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Watch Out Kids....Here They Come Again...
Published on Thursday, September 15, 2005 by the Wiscasset Newspaper
(Maine)
Sugar for Sugar, Salt For Salt
Go Down In The Flood Gonna Be Your Own Fault
by Christopher Cooper
This won't take long. And it
won't be much fun. But duty and
decency demand that we do it.
Sometimes you buy a cantaloupe because it looks
good and you
have enjoyed some fine ripe cantaloupes in your time, even though a
buck and a
half for a little melon that went three for a dollar within living
memory seems
pretty pricey. And you leave it on the kitchen counter for a few
days, because
it's a little green, but it softens and gets a better color so you
slice it
open, but it's mushy and rotten and smells like feet and tastes
like vomit and
you remember other, similar, corporate grocery chain cantaloupe
experiences and
vow as you heave the mess into the compost not to get fooled again.
Maybe you've bought a car. Reasonable mileage, no
rust,
convincing salesman who chatted you up about your hobbies, agreed
with your
prejudices, and made you feel you were a pretty clever guy for
choosing this
vehicle from his selection. But you couldn't keep it aligned, it
ate tires, the
brakes, exhaust system and radiator didn't survive the life of the
payment book,
and when you tried to sell it three years later every seventeen-
year-old who
looked at it was astute enough to reference the oil blown past the
rear main
seals as his reason for declining your "Best Offer Over $500
Dollars" prayer.
Some of you lady readers married men whose
virtues are now no
more apparent to you than they were pre-nuptially to your mothers,
friends or
even relatives of the groom himself. True, he was a successful
inseminator but,
sadly, the children look disturbingly like him. Of you, people say,
"She could
have done so much better." What were you thinking? What can you do?
Or let's say a whole country was riding a foaming
crest of
good times, new cars, low interest rates, affordable gas,
electronic gadgets
and a We're Number One world view that was maybe weak on history,
geography and
empathy, but sure did by God show the big stick to the heathen
foreigners. Such
a people might toss a coin in a contest between a dorky, dull
Democrat and an
insipid dry drunk Texas fratboy Republican whose every and many
failures had
been rendered moot by family money and connections. They might not
be paying
much attention.
Then, let's say, some really nasty guys from a
country larded
up with ugly, corrupt fat cats blew a great big hole in a part of
that country.
Suppose the new president "rose to the occasion" by starting a war
with another
country in the same part of the world as the one where the bad guys
came from,
but which, for political and personal reasons and reasons having
very much
indeed to do with very valuable mineral resources and very profitable
corporations and some other complicated considerations having to do
with
weapons sales, it was not convenient to invade because those
particular rich
foreigners were personal friends and business partners of that new
chief
executive.
And further (stay with me; I know it's a weird
trip), imagine
that just as it was made startlingly clear that pretty much
everything this
president had advanced as a reason for that war was a fabrication, a
misdirection, a deliberate under- or over-statement (well, hell,
yes, I guess
just a pile of tremendous lies, really, if we need to use such an
ugly word),
imagine that he got re-elected despite his manifest incompetence
and venality
and smugness because the same Democrats who had advanced the very
dull,
unappealing candidate four years previously selected this time a
cipher who ran
against his own finest, most decent history and tried to seem more
and more like
the dull incumbent until, finally, some voters stuck with the dummy
they knew,
and some voted against the sad-sack they'd come to not respect, and
the rigged
Republican voting machines in two critical states made up the
shortfall.
Now what if the best-studied, most carefully-
observed,
best-tracked, most predictable-coursed hurricane ever seen, and one
of the
biggest, wiped out a major coastal city that, had the president in
question not
been so intent upon "drowning government in a bathtub" and reducing
the
unwelcome sting of taxation upon the richest people and
corporations he knew
(outside of his friends in Saudi Arabia, I mean), might have
received enough
money to fortify its dikes and seawalls in the true spirit of
"Homeland
Security", and maybe every old lady trying to board an airplane
could have been
spared the burden of taking off her shoes. (OK, I know it doesn't
cost much to
humiliate old ladies, and I know the money saved wouldn't have been
diverted to
New Orleans, but great craziness must be recognized and ridiculed
and, when it
is public policy, repudiated, and that's what they pay me to do here.)
You've seen the pictures. Twenty per cent of the
residents of
New Orleans lacked the resources, the vehicles, the health, the
money to
evacuate ahead of the storm. Too old, too sick, too poor to save
themselves,
and mostly, given America's great secret still, all these years
after we
thought we'd equalized these things, even after the token Scalia-
wannabe on the
Supreme Court and the sad yes-man who abandoned the Secretary of
State job after
the lies he told finally began to curdle on his lips, mostly black.
