I read The Globe and Mail, the local paper, and half the papers published on the internet. I don't watch television, but I can't stop reading. The images coming out of Lousiana and Mississippi hit me on such a visceral level that I can barely believe it when I look up from the page and find myself in the middle of city going about its normal daily life.
I keep picturing a news clip I caught by accident once. "I'm a war president," George W. smirks. He has the look of a madman whose ego has ballooned to filled up the space where a brain and heart might have once been.
A "war president." Well, it's a damn good thing he let everyone know, because now we aren't furious to see him lollygagging around making speeches about controlling oil prices while half the population of New Orleans dies in front of media cameras...in hundred degree attics...stranded in hospitals that no longer have food, let alone medicine, stranded in the thousands inside the superdome, while the bodies stack up outside - and young men already so disentitled and alienated give final vent to the brutality of need and anger.
I'm glad he's big on law and order too. We wouldn't want to see what little police power is left wasted on saving anyone when they could be enforcing the law and protecting property. And after all, I have to think, how can you expect this "war president" to relate? Do you figure he's ever been hungry? Or even stood next to someone who was? Do you figure he can imagine, in his wildest dreams, being someone without the means to evacuate? Without gas money or a car? Without anywhere to go? Could he imagine being sick or old or pregnant when the hurricane hit? Could he imagine how it must feel to realize that you are abandoned in a huge sewer and every face in that crowd of thousands is black, like yours, and that no one - no one - may be coming? At least not in time to get you out alive.
I see those horrifying pictures and I want to send George W. on a little vacation - two weeks paid holiday in The Big Easy. And he can take his advisors with him. If he doesn't like it, maybe a school bus will come along to take him back to Texas. And maybe he'll be one of the lucky few who get on it.
3 comments:
Army to soldiers: Blog with care
Say you're an Army soldier on a mission in an Iraqi desert town. Things are pretty quiet, so you decide to draft a blog entry and report just that.
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Commentary Haiku:
katrina unmasks
true color of poverty
whites go, blacks remain.
Have you heard these sick news items?
Barbara Bush Sees Sunny Side
Tribune staff reporters John Bebow, Lisa Black, Mary Ann Fergus, James
Janega and John von Rhein contributed to this report. Tribune news services
also contributed
Published September 6, 2005
Former First Lady Barbara Bush, who toured the Astrodome and met hurricane
evacuees Monday in Houston, may have tried to put too cheerful a spin on
what has occurred in the last week.
"Almost everyone I have talked to says, `We're going to move to Houston,'"
she said in remarks to National Public Radio's "Marketplace."
"What I'm hearing is they all want to stay in Texas," she said. "Everyone is
so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena
here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this, this is working very
well for them."
Also...
Bush Sees the Bright Side
Sept 2
"We got a lot of rebuilding to do.... the good news is and it's hard for some to see it now but out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic gulf coast... out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house -- the guy lost his entire house -- there's going to be fantastic house. I look forward to sitting on the porch. Out of New Orleans is going to come that great city again."
Oh, no. Trent Lott lost his entire house. Where, oh where will he go? He is truly the face of the tragedy.
WTF????? What ignorance!!!!!! Bodies ARE stacked in stairwells in the Superdome and in hospitals and god knows where else. Last night, there was the body of a dead man lying on the hood of a car on the news. LAST NIGHT. There's that horrific photograph of a shrouded dead man lying on the concrete at a gas station with his still-live dog by his side who refuses to leave his owner's body in the Washington Post THIS MORNING.
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