve always wanted to incorporate into a poem—one that would be a lot more effective if I actually believed in a savior (my utterances of “O Christ!” and “Oh For The Love of God!” not withstanding): When the black choirgirls died in the church bombings, the stained-glass windows remained intact except for Jesus’s face, which blew out ... almost as if he couldn’t bear to see the horror of what hate destroyed.

I hope we don’t find out just what happens when the urge to develo destroys over one million acres of coastal wetlands that once served as a storm buffer.

This puts me in mind of Hillary’s comments after her trip to Alaska. She said, after seeing the effects of climate change firsthand, “We can’t afford to live in an evidence-free zone where science takes a back seat to ideology” anymore.

What I find most pathetic is that the White House oilmen not only refused to join over 150 nations in signing the Kyoto Protocols to reduce emissions but also declared that, instead of regulating the harmful greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming, they would instead make any such emission reductions voluntary.

The New York Times calls this “Washington’s stubborn passivity.” I call it Pure-T Greed.

Meanwhile, the mayors of over 130 cities have become exasperated enough with the oilmen’s failure to sign the Protocol that they have agreed to meet the emissions reductions contained in the pact at the local level.

And the state of California (which already went into the business of funding scientific research after Shrub announced his so-called moral prohibition against stem-cell research and which already has tough environmental laws on the books) is now exploring a regional agreement with Washington and Oregon.

Nine other northeast states have taken matters into their own hands too and agreed on a regional plan to reduce power plant emissions of carbon dioxide by 2020.

Dan Savage argues that we’re a series of cities that queers live in, that we Island hop between San Francisco, Seattle, New York, and the other big urban gay meccas, but progressive politics is alive at the state level in the humid Southland too. (And I must mention that Dan fails to include RTP in his formula, although it consistently ranks as one of the top 10 places for LGBTQ folks to live—and Asheville is right up there too, folks!)

The northeast states’ agreement exceeds the oilmen’s voluntary approach to reductions (which, no big surprise, has not produced a great response among the corporations and power companies). Of course, automobile companies are challenging these states’ laws too—particularly California’s, which will require a 30 percent reduction in vehicular greenhouse gas emissions. Car manufacturers argue that these laws are an illegal usurpation of federal authority to set mileage standards but, if the national leaders won’t do their job....

According to the Times, “Environmentalists who support a federal law to control greenhouse gases believe that the model established by the Northeastern states will be followed by other states, resulting in pressure that could eventually lead to the enactment of a national law.”

Maybe if Pataki is elected....

But think of it, folks: states are working together in a cooperative action to correct our president’s blatant oversights. Now that’s hopeful!

142. HE HAD A REASON TO GET BACK TO LAKE CHARLES

From the Archives

(August 2005) Just made the perfect August garden-fresh meal and leftovers for the week: grilled fresh corn on the cob, broccoli cooked on high in olive oil and lemon, green beans cooked with fresh garlic and onions and olive oil and balsamic vinegar with chives sprinkled on top, Swiss chard cooked in lemon and salt, and some happy red potatoes cooked with rosemary.

Have been watching the weather channel all evening hoping to hear a report that Hurricane Katrina turned back to sea and spared New Orleans but no good news so far.

I am here to tell you that surviving a hurricane is a damn sobering experience.

I can also assure you that the following is a place you never want to be: sitting in a huddle in your pitch black hallway with your pets pressed against you as your deck furniture crashes through your windows and your fence explodes into ribbons and your roof peels off in sheets and the rain seeps all the way through your thirteen-inch stucco walls and onto the floor around you.

My neighborhood had so many downed trees after our hurricane hit that no one could leave, so we pooled our food and grilled out meals in the tree-strewn streets together and sweated like pigs while we made our repairs and worshipped the generator owners who stored beer for us so we could have a cold one together after chopping up trees together all day.

What’s sobering to me is that the hurricane I survived was only a category 3, and Fran is a category 5 that's heading straight for Lake Pontchartrain.

•

Meanwhile, an Alternet reader points out that the UK has announced guidelines for deporting “extremist religious leaders” who preach hatred and violence.

(This means they could deport Pat Robertson and Fred Phelps, right?)

And another alert AlterNet reader points out that Pat Robertson supported war criminal Charles Taylor and actually muttered on The 700 Club when Taylor was petitioning Congress to drop sanctions against Liberia, “How dare the president of the United States say to the duly elected president of another country, 'You've got to step down.'"

Apparently, money-loving Robertson loves those Liberian gold and diamond mines.

And, while we’re on the topic, did anyone else note that Dr. James Dobson of conservative Focus on the Family fame told fathers recently that they can prevent homosexuality by showering with their boys (to affirm their maleness) and teaching them to pound square wooden pegs into square holes?

(Yes, it’s all about our inability to hammer pegs into holes correctly, folks.)

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