The Fury of New Orleans
A friend of mine wrote this, and I simply had to share. I really dont know what "belongs" on this community, it seems to be a hodge podge, so I can delete it again upon request. This man is my very own Happy Harry Hard-on, a mixture of blinding intellect and, though it doesnt show here, the sexually perverse, and I thought people here might enjoy this.
We Have To Burn All The Flags
From: Thrasymachus
Date: Sep 3 2005 4:50AM
reposted with permission
I don't even know where to begin this post. I've been setting my fingers to the keyboard all day, and every time I start writing I become so incredibly angry that I want to smash my computer, to smash everything. To scream at the sunrise, and burn an American flag.
I'd burn all the American flags. Every single one of them, everywhere in the world. I'd even go and scrub off the American flag that the Iranian government has painted in the middle of some street. All the flags, all the patches, all the lapel pins. I'd destroy them. Every last one of them. I'd burn, melt, smash, tear, and utterly obliterate them all.
And why? Because today I saw George W. Bush standing in front of an American flag and congratulate himself for the fine job being done for the people of New Orleans, and because today I saw official after official stand at the White House podium, with two American Flags crossed proudly behind them, bearing witness as they lied and lied and lied and put political spin on this debacle, spinning while their countrymen died like dogs as a direct result of their own criminal incompetence and indifference to human life.
And these were his remarks:
"The good news is -- and it's hard for some to see it now -- that out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast, like it was before. Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house -- he's lost his entire house -- there's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch. (Laughter.)"
While Bush was out there comforting Trent Lott and any other unfortunate racist millionaires who had tragically lost the porches of their vacation homes, a vast crowd of African Americans, trapped in New Orleans, was left to slowly die of starvation and disease. And the flag behind him had to listen to him talk.
You've seen the pictures, I'm sure. We're used to them.
We're used to those thin, dark lines of the damned, snaking past the cameras, their expressions bearing signs of every possible sorrow that can lie on a human soul. Clad in rags and barefoot, they walk for miles, leaving their possessions, their lands, their homes, and when finally pressed to it, their dead. They walk on past the bodies of their fellows, staining the ground with the blood of their wounded feet. And in their eyes, if you dare to look upon them, you can see the Gates of Hell.
We see this all the time. But never here. This time, the hopeless, hungry faces belong to Americans. Our countrymen. Our kin. Day by day, hour by hour, we are watching them dying. Dying in fear and hopelessness, begging for aid that takes so long to arrive that by the time it finally gets there, the recipients are dead. They are dead, in their thousands, and they're dying, from hunger and thirst and disease! Starving! In America!
And meanwhile while they helplessly look to the government that is sworn to protect them, and past that government to the people -you and I- who form the basis of its strength and its authority, waiting endlessly while contradictory decisions are reached and abandoned, altered and modified and at last set aside in favor of. . . nothing. Or at most, for something small. We cannot even evacuate the deathly ill. The sick and the wounded are left to die on staircases, as if they had been left on some ignominous battlefield that the rest of us had fled from.
Americans are dying, thousands of them, and CNN wants to sell us cars! Americans are dying, horribly, and the President wants to cut the estate tax. Americans are dying, from hunger and thirst, and Tom DeLay is skimming billions of dollars from the budget for a fictitious "energy consulting company". Americans are dying, in hopelessness and helplessness, and fear. . . and all that our leaders can think to do about it is. . . speak. Speak about the glories of New Orleans, about what a great job they're supposedly doing, about anything, anything that doesn't involve taking action, taking risks, making any effort at all to live up to their obligations to their fellow Americans.
Starvation, disease, violence. The dead left to rot, the sick left to die, the weak left to sicken, and the hungry left to become weak. If these people had any actual countrymen, if Americans still existed as reality instead of as a fondly remembered myth, then those Americans would win through to save them. All of them. They would stage a vehicular Dunkirk, bring supplies, secure the people and save their lives. They would do, in short, all of the superhuman things that we all have a right to expect when the hammer of peril falls on us, instead of on someone else.
If our lack of effectiveness stems from lack of resolve (which I do not believe) then our country has died and should be forgotten. If it stems from our lack of foresight, and our poor decisions, then we have humiliated and disgraced ourselves beyond measure.
