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Sep. 1, 2005
to Randall, from Gabriel:
i don't know what kind of moving pictures have been getting beamed your way, but i hadn't seen any television news until my lunch break. i'l tell you what, man; no matter how bad everything sounds right now, it looks a thousand times worse. and it doesn't look to be getting any better anytime soon.
about the suffering, i'll say this: i'd never realized this before, but the effect of seeing disasters happen in third world countries is blunted by the fact that foreign victims never have voices. but when you see a man interviewed in front of the astrodome, and all he can say is "I'm just so tired," over and over again, wipe his eyes, and walk away, then it has a greater impact than 1,000 sally struthers voice-overs.
about the suffering, i'll say this: i'd never realized this before, but the effect of seeing disasters happen in third world countries is blunted by the fact that foreign victims never have voices. but when you see a man interviewed in front of the astrodome, and all he can say is "I'm just so tired," over and over again, wipe his eyes, and walk away, then it has a greater impact than 1,000 sally struthers voice-overs.
that said, i'll skirt the human suffering angle. i can't do it justice.
here's something, though: all the people i'm seeing on the news, they're black. and the black mayor of new orleans is talking about how they're running out of supplies and they need help and "We're letting the people march to...find what they need." meanwhile, you have the white governor of louisiana suspending rescue operations to clamp down on lawlessness, the director of homeland security assuring us that the relief operation is going infinitely more smoothly than the tsunami relief, and the white leader of FEMA shrugging and saying, hey, we gave the warning, you shoulda got out of town...
incidentally, shouldn't every national guardsman east of the rockies been mobilized, oh, about a day or two before the hurricane made landfall? or at least by the time i sent you an email joking about new orleans being destroyed the day before it got destroyed? it's not like i was working with inside information. that decision's going to haunt some people. speaking of which, can you name the head of the department of homeland security? (you know, the guys who run the national guard now). neither can i.
remember when i said Bush was going to be remembered as Lyndon Johnson, minus the record on domestic/social policy? yeah. only now, it's worse. (LBJ = Great Society, GWB = swollen black corpses floating down Bourbon Street.) like i said, you have to watch the newscast for only a couple minutes, but when you see it, it's shocking. the anger is palpable, it's on everyone's face, in every shot and it just oozes off the screen. i don't know what it means--i'll have to wait for jason whitlock to weigh in on the matter--but i'm guessing race is going to become a huge issue in the next election. not to put too fine a point on it, but american citizens are dying--not suffering, which doesn't get middle america all that riled up, but dying--right now because they are black and poor, and at some point americans will probably think about holding someone responsible, if for no other reason than it's going to be about the only thing on television for the next couple of weeks, and it's kind of a downer, and america hates downers.
not to get too far ahead of anything, but my mom had a theory that republicans hated Clinton because black people loved him. i don't know how true the first part of that statement is, but there's no denying the latter.
oh, and if this Marshawn Lynch kid is the goods, the Cal beats USC. they've lost too much on defense. those guys were monsters last year; the difference between having a great run defense and a pretty good run defense is huge. i'm telling you, a new day has dawned.
post-apocalyptically,
gabriel
September 3, 2005
to Randall, from Gabriel
yeah. suddenly, i'm a kanye west fan.
g
September 3, 2005
to Randall, from Gabriel
yeah. suddenly, i'm a kanye west fan.
g
September 4, 2005
to Gabriel, from Randall
the guy hasn't been held accountable yet. those of us up here with saying that if this had happened in cali, the guard would've been on it days before, like you were mentioning. i hope they don't just scapegoat the fema guy. i've heard bush was trying not to smirk and laugh between telecasts.
