Retraction
What ever drivel leaked out of my mind and onto the page I would like to take back, partcularly anything about red states and the the wrath of God which I may have less than tacitly implied. In the age old battle of man v. nature will out, as she has proven time and again recklessly, dispassionately and dangerously. Then the rest of it is up to us, and whatever perogative of survival which compels us to rape and pillage at the dawn of lawlessness, to be king of the sewer rats, to surrender decorum and piss on the streets.
I am having a very hard time articulating the myriad of emotions, I can't quite reconcile anything that I see and read, it doesn't gel, it doesn't gestate, my middle class sense of justice is alternately appalled and offended, I have a tinkle of glee that this calamity, this catastrophe might be the mill stone around the neck of this administration. And Our Feckless Leader who so violated stone faced diplomacy be declaiming in his best red neck drawl that he was lookin' forward to his tour of the gulf, and later noted that he was lookin' forward to sittin' on Trent Lott's rebuilt verandah, and all those "good people" in "that part of the world" (read: poor and largley black) would have to suck it up, meanwhile Dennis Hastert was talking highway expansion in Illinois, Pat Robertson duct taped his trap shut, and Anderson Cooper lost his cool on CNN.
I feel we are on a sort of tipping point here and the sulfer is starting to smoulder, and it's not so much as Katrina who cut a gaping swath out of the gulf as it is that perhaps now we will be forced to take a good, cold, hard look race and class. How many americans are really ostriches and how many of us, myself included, will stick our heads in the dirt, because 600,000 of the poorest of the poor are coming to a city near you and how long will our charity last, just about as long until the next celebrity scandal, is New Orleans dead, or can it rise from the mud.
I am torn by turns, and sit helplessly in thrall of CNN pedaling to nowhere fast on the stationary bike at the gym, and even then the irony is not lost on me, and donated to the Red Cross and my employer generously matched. For those of you who work for financial institutions or large corporations do inquire after donation matching programs, many have them, or if they don't in times like this it behooves them to be harangued into being bullied, because it's really up to us, up to we the people, because our government in enslaved to partanship and paralysed by pork and with few execptions I think they all deserve a spit in a BBQ pit in Biloxi. Feed the fucking people, they are thirsty for blood.
We can't keep shifting them from stadium to stadium, think of all of those NFL dollars and advertsing budgets shot to shit by the blind man defecating next to the hot dog stand, think of the lice and the scabies and the lingering stench of vomit and a long lingering case of the heebeejeebees who slumped and died in your 150 dollar NFL seat, which child died of dysentary, what malignancy festers in that poisoned water.
What is going to become of us? Four years and a week shy after September 11th, life, love, death cycles on, and will and should and does day in and day out, from season to season, to cities of sand and cities of mold, from my skeleton to the exoskeleton of my city. And from my comfortable perch on a fault line I write, glass of wine within reach, lit cigarette in the ashtray, bathtub full of steamy, scented water a comfortable financial buffer between me and them, and a big empty. And then there is the water bloated, undignified corpse floating by in the too large t-shirt in the Big Easy. Comparison is futile.
What ever drivel leaked out of my mind and onto the page I would like to take back, partcularly anything about red states and the the wrath of God which I may have less than tacitly implied. In the age old battle of man v. nature will out, as she has proven time and again recklessly, dispassionately and dangerously. Then the rest of it is up to us, and whatever perogative of survival which compels us to rape and pillage at the dawn of lawlessness, to be king of the sewer rats, to surrender decorum and piss on the streets.
I am having a very hard time articulating the myriad of emotions, I can't quite reconcile anything that I see and read, it doesn't gel, it doesn't gestate, my middle class sense of justice is alternately appalled and offended, I have a tinkle of glee that this calamity, this catastrophe might be the mill stone around the neck of this administration. And Our Feckless Leader who so violated stone faced diplomacy be declaiming in his best red neck drawl that he was lookin' forward to his tour of the gulf, and later noted that he was lookin' forward to sittin' on Trent Lott's rebuilt verandah, and all those "good people" in "that part of the world" (read: poor and largley black) would have to suck it up, meanwhile Dennis Hastert was talking highway expansion in Illinois, Pat Robertson duct taped his trap shut, and Anderson Cooper lost his cool on CNN.
I feel we are on a sort of tipping point here and the sulfer is starting to smoulder, and it's not so much as Katrina who cut a gaping swath out of the gulf as it is that perhaps now we will be forced to take a good, cold, hard look race and class. How many americans are really ostriches and how many of us, myself included, will stick our heads in the dirt, because 600,000 of the poorest of the poor are coming to a city near you and how long will our charity last, just about as long until the next celebrity scandal, is New Orleans dead, or can it rise from the mud.
I am torn by turns, and sit helplessly in thrall of CNN pedaling to nowhere fast on the stationary bike at the gym, and even then the irony is not lost on me, and donated to the Red Cross and my employer generously matched. For those of you who work for financial institutions or large corporations do inquire after donation matching programs, many have them, or if they don't in times like this it behooves them to be harangued into being bullied, because it's really up to us, up to we the people, because our government in enslaved to partanship and paralysed by pork and with few execptions I think they all deserve a spit in a BBQ pit in Biloxi. Feed the fucking people, they are thirsty for blood.
We can't keep shifting them from stadium to stadium, think of all of those NFL dollars and advertsing budgets shot to shit by the blind man defecating next to the hot dog stand, think of the lice and the scabies and the lingering stench of vomit and a long lingering case of the heebeejeebees who slumped and died in your 150 dollar NFL seat, which child died of dysentary, what malignancy festers in that poisoned water.
What is going to become of us? Four years and a week shy after September 11th, life, love, death cycles on, and will and should and does day in and day out, from season to season, to cities of sand and cities of mold, from my skeleton to the exoskeleton of my city. And from my comfortable perch on a fault line I write, glass of wine within reach, lit cigarette in the ashtray, bathtub full of steamy, scented water a comfortable financial buffer between me and them, and a big empty. And then there is the water bloated, undignified corpse floating by in the too large t-shirt in the Big Easy. Comparison is futile.
posted by emma at
11:03 PM
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