A nation is really a tribe. United by blood or by an idea. And the Secret of the Tribe is no secret at all, though it may seem one for being so often and completely ignored. It is this:
The tribe is all of one spirit, one destiny, and one life. . . it must live or die, suffer or prosper, exist in freedom or languish in slavery, together. The honor that flows through this bond is the living blood of the heart of the tribe, the source of its strength, and its courage.
That strength is almost gone, because that spirit is almost extinguished.
The good news is that fellow Americans still exist, here and there. They are streaming towards New Orleans from all directions, to interpose their very lives if need be between the Americans of New Orleans and the perils that menace them. Many are there already.
But the government does only what is easy. $10.5 billion dollars for repairs. . .whatever that might mean. The media, meanwhile encourages us to pitch in, to sacrifice, and to help. And many of us want to. But the President, as ever, asks for nothing more than our patience as Trent Lott constructs his new beach house with government money.
And this is where we get to the part about burning all the flags.
America exists to ensure that "government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth." That is the sentiment that rides the wind, when the flag of this country unfurls. So who, we might ask, are this symbol's servants?
Do they govern for "the people?" Do they provide for the common good?
I think not.
"In 2001, Chronicle Science Writer Eric Berger reported at the time, the Federal Emergency Management Agency declared a devastating hurricane hitting New Orleans to be one of the three likeliest, most catastrophic disasters facing the United States. The other two were a terrorist attack on New York and a major earthquake in San Francisco, but the threat to New Orleans could turn out to be the deadliest."
Given the severity of the projected threat, and New Orleans' history of flooding, threat, you might have expected the Federal Government to expand funding for strengthening the levees, but you'd be wrong.
In the most recent budget, the Army Corps of Engineers asked for $27.1 million to improve the levees Bush cut that to $3.9 million, although Congress ultimately raised that to the princely sum of $5.7 million, down from $10 million in 2001. Louisiana also$100 million 2005 budget requested by the Southeast Louisiana Flood control project was slashed to $16.5 million by Bush and Congress finally awarded $34 million to the plan, as compared to $69 million in 2001. The reason that was cited, of course, was the war in Iraq.
"The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security -- coming at the same time as federal tax cuts -- was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars."
And yet, Just before the August recess, Congress acted to pass two gigantic pork-barrel spending bills on (ironically) transportation and energy. They were masterpieces of government extravagance, doling out money according to Republican political clout, with an almost sublime lack of interest in actual need.
As one Alaska newspaper gushed, "The $286.4 billion transportation bill before the U.S. House today makes good on Congressman Don Young's promise to deliver big projects and small -- from appropriations exceeding $200 million to help build a bridge across Knik Arm to $1 million to repave roads in North Pole."
(Don Young ultimately got his $250 million. . . as well as a further $250 million to build a second bridge between a town with a population of 14,000 and an island with a population of 17. One of those bridges is now called "Don Young's Way." I'd hope that any outbreak of cholera in New Orleans is just as thoughtfully named Don Young's Senseless Plague."
But even then, Congress wasn't done showering its donors with money. The same week, Congress passed an energy bill containing $23 billion in tax breaks for energy companies and $72 billion in authorized spending, including $2 billion for a " research consortium" in Tom DeLay's home town of Sugar Land, Texas.
The ostensible purpose of this legislation was to "ensure the security of America's energy supply." It apparently never occurred to these geniuses that this goal might include some modest efforts to prevent a major distribution hub like New Orleans from being flooded.
So much for saving New Orleans, then; the appetite for pork was just too great. But what about the people?
The people who remained behind, for the most part, were people who lacked access to private cars. The city knew that there were over a hundred thousand residents without personal transportation, so did it send transportation for them? No. Didn't care enough.
How about the State? No. Couldn't be bothered.
What about the Federal government, then? FEMA? The Department of Homeland Security? Nope. They'd been planning for this exact flood, in great detail, for literally decades. . . but somehow the political appointee Bush picked to head up the nation's most critical civilian agency. . . appears to have forgotten that part of the plan. Or, really EVERY part of the plan.
The people of New Orleans were left, quite frankly, and in many cases literally, to rot. A disinterested observer might be forgiven for wondering whether the American government was really quite serious about trying to save them. When the director of FEMA admitted that he had "only just found out" that morning about a concentration of hungry, shelterless people who had been reported on in the media for days. . . he appeared to be telling the truth.
At last, finally, the soldiers arrived. . . to shoot them. For looting the food and water that the government had failed to provide them. For taking, in short, no more than their due as citizens of this Republic.