September 5, 2005
to Randall, from Gabriel
there was no way you or i could have known it was going to be like this.
maybe this is when america finally comes to the conclusion that cynically opportunistic, morally bankrupt, and ideologically vacuous do not make for good government. hell, even fox news has become a bunch of New Deal Democrats in the last week, even if they're going to deny as soon as people stop, you know, dying and shit. the people who run DHS and FEMA are going to get put down, but the real sport will be watching the republicans cannibalize Dubya over the next three (!) years. it was bound to come to this, of course; the republicans' loyalty has always been to their bastard non-Christian, non-Conservative "values" (Jesus' big thing was never supply-side economics--almost the exact opposite, in fact, unless my edition is a bad translation or something), and Dubya's priority--like Gingrich, Bush the Elder, Reagan, Nixon--has always been his own political survival and personal ambition. it should be good sport, anyway, watching that pack of rabid fear-crazed hyenas tear that fat lipped cocksucker apart--incidentally, just me, or is he about as Texas as Emily Dickinson? you can hear them sharpening thier knives, in anticipation of sacrificing their great leader in the interest of their own re-election campaigns (Bush polls lower on Iraq right now than LBJ on Vietnam in 1968)--and then Dubya goes on national television to officially hand the "relief effort" over to W.J. Clinton--in the oval office no less (a pale shade resembling Bush the Elder may have also been in the room; neither i, nor anyone else, really noticed); he may as well have handed Hillary the keys to the white house while he was at it, if the bloated corpses of black people on CNN haven't done the job for him already.
not to get all partisan about it, though. when people have stopped dying and the investigations start, i hope they dust everything with that phosphorescent CSI shit and whoever left their fingerprints within a mile of this repugnant miasma should be sentenced to a week without food or water in triple digit heat, festering in their own piss and shit the whole time, just to restore some sense of justice in this country. and then some of their family should die, too, just for good measure. the orwellian platitudes of this administration (what farmers used to call "spin") don't go down so easily when there's no fog of war fig-leafing their stupidity and inhumanity and greed. Bush gutted the FEMA budget when he rolled it up into the pork pie that calls iteslf the DHS, and now Halli-fucking-burton has the contract to rebuild the gulf coast. the howling injustice of those bastards raking in millions of dollars to bury the dead and "reclaim" the land (some of it at pennies on the dollar for themselves) it is just too much to get my brain around. it was rotten from beginning to end, and the whole of it might be the most sickening stupidity perpetrated on America by a sitting president in this century--i say maybe only because it'll be awhile before i can soberly measure new orleans against baghdad or even downtown manhattan.
"intelligence failures" my fucking ass--that's like me saying i'm late for work because i had "car trouble." i don't have a car and you don't have any fucking intelligence you stupid, stupid fucks. i don't believe in Evil. but i do know that stupid is the enemy of the Good, and stupid people are runnning my country right now.
(speaking of stupid, contrary to the opinions of certain speakers of the house, nobody builds a city in a stupid place. yes, it sits below sea-level, but new orleans exists and evolved the way it did because it also sits at the mouth of the mississippi river and serves as the gateway to to the midwest--it's a shipping port, essentially, and a staggering number of interstate highways and rail tracks run into & out of the city. which is to say, the argument that new orleans was somehow cut-off or otherwise inaccessible is laughably stupid. more laughable if people hadn't died because nobody gave the order to go in, but still.)
incidentally, you're probably not getting a great feel for the media coverage in j-town, but http://www.wonkette.com/ has been doing a good job; you get a feel for the trajectory of the story. and i love the reporters going all Herb Williams, taking their despair out on bullshit politicians--although i think the more apt parrallel would be Steinbeck as he wrote Grapes of Wrath, the parts where he takes a step past the familiar Dorothea Lange and even Walker Evans territory and gets all, you know, subjective and lefty political and shit. (i think the dust bowl was the last comparable moment in american history; i also think that i'm just now coming around to understanding why so many people have trouble stomaching that book, given that that kind of thing could never...oh, hell.) as for myself, just when i think i've found my safe ironic distance, i see shit like this, and i'm angry again::
http://www.wonkette.com/images
it's just not right.
g
September 6, 2007
to Randall, from Gabriel
I'm not a psychic or nothing, but i'm guessing that there's going to be a congressional hearing, and they're going to call Michael "Brownie" Brown to testify about FEMA's role in this mess, the expectation being that the criminally underqualified Brown will roll over on G. Dubya...until Dubya himself dramatically shows up to the hearing accompanied by an olive skinned stranger, who turns out to be none other than Brown's sicilian brother. "Georgie over there? Yeah, I know Georgie," Brown will testify, clearly more flusterd than usual, if that's possible. "Me and his dad used to be in the olive business. Fuhgeddaboudit."