Poor blacks.
Indeed.
You've seen the Superdome, the convention center
footage.
You've heard the first-person accounts of scores of hurting, hungry
homeless
(poor, black) persons trying to cross a bridge to dry ground but
ordered back
by white officials with guns. You've seen the misery, the neglect,
the abuse.
So has the rest of the world. We're Number One! Say it loud.
Is it time yet? Can we all just admit we made a
stupid
mistake? We weren't paying attention? We heard what we wanted to
hear? We
succumbed to slick advertising? The fruit was rotten; the car was a
lemon; that
bum was just piss-poor husband/father material and your momma was
right. Stay
the course? What course? Our country, its citizens, its principles
have been
reduced, abused, worked-over, bled-out, violated and humiliated.
Not by
terrorists or foreign enemies or tsunamis or tornadoes or an angry
god. We have
rotted from within.
Blame the Republicans? Nah, they're just
"protecting their
base." Like helping like. It is the party of wealth and privilege.
Blame the
Democrats? Sure, if you can distinguish 'em from the Republicans.
It sure ain't
the party of FDR any more. Or even Jack Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson
or Jimmy
Carter. I'll see your Tom DeLay and your Bill Frist and raise you a
Joe Biden
and a Joe Lieberman. Blame the press for avoiding or killing any
story that
wasn't a press release from the Pentagon, the White House or the
American
Association of Yellow Ribbon Manufacturers. Blame our stars. Blame
ourselves;
we weren't paying attention; we didn't do the work democracy demands.
Do I exaggerate our desperate straits? The man at
the top in
his own words and by his own actions. Add the smirk and swagger
yourself;
you've seen it often enough.
First response? Fly over on Air Force One; go
play golf. Condi
Rice shopped shoe boutiques. Dick Cheney bought a three million dollar vacation home.
While you and I watched the Superdome and
convention center
fiascoes? Lunch with Al Greenspan. "Hurricane Katrina will represent a
temporary setback for the U.S. economy and the energy sector."
As WalMart water trucks, Red Cross workers, TV
reporters and
Canadian Mounted Police forces tended the stricken city while FEMA
and the
National Guard waited for orders that didn't come? "Brownie, you're
doing a
heckuva job."
Days after we'd all heard testimony from the engineers and
planners who'd repeatedly sounded the alarm about Category Five
storms and Cat.
Three levees: "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the
levees."
With hundred of thousands homeless, uncounted
dead, the
poorest among us hit the hardest: "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." [Yes, rubbles, plural. I know it
sounds
stupid, but I got it right off the White House website. He's proud
of it, for
Christ's sake!]
There's more. You've seen it, heard it, been
repulsed by it.
But did you get this from his mom, the husband of one bad
president, the mother
of the worst one yet, a woman who you'll remember said she couldn't
find the
time to trouble her "beautiful mind" about Iraqi civilians we'd
bombed to death
by the tens of thousands? Of those who'd lost all they owned,
including, in many
cases, loved ones, to the flood and were now enjoying the
hospitality of Texas
shelters: "And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were
underprivileged anyway, so this--this [chuckle] is working very
well for them."
Oh, those lucky, lucky homeless, sick people!
What happy
niggras we have here on our grand plantation. It makes a person
feel dirty and
disgusted and sick to his stomach. Don't you suppose a couple
billion other
people all over the world heard that chortle, you bloated, ignorant,
overprivileged mother of a moron?
Hey, folks, things have gotten so bad that even
the press is
beginning to pay attention. Presidential Press Secretary Scott
McClellan said
at least fourteen times during two press briefings last week that
now is not
the time to "play the blame game." I say it's an excellent time,
while the dead
are still floating on the polluted tides and we are not yet
distracted by the
World Series or the run-up to Christmas or another newly-discovered
"Axis Of
Terror" triumvirate.
Now, for pure, wholesome, refreshing local idiocy
we have the
Maine Republicans' brilliant plan to make us forget the screwing
we're getting
from Exxon by canceling the state gasoline tax for a few months and
(this is
really too perfect for me to have made up) forgiving the sales tax
on home
heating oil (struggling, low wage, two-job homeowners get ready for
this!) for business use.
OK. I'm done. Gotta go wax the yacht and wind my
Rolex. Jesus,
I wish I could be homeless and eat some donated food in Texas while
my wife rots
in a drainage canal and my dogs starve to death on the balcony of
our ruined
home.
Chris Cooper writes an editorial page column,
Fixtures And
Forces And Friends for the Wiscasset [Maine] Newspaper. He lives in
Alna, Maine; contact him at [email protected].