So burn the flags. No flag in existence to witness this day should ever have to fly for us again. Their obligation to us is finished.
We'll make new flags to replace them, and perhaps we won't bring these new ones into such terrible dishonor.
We Have To Burn All The Flags
From: Thrasymachus
Date: Sep 3 2005 4:50AM
reposted with permission
I don't even know where to begin this post. I've been setting my fingers to the keyboard all day, and every time I start writing I become so incredibly angry that I want to smash my computer, to smash everything. To scream at the sunrise, and burn an American flag.
I'd burn all the American flags. Every single one of them, everywhere in the world. I'd even go and scrub off the American flag that the Iranian government has painted in the middle of some street. All the flags, all the patches, all the lapel pins. I'd destroy them. Every last one of them. I'd burn, melt, smash, tear, and utterly obliterate them all.
And why? Because today I saw George W. Bush standing in front of an American flag and congratulate himself for the fine job being done for the people of New Orleans, and because today I saw official after official stand at the White House podium, with two American Flags crossed proudly behind them, bearing witness as they lied and lied and lied and put political spin on this debacle, spinning while their countrymen died like dogs as a direct result of their own criminal incompetence and indifference to human life.
And these were his remarks:
"The good news is -- and it's hard for some to see it now -- that out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast, like it was before. Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house -- he's lost his entire house -- there's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch. (Laughter.)"
While Bush was out there comforting Trent Lott and any other unfortunate racist millionaires who had tragically lost the porches of their vacation homes, a vast crowd of African Americans, trapped in New Orleans, was left to slowly die of starvation and disease. And the flag behind him had to listen to him talk.
You've seen the pictures, I'm sure. We're used to them.
We're used to those thin, dark lines of the damned, snaking past the cameras, their expressions bearing signs of every possible sorrow that can lie on a human soul. Clad in rags and barefoot, they walk for miles, leaving their possessions, their lands, their homes, and when finally pressed to it, their dead. They walk on past the bodies of their fellows, staining the ground with the blood of their wounded feet. And in their eyes, if you dare to look upon them, you can see the Gates of Hell.
We see this all the time. But never here. This time, the hopeless, hungry faces belong to Americans. Our countrymen. Our kin. Day by day, hour by hour, we are watching them dying. Dying in fear and hopelessness, begging for aid that takes so long to arrive that by the time it finally gets there, the recipients are dead. They are dead, in their thousands, and they're dying, from hunger and thirst and disease! Starving! In America!
And meanwhile while they helplessly look to the government that is sworn to protect them, and past that government to the people -you and I- who form the basis of its strength and its authority, waiting endlessly while contradictory decisions are reached and abandoned, altered and modified and at last set aside in favor of. . . nothing. Or at most, for something small. We cannot even evacuate the deathly ill. The sick and the wounded are left to die on staircases, as if they had been left on some ignominous battlefield that the rest of us had fled from.
Americans are dying, thousands of them, and CNN wants to sell us cars! Americans are dying, horribly, and the President wants to cut the estate tax. Americans are dying, from hunger and thirst, and Tom DeLay is skimming billions of dollars from the budget for a fictitious "energy consulting company". Americans are dying, in hopelessness and helplessness, and fear. . . and all that our leaders can think to do about it is. . . speak. Speak about the glories of New Orleans, about what a great job they're supposedly doing, about anything, anything that doesn't involve taking action, taking risks, making any effort at all to live up to their obligations to their fellow Americans.
Starvation, disease, violence. The dead left to rot, the sick left to die, the weak left to sicken, and the hungry left to become weak. If these people had any actual countrymen, if Americans still existed as reality instead of as a fondly remembered myth, then those Americans would win through to save them. All of them. They would stage a vehicular Dunkirk, bring supplies, secure the people and save their lives. They would do, in short, all of the superhuman things that we all have a right to expect when the hammer of peril falls on us, instead of on someone else.
If our lack of effectiveness stems from lack of resolve (which I do not believe) then our country has died and should be forgotten. If it stems from our lack of foresight, and our poor decisions, then we have humiliated and disgraced ourselves beyond measure.
A nation is really a tribe. United by blood or by an idea. And the Secret of the Tribe is no secret at all, though it may seem one for being so often and completely ignored. It is this:
The tribe is all of one spirit, one destiny, and one life. . . it must live or die, suffer or prosper, exist in freedom or languish in slavery, together. The honor that flows through this bond is the living blood of the heart of the tribe, the source of its strength, and its courage.
