Short Stories, Long Odds

Uninvited
We’ll stay if we want
Searching through your closets
For your grandfathers gun
-Cake

Over the last several days, I have made several attempts at writing a piece for this site, or for the Dig, called “Minimum Wage Nation.” The basic thrust of the whole thing was going to be that, like most families in America, our beloved country lives far beyond its means.

This was recently proven to the American people by, of all things, hurricanes.

Oh sure, YOU knew it, and I knew it, but the American electorate did not. They did not realize how far in the hole we’ve been getting, or that we’ve been borrowing money hand over fist to finance the war in Iraq. They did not realize that Homeland Security funds have been ill-allocated, and that locales and programs that could truly benefit Americans and shore up their safety have had a hard time getting dollars, while, as previously mentioned here, Alabama and Kansas have gotten plenty of dough to combat terrorists on their native soil. They did not recognize rampant cronyism leading to appointments to positions of importance in national security: to be fair, cronyism is always rampant in federal appointments, but usually people get cush jobs at Interior dealing with things like ethanol, not jobs which require actually saving people or implementing shit that actually has to work.

Instead, Americans were treated to the third giant clusterfuck of this century. (You get two guesses as to what the first two were, and if you get it wrong, I’m not sure how you got here in the first place.) They watched on TV as New Orleans flooded and everyone in the federal, state, and local governments stood around with the collective thumb up the collective ass. They watched as everyone tried to blame each other and were unable to make much sense of who was actually responsible. The answer to that, of course, comes back to the federal government, no mater how sad you are for Generalissimo Jorge: when FEMA became part of Homeland Security, they got the power to override and commandeer state and local government decision-making and resources, which they failed to use during Katrina and are now Camaro-ing in the face of Rita.

So I kept trying to write – the gospel, righteous truth about how America is like a double-income, low-wage family struggling to make ends meet. A family, like most, that can’t afford health insurance and are unprepared for any sort of emergency. A family that, when little Timmy ends up with a busted leg for whatever reason, well, they end up losing the house. And I hate to say this, but I couldn’t do it.

After a summer of working for the Democratic Party and being met on some very important fronts with nothing but frustration, I began to wonder if maybe our party leadership is determined to fail. That maybe they like losing. That they are so wrapped up in a vision of the Democratic Party that never actually existed – the spineless, all-inclusive vision that is afraid to engage in real politics, the vision where Bill Clinton was elected because he was a really nice guy and was ready to fight on the front lines of our nation’s hearts and minds for gay marriage and abortion and being really “progressive,” a term which everyone seems to throw around (similar to ‘‘populist’) without anyone having any idea what they’re talking about. The vision where you can show up for politics without a bandana and a switchblade and still have a shot at winning.

Let me give you an example of what I mean: there’s this Denton County Constable – a Republican elected official – named Larry Floyd. Larry got in a spot of trouble because he drove to Colorado to solicit sex from a young girl via her mother, using the interweb. I urged the party to release something to the press, saying “We in the Denton County Democratic Party believe that our elected officials should hold themselves to the highest standards, and an elected official that administers the law even more so. We call for Larry Floyd’s immediate resignation at the behest of the Denton County Republican Party.”

Seems fine, right? Why wouldn’t we feel that way? “Oh no”, I was told.” We can’t touch that. We can’t play their game!” So then it comes out that the DENTON COUNTY REPUBLICAN PARTY KNEW HE WAS FILTHY. They knew he’d been accused o going after the kiddies before he ran for office, and they ran his ass anyways.

Guess what the party leadership dictated be done about it? Yeah, I bet you can guess.

So either I’m all out of outrage or I am so disappointed in the people leading my own local party that I can’t muster up the juice to throw down.

Wait, I totally just wrote about it! OH SHI

Here’s to the confusion of our enemies! – Frank Sinatra

Dear Government:

I would like to ask you a question. If I were in charge of Homeland Security (or just if we were living in that fantasy world where everyone listened to me and believed in my righteous rightness), can you guess where I would put all the money? I would most likely give the majority of it to our largest ports and busiest airports, as well as major metropolitan centers, especially those with mass transit systems. That would be the terrorism money. The natural disaster money is something different.

But I’m curious, Homeland Security -why would you give most of the terrorism money to Alabama? I’m just spitballing here, and I know I’ve said it before, but how many terrorists are casing a joint like Alabama? Why would you give Kansas a million Congressional Funbucks, but deny all applications from Newport News, VA, America’s sixth busiest port and home to a major Coast Guard facility?