(Maine)
Sugar for Sugar, Salt For Salt
Go Down In The Flood Gonna Be Your Own Fault
by Christopher Cooper
This won't take long. And it
won't be much fun. But duty and
decency demand that we do it.
Sometimes you buy a cantaloupe because it looks
good and you
have enjoyed some fine ripe cantaloupes in your time, even though a
buck and a
half for a little melon that went three for a dollar within living
memory seems
pretty pricey. And you leave it on the kitchen counter for a few
days, because
it's a little green, but it softens and gets a better color so you
slice it
open, but it's mushy and rotten and smells like feet and tastes
like vomit and
you remember other, similar, corporate grocery chain cantaloupe
experiences and
vow as you heave the mess into the compost not to get fooled again.
Maybe you've bought a car. Reasonable mileage, no
rust,
convincing salesman who chatted you up about your hobbies, agreed
with your
prejudices, and made you feel you were a pretty clever guy for
choosing this
vehicle from his selection. But you couldn't keep it aligned, it
ate tires, the
brakes, exhaust system and radiator didn't survive the life of the
payment book,
and when you tried to sell it three years later every seventeen-
year-old who
looked at it was astute enough to reference the oil blown past the
rear main
seals as his reason for declining your "Best Offer Over $500
Dollars" prayer.
Some of you lady readers married men whose
virtues are now no
more apparent to you than they were pre-nuptially to your mothers,
friends or
even relatives of the groom himself. True, he was a successful
inseminator but,
sadly, the children look disturbingly like him. Of you, people say,
"She could
have done so much better." What were you thinking? What can you do?
Or let's say a whole country was riding a foaming
crest of
good times, new cars, low interest rates, affordable gas,
electronic gadgets
and a We're Number One world view that was maybe weak on history,
geography and
empathy, but sure did by God show the big stick to the heathen
foreigners. Such
a people might toss a coin in a contest between a dorky, dull
Democrat and an
insipid dry drunk Texas fratboy Republican whose every and many
failures had
been rendered moot by family money and connections. They might not
be paying
much attention.
Then, let's say, some really nasty guys from a
country larded
up with ugly, corrupt fat cats blew a great big hole in a part of
that country.
Suppose the new president "rose to the occasion" by starting a war
with another
country in the same part of the world as the one where the bad guys
came from,
but which, for political and personal reasons and reasons having
very much
indeed to do with very valuable mineral resources and very profitable
corporations and some other complicated considerations having to do
with
weapons sales, it was not convenient to invade because those
particular rich
foreigners were personal friends and business partners of that new
chief
executive.
And further (stay with me; I know it's a weird
trip), imagine
that just as it was made startlingly clear that pretty much
everything this
president had advanced as a reason for that war was a fabrication, a
misdirection, a deliberate under- or over-statement (well, hell,
yes, I guess
just a pile of tremendous lies, really, if we need to use such an
ugly word),
imagine that he got re-elected despite his manifest incompetence
and venality
and smugness because the same Democrats who had advanced the very
dull,
unappealing candidate four years previously selected this time a
cipher who ran
against his own finest, most decent history and tried to seem more
and more like
the dull incumbent until, finally, some voters stuck with the dummy
they knew,
and some voted against the sad-sack they'd come to not respect, and
the rigged
Republican voting machines in two critical states made up the
shortfall.
Now what if the best-studied, most carefully-
observed,
best-tracked, most predictable-coursed hurricane ever seen, and one
of the
biggest, wiped out a major coastal city that, had the president in
question not
been so intent upon "drowning government in a bathtub" and reducing
the
unwelcome sting of taxation upon the richest people and
corporations he knew
(outside of his friends in Saudi Arabia, I mean), might have
received enough
money to fortify its dikes and seawalls in the true spirit of
"Homeland
Security", and maybe every old lady trying to board an airplane
could have been
spared the burden of taking off her shoes. (OK, I know it doesn't
cost much to
humiliate old ladies, and I know the money saved wouldn't have been
diverted to
New Orleans, but great craziness must be recognized and ridiculed
and, when it
is public policy, repudiated, and that's what they pay me to do here.)
You've seen the pictures. Twenty per cent of the
residents of
New Orleans lacked the resources, the vehicles, the health, the
money to
evacuate ahead of the storm. Too old, too sick, too poor to save
themselves,
and mostly, given America's great secret still, all these years
after we
thought we'd equalized these things, even after the token Scalia-
wannabe on the
Supreme Court and the sad yes-man who abandoned the Secretary of
State job after
the lies he told finally began to curdle on his lips, mostly black.