That strength is almost gone, because that spirit is almost extinguished.
The good news is that fellow Americans still exist, here and there. They are streaming towards New Orleans from all directions, to interpose their very lives if need be between the Americans of New Orleans and the perils that menace them. Many are there already.
But the government does only what is easy. $10.5 billion dollars for repairs. . .whatever that might mean. The media, meanwhile encourages us to pitch in, to sacrifice, and to help. And many of us want to. But the President, as ever, asks for nothing more than our patience as Trent Lott constructs his new beach house with government money.
And this is where we get to the part about burning all the flags.
America exists to ensure that "government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth." That is the sentiment that rides the wind, when the flag of this country unfurls. So who, we might ask, are this symbol's servants?
Do they govern for "the people?" Do they provide for the common good?
I think not.
"In 2001, Chronicle Science Writer Eric Berger reported at the time, the Federal Emergency Management Agency declared a devastating hurricane hitting New Orleans to be one of the three likeliest, most catastrophic disasters facing the United States. The other two were a terrorist attack on New York and a major earthquake in San Francisco, but the threat to New Orleans could turn out to be the deadliest."
Given the severity of the projected threat, and New Orleans' history of flooding, threat, you might have expected the Federal Government to expand funding for strengthening the levees, but you'd be wrong.
In the most recent budget, the Army Corps of Engineers asked for $27.1 million to improve the levees Bush cut that to $3.9 million, although Congress ultimately raised that to the princely sum of $5.7 million, down from $10 million in 2001. Louisiana also$100 million 2005 budget requested by the Southeast Louisiana Flood control project was slashed to $16.5 million by Bush and Congress finally awarded $34 million to the plan, as compared to $69 million in 2001. The reason that was cited, of course, was the war in Iraq.
"The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security -- coming at the same time as federal tax cuts -- was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars."
And yet, Just before the August recess, Congress acted to pass two gigantic pork-barrel spending bills on (ironically) transportation and energy. They were masterpieces of government extravagance, doling out money according to Republican political clout, with an almost sublime lack of interest in actual need.
As one Alaska newspaper gushed, "The $286.4 billion transportation bill before the U.S. House today makes good on Congressman Don Young's promise to deliver big projects and small -- from appropriations exceeding $200 million to help build a bridge across Knik Arm to $1 million to repave roads in North Pole."
(Don Young ultimately got his $250 million. . . as well as a further $250 million to build a second bridge between a town with a population of 14,000 and an island with a population of 17. One of those bridges is now called "Don Young's Way." I'd hope that any outbreak of cholera in New Orleans is just as thoughtfully named Don Young's Senseless Plague."
But even then, Congress wasn't done showering its donors with money. The same week, Congress passed an energy bill containing $23 billion in tax breaks for energy companies and $72 billion in authorized spending, including $2 billion for a " research consortium" in Tom DeLay's home town of Sugar Land, Texas.
The ostensible purpose of this legislation was to "ensure the security of America's energy supply." It apparently never occurred to these geniuses that this goal might include some modest efforts to prevent a major distribution hub like New Orleans from being flooded.
So much for saving New Orleans, then; the appetite for pork was just too great. But what about the people?
The people who remained behind, for the most part, were people who lacked access to private cars. The city knew that there were over a hundred thousand residents without personal transportation, so did it send transportation for them? No. Didn't care enough.
How about the State? No. Couldn't be bothered.
What about the Federal government, then? FEMA? The Department of Homeland Security? Nope. They'd been planning for this exact flood, in great detail, for literally decades. . . but somehow the political appointee Bush picked to head up the nation's most critical civilian agency. . . appears to have forgotten that part of the plan. Or, really EVERY part of the plan.
The people of New Orleans were left, quite frankly, and in many cases literally, to rot. A disinterested observer might be forgiven for wondering whether the American government was really quite serious about trying to save them. When the director of FEMA admitted that he had "only just found out" that morning about a concentration of hungry, shelterless people who had been reported on in the media for days. . . he appeared to be telling the truth.
At last, finally, the soldiers arrived. . . to shoot them. For looting the food and water that the government had failed to provide them. For taking, in short, no more than their due as citizens of this Republic.
So burn the flags. No flag in existence to witness this day should ever have to fly for us again. Their obligation to us is finished.
We'll make new flags to replace them, and perhaps we won't bring these new ones into such terrible dishonor.