Hi, I'm still here, sorry. There's a lot going on in the world, but my brain hasn't really had much to say about it. Here's the summary:
Katrina: Oh. My. God. Dear President Bush: the next time you see a category 4 hurricane heading straight for a major city and you have a couple of days' notice, please start getting ready. You put who in charge of FEMA? Christ, after you fire that asshole, why don't you nominate me? I'm smart enough to know I can't handle the job, which makes me more qualified than him.
Racism: I'm not convinced that the government didn't act to help New Orleans because the administration is racist. Honestly, I don't believe that about Bush. Instead what we've seen is the conservative anti-tax mantra come to fruition: the people who operate on the belief that "government is the problem" aren't able to come through in a crisis when government is the answer.
Implications for Manhattan: get your own emergency plan. The government can't help us.
Supreme Court: just approve Roberts already, okay? Oooooh, he's conservative! No shit. Who were you expecting Bush to nominate, Barbra Streisand? I probably won't agree with him a lot of the time, but I look forward to reading his opinions. I hear in his spare time he takes the text of Bush's press conferences and annotates grammatical corrections in the margins. Next.
Iraq: ?
Bull's Eye: I went to visit the "new" Target store in The Bronx, just across the Broadway Bridge from upper Manhattan. Now, I suffer from mild crowd anxiety. Perhaps it was COMPLETELY FUCKING RETARDED OF ME to go to Target on a) Labor Day when no one is working, b) the last night of New York's tax-free shopping week, and c) the weekend before school starts. It was like a war-zone in there. Do all children scream like that? Even at 31 years of age, I don't have the balls to say, "Mommy, buy me that!" This was about the most uncouth (least couth?) collection of people I have ever seen in one location. Every woman who wasn't morbidly obese was pregnant. I actually had to back out of an aisle because there was a woman (?) coming at me as wide as the aisle itself. Man, if your breasts hang down to your belly button, for the love of God please don't wear a tank-top without a bra, especially a tank-top too small for you so that it rides up to your navel. I don't need to see the twin bags of cellulite that hang off your belly button over your stretched-to-the-bursting-point jeans. Lord, if I wasn't gay before, I am now! I know it's a holiday, but I shaved my upper lip...why didn't you?
There is still hope for America.
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7 comments:
Thanks for the laugh! That brightened my day.
Did you guys see the cat with the coffee maker sitting on it? eheheh
I went to walmart and had my eye balls seared from my skull after seeing a grandmother waering a tank top that was falling off her shoulder and exposign on complete side of her bra.
ick.
It's important to remember that if you live in an American city your life expectancy is about 45 years old, according to the big-wig risk assessment firms. So, i'm not sure the worthiness of a personal evacuation plan. Chemical, bio, and nuclear usually don't move as slowly as water.
rob@egoz.org
Andy,
When you write...
I'm not convinced that the government didn't act to help New Orleans because the administration is racist.
I think that you are mistaken.
While I might tend to agree that you are generally correct in thinking that the Bush administration is not consciously racist, I feel that there is a subconscious (or perhaps unconscious) racist effect in almost everything they do.
Example One, Bush's tax cuts benefit the rich people -- most of whom are not people of color. Example Two, there are disproportionately few people without color fighting the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.
On "Real Time" last Friday I think that Bill Maher said something along the lines of, "Those in the Bush administration are not racist. But they just think, why didn't those people [who did not leave New Orleans] grab a case of Poland Springs water out of the garage, load up the Range Rover and drive to their summer home?" (I am sure that do not have the wording spot on, so my apologies to Mr. Maher, but you get the gist of what he said.)
What those in the administration could not understand is that a poor black single mom working on minimum wage cannot afford to own, insure, park, and maintain a car, let alone gas it up and drive to a hotel outside of the hurricane’s path.
So while the president that was the first to hire not one, but two African-American Secretaries of State is hard to call a racist, most of his administration’s policies -- and, in the case of the recent hurricane, inaction -- certainly have effects that are simply put racist.
-kh
The Targeat in Jersey City has a Starbucks!! Oooohhh, and yes, poorly dressed women.
Rob: I don't think it hurts to have a plan just in case. But really what I meant is that the City clearly needs to have its own evacuation/disaster plan, because right now the Feds are a mess.
Kevin: I really disagree. You are right to say that Republican policies target the poor, who are overwhelmingly ethnic minorities in this country. But I really don't think race has anything to do with those policies. It has to do with pure greed; the persistent irrational fear of socialism/communism that fuels conservative angst over government-run-anything; the belief that the poor are poor because they choose to be; and bad theology. As far as the latter goes, many people believe that success, as we view it here in America, indicates God's favor. I'm sure Bush believes that the very fact that he is President confirms for him that God is rewarding him. Therefore, if God is punishing the poor, it would be at cross-purposes for us to ameliorate their condition. The administration is classist, for certain, but not racist.
I had the great joy of going to P.C. Richards in the mall at Co-op City, the Bronx on Labor Day, which would easily have rivaled your Target experience. Whoever planned and designed Co-op City should be prosecuted. The amazing thing is, Co-op City is commonly held to be the thing that destroyed the Bronx. I just can't understand why anyone would have wanted to leave their nice normal neighborhoods (this was the late 1960s, before the Bronx was burning) to move to that monstrosity.
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