Poor blacks.
Indeed.
You've seen the Superdome, the convention center
footage.
You've heard the first-person accounts of scores of hurting, hungry
homeless
(poor, black) persons trying to cross a bridge to dry ground but
ordered back
by white officials with guns. You've seen the misery, the neglect,
the abuse.
So has the rest of the world. We're Number One! Say it loud.
Is it time yet? Can we all just admit we made a
stupid
mistake? We weren't paying attention? We heard what we wanted to
hear? We
succumbed to slick advertising? The fruit was rotten; the car was a
lemon; that
bum was just piss-poor husband/father material and your momma was
right. Stay
the course? What course? Our country, its citizens, its principles
have been
reduced, abused, worked-over, bled-out, violated and humiliated.
Not by
terrorists or foreign enemies or tsunamis or tornadoes or an angry
god. We have
rotted from within.
Blame the Republicans? Nah, they're just
"protecting their
base." Like helping like. It is the party of wealth and privilege.
Blame the
Democrats? Sure, if you can distinguish 'em from the Republicans.
It sure ain't
the party of FDR any more. Or even Jack Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson
or Jimmy
Carter. I'll see your Tom DeLay and your Bill Frist and raise you a
Joe Biden
and a Joe Lieberman. Blame the press for avoiding or killing any
story that
wasn't a press release from the Pentagon, the White House or the
American
Association of Yellow Ribbon Manufacturers. Blame our stars. Blame
ourselves;
we weren't paying attention; we didn't do the work democracy demands.
Do I exaggerate our desperate straits? The man at
the top in
his own words and by his own actions. Add the smirk and swagger
yourself;
you've seen it often enough.
First response? Fly over on Air Force One; go
play golf. Condi
Rice shopped shoe boutiques. Dick Cheney bought a three million dollar vacation home.
While you and I watched the Superdome and
convention center
fiascoes? Lunch with Al Greenspan. "Hurricane Katrina will represent a
temporary setback for the U.S. economy and the energy sector."
As WalMart water trucks, Red Cross workers, TV
reporters and
Canadian Mounted Police forces tended the stricken city while FEMA
and the
National Guard waited for orders that didn't come? "Brownie, you're
doing a
heckuva job."
Days after we'd all heard testimony from the engineers and
planners who'd repeatedly sounded the alarm about Category Five
storms and Cat.
Three levees: "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the
levees."
With hundred of thousands homeless, uncounted
dead, the
poorest among us hit the hardest: "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." [Yes, rubbles, plural. I know it
sounds
stupid, but I got it right off the White House website. He's proud
of it, for
Christ's sake!]
There's more. You've seen it, heard it, been
repulsed by it.
But did you get this from his mom, the husband of one bad
president, the mother
of the worst one yet, a woman who you'll remember said she couldn't
find the
time to trouble her "beautiful mind" about Iraqi civilians we'd
bombed to death
by the tens of thousands? Of those who'd lost all they owned,
including, in many
cases, loved ones, to the flood and were now enjoying the
hospitality of Texas
shelters: "And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were
underprivileged anyway, so this--this [chuckle] is working very
well for them."
Oh, those lucky, lucky homeless, sick people!
What happy
niggras we have here on our grand plantation. It makes a person
feel dirty and
disgusted and sick to his stomach. Don't you suppose a couple
billion other
people all over the world heard that chortle, you bloated, ignorant,
overprivileged mother of a moron?
Hey, folks, things have gotten so bad that even
the press is
beginning to pay attention. Presidential Press Secretary Scott
McClellan said
at least fourteen times during two press briefings last week that
now is not
the time to "play the blame game." I say it's an excellent time,
while the dead
are still floating on the polluted tides and we are not yet
distracted by the
World Series or the run-up to Christmas or another newly-discovered
"Axis Of
Terror" triumvirate.
Now, for pure, wholesome, refreshing local idiocy
we have the
Maine Republicans' brilliant plan to make us forget the screwing
we're getting
from Exxon by canceling the state gasoline tax for a few months and
(this is
really too perfect for me to have made up) forgiving the sales tax
on home
heating oil (struggling, low wage, two-job homeowners get ready for
this!) for business use.
OK. I'm done. Gotta go wax the yacht and wind my
Rolex. Jesus,
I wish I could be homeless and eat some donated food in Texas while
my wife rots
in a drainage canal and my dogs starve to death on the balcony of
our ruined
home.
Chris Cooper writes an editorial page column,
Fixtures And
Forces And Friends for the Wiscasset [Maine] Newspaper. He lives in
Alna, Maine; contact him at [email protected].