I understand that it is easy to sit back and point fingers, and to become an Armchair Despot. I get that. But this doesn’t make any sense. If you combine that with the State Department’s current Weapons / Jungle Warfare Shopping Spree, and you get Italian guys in your brain. They emphatically, yet coloquially, implore you to banish the consideration of such obvious oddities from memory

How well I have learned that there is no fence to sit on between heaven and hell. There is a deep, wide gulf, a chasm, and in that chasm is no place for any man. – Johnny Cash

Uh-oh. You need a subscription to read it, and if you’re too lazy, let me get you up ins: We are mad at Syria and our diplomats, particularly our Ambassador to Iraq, are angry at Syria. Sure, we were angry at them earlier this year for their occupation of Lebanon, but that worked out better than expected. What we’re really mad at now is what we’ve been saying for a while: Syria is aiding the insurgency in Iraq.

“Our patience is running out,” said the ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad.

How ominous! Its almost as if we’re now openly discussing some sort of plan to go after other countries in the Middle East!

The smart money now is not on aggression against Syria. We don’t have the manpower or the resources to go after such an endeavor. This could be a rogue diplomat with his credentialed panties in a wad. But considering how thick we are into Iraq now, I somehow doubt such a hardline statement would come out of the diplomatic corps without some sort of okay from State.

Unless! Unless Iraq is planning on attacking Syria on its own! While totally implausible for at least a few years, that Iraq could mount any sort of military operation on its own, it still sort of makes you break out in a low-grade greasy sweat, doesn’t it?

Its cool though, I’m sure the civil war in Iraq will last way longer than Syria’s current regime.

Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.
– W. H. Auden

It is difficult, at times, to continue to save the world in small and contemporary ways. My Democrat job, the ending of which is its own story, was a source of stress because I put upon myself the usual growth of scope that accompanies all of my activities. I demand that I be the best, and if I am not the best, I agonize over it. I don’t know where that came from. Everything I do, I see myself as doing it on as large a scale as possible, and I am constantly working as if I am on some sort of world wide stage.

It is a pattern in my life, wherein I throw myself fully into some endeavor until it goes wrong, or I get disenchanted with it, or I find out the truth of a thing, and then I immediately become disaffected. Its okay for me to admit this – I’m a grown-ass man, and I can be honest with myself about my penchant for self-aggrandizement.

So it was no surprise to me that I took my Democrat job very seriously, and felt as if everytime I went into work, I was saving Democracy in some small way. My friends in Deutsch class had an unrelated joke – they would ask me how Democracy was doing everytime I came into class. The usual answer was “terrible”.

For a long time, through this medium and through my conversations, scholarly work, and arguments, I have been preaching that the direction our country has been steered in since the terrorist attacks on 9/11 is not only wrong-headed but potentially disastrous. I have commented on foreign policy, geopolitical analysis, the state of rights and our need to protect the Constitution, and the inherent dangerr represented by the Bush administration, single-party rule portrayed as unified governnment, and the rise of the faux-martyrs in American Christianity. I have stated that the Iraq war had nothing to do with the War on Terror, that it would be disastrous, that it would cost way more than we were told, that WMD’s would never be found because they didn’t exist, and that it would in effect destablize the Middle East. I have said we were definitely going to attack Syria, and that we may end up running offensives against Iraq.

I have said, on several occasions, that despite all the money we’ve dumped into Homeland Security, we are in no way prepared for a terrorist attack or its aftermath. I did NOT, however, say or anticipate in any way that we would be so roundly unprepared to deal with a situation like Hurricane Katrina. I never anticipated that we would be preparing to spray pesticides over a city already drenched in toxicity, that Americans would be pointing guns at Americans needing help, that a rescue and logistics matter would be botched so badly that so many people would die horrible, drawn-out deaths for no better reason than a lack of listening skills or caring on the part of our leaders.

4 years to the day after 9/11 and what has happened? Where are we now? What have we achieved with all of our hard work? Our media has finally started to ask the important questions, the hard questions – Ted Koppel and Anderson Cooper are some current heroes who apparently lost their tolerance for bullshit some months ago – but no one seems to be asking what should be the 2 most important questions:

1) Saying that most of the people that died in Katrina’s aftermath were killed by governmental impotency is not correct – a lack of ability or resources is forgivable; what happened in New Orleans is an example of gross negligence and mismanagement, on about as many fronts as you can imagine. Who is going to be held accountable, ultimately? Where does the buck stop? Certainly we have played the blame game some what, but no one is asking who will end up at the end of the chain when the time comes, if it ever does. I believe it has to, because we have witnessed what amounts to murder. Anyone who says anything different is an apologist.

2) What if this had been a nuke? Or a bio-weapon attack? If this doesn’t show the American public that we are in no way safer than we were four years and one day ago, what will?

So I’ve figured out what’s wrong with my MT install – my server, which I have long lauded as the poor man’s gold mine, has been surpassed by the new Movable Type’s ability to thresh information. It times out, its DBI isn’t new enough, and so on. I have devised methods for getting around the problem, but they are unsatisfactory for the long term. We’ll see what happens next.

Regardless, the kid can write again, so rejoice.