Ted Kennedy will die of a heart attack on the spot. Shortly thereafter consigliere Dick Cheney will have a secret meeting with Brown and say some confusing stuff about Romans. Then Brown will be ironically found dead in his bathtub. And by "ironically," I guess I mean "drowned."
Ted Kennedy will die of a heart attack on the spot. Shortly thereafter consigliere Dick Cheney will have a secret meeting with Brown and say some confusing stuff about Romans. Then Brown will be ironically found dead in his bathtub. And by "ironically," I guess I mean "drowned."
Then it will occur to Dubya that hurricane relief is an action that comes easily in the fiefdom of his brother Jeb. "I know it was you," Dubya will tell him. "I know it was you who let Katrina destroy my political career. You broke my heart, Jeb, you broke my heart." A week or so after that meeting Jeb Bush will be shot to death in his fanboat. Or whatever the hell they call those swamp hovercraft things they got, you know the ones I'm talking about. With the big fans on 'em.
After that, it's on to Part III of the epic Bush Saga. People who'd been hoping for a flourish befitting anyone audacious enough to proclaim himself The War President are bound to be disappointed. Part III will be slow, artsy, and maybe a little depressing as it tracks not really a downfall per se but rather the calcification of an iconic, of polarizing, character. Even hardcore fans of the series are going to be hard-pressed to think of anything exciting or even memorable, except maybe an incongruous and somewhat gratuitous helicopter attack. Also, if anyone explains to me why the Pope gets offed, I'm all ears because frankly, that shit don't make no sense. Such hubris on so grand a stage demands an operatic gotterdamerung, but instead Dubya will fade from existence, our last glimpse of him sitting alone feeding pigeons anonymously on the porch of Trent Lott's house, rebuilt with federal assistance money freed up by massive cuts to social service budgets across the country. Love him or hate him, it will be a highly unsatisfying ending regardless, but it may also be the truest ending.
Or maybe he'll become a Jimmy Carter/Bill Clinton ambassador of goodwill. The fuck do I know? Those are my predictions for the week.
Or maybe he'll become a Jimmy Carter/Bill Clinton ambassador of goodwill. The fuck do I know? Those are my predictions for the week.
g
September 7, 2005
to Jaimie, from Gabriel
"As your WAR PRESIDENT, I think the American People need to hear decisive answers to some of the criticism leveled at this administration in the last week. I know the pictures don't look good, and I understand the frustration of the brave people of New Orleans who were courageous enough to stay alive during the five days it took for any kind of federal relief to arrive, but as the WAR PRESIDENT I want you to know that mine is not a racist administration. To be honest, I've been so busy with being WAR PRESIDENT that I haven't given much thought to much of anything else besides the war. Except tax cuts for the people who voted for me, since that's what I promised them when they paid $10,000 to have dinner with me. I've also been working on a plan to let you take the money you've been putting into Social Security and flooding the stock market with it, because that's what America is about. Also I've been busy imposing federal standards for student achievement while simultaneously insisting that teaching Intelligent Des--aw, hell, Creationism--should be a decision left to the individual municipal school boards of across our great nation. Point is, your WAR PRESIDENT did not let those people die because he is a racist. America is the greatest country I can think of or even know about, and I think a lot of that greatness probably depends on contributions from our brown-skinned citizens. What we should all keep in mind during a moment of tragedy like this is that neither your WAR PRESIDENT nor anyone I've appointed to handle disasters at the federal level is competent to do the job. Race is a very sensitive issue in our great nation, so as WAR PRESIDENT I'd like to stress that last point; those poor African Americans who died in New Orleans did not die because of racism, but rather my own stupidity. I hope this clarifies things for a few people out there, and allows us to move forward in making the greatest nation on earth great once again."
i mean, in that light, it's almost excusable, isn't it?
g
