(no subject)

Saw the footage of the unnamed woman who died in the Superdome and was pushed against a wall and covered with a blanket. Saw just a little bit of her arm. Oh. Man. Like, ....kust...man. No one shoudl die like that. I bawled. Oh fuck. I just want to hold that woman, hold her hands and look in her eyes and ease her out of this world. Just say "it's okay...it's okay." No one should die like that. She looked so abandoned.

I cannot stop crying about this.

(no subject)

I don't understand so much of this. We're the richest country in the world, and we can't do drops of food and water to these people? We can't airlift troops into the city to stabilize the looting and sniping? We did drops in Berlin after the war--WTF? This is not a third world country; this is America. Why the hell isn't FEMA doing more? This is unbelievable; I've literally felt this week as though I were dreaming. This can't be happening. It can't be happening.

I was talking to my mother last night--as hard as this is for me, it's worse for her. She went to college in New Orleans. She met my father there. She gave birth to my brother Bart there. She spent the first few years of her married life there. They lived on Tchapitoulas Street, and she said she had a hard time making cakes because they would come out crooked (New Orleans is on such squashy ground, some of the buildings are crooked). "So," she said brightly, "I made pies instead!" (My mother is famous for her pies--her chocolate cream pie is so good, my dad requested the recipe years after their not-cordial-divorce for his restaurant.)

I haven't talked to Bart yet. I can't imagine how he's feeling.

Beautiful

From the Washington Post.

This Isn't the Last Dance

By Rick Bragg

Friday, September 2, 2005; Page A29

It has always had my heart in a box.

In the clip-joint souvenir shops in the gaudiest blocks of the Quarter, with canned Cajun music drilling rock-concert-loud into my ears, I could never resist opening the toy wooden coffins to see what was inside. I knew it would be just a cut-rate voodoo doll -- a wad of rags, cheap plastic beads and blind, button eyes. But every time, it made me smile. What a place, what a city, that can make you laugh at coffins and believe in magic -- all the way to the cash register.

What a place, where old women sit beside you on outbound planes complaining about their diabetes while eating caramel-covered popcorn a fistful at a time. "It's hard, so hard, sweet baby," they will say of their disease, then go home and slick an iron skillet with bacon grease, because what good is there in a life without hot cornbread?

What a place, where in the poorest cemeteries the poorest men and women build tin-foil monuments to lost children in a potter's field, while just a few blocks over, the better-off lay out oyster po' boys and cold root beer and dine in the shade of the family crypt, doing lunch with their ancestors and the cement angels in cities of the dead.

What a place, so at ease here at the elbow of death, where I once marched and was almost compelled to dance in a jazz funeral for a street-corner conjurer named Chicken Man, who was carried to his resting place by a hot-stepping brass band and a procession of mourners who drank long-neck beers and laughed out loud as his hearse rolled past doorways filled with men and women who clapped in time.

Now, for those of us who borrowed that spirit and used that love and then moved away, these past few awful days have seemed like a hospital death watch -- and, in fact, for so many people it has been. And we stare deep into the television screen, at the water that had always seemed like just one more witch, one more story to scare ourselves into a warmer, deeper sleep, and we wonder if there is just too much water and too much death this time.

Ever since I was barely in my twenties, I have loved the way some men love women, if that means unreasonably. I fell in love with the city and a Louisiana State University sophomore on the same night, eating shrimp cooked seven ways in the Quarter, riding the ferry across the black, black river where fireworks burned the air at Algiers Point. I drank so much rum I could sleep standing up against a wall. The sophomore left me, smiling, but the city never did.

There is no way to explain to someone who has never lived here why every day seemed like parole. Every time I would swing my legs from under the quilt and ease my toes onto the pine floors of my shotgun double, I would think, I am getting away with something here.

How long now before the streetcar rattles down St. Charles Avenue and beads swing into the 200-year-old trees? How long before Dunbar's puts the chicken and stewed cabbage on the stove, or the overworked ladies at Domilisie's dress a po' boy on Annunciation Street, or the midday drinkers find their way back to Frankie and Johnny's on Arabella Street? Does my old house still stand on Joseph? It was high, high ground, on the lip of the bowl, and you could hit the Mississippi River with a silver dollar if you threw it twice.

I cannot stand the idea that it is broken, unfixable. I look at the men using axes to hack their way into 100-year-old houses to save people trapped there by the suffocating water. I know there is life and death to be fought out for a long, long time. But I can't help but wonder what will come, later.

My wife, as wives do, voiced what most of us are afraid to say.

"I'm glad you took me there," she said. "Before."

We went there on our honeymoon.

Just a few weeks ago, I spent a week there, walking along Magazine, walking the Quarter, not minding the heat because that is what the devil sends, heat and water, to make you appreciate the smell of crushed cherries and whiskey on the balcony at the Columns Hotel, to make you savor the barbecued shrimp, to make you hear, really hear, the sound of a 12-year-old boy blowing his own heart out into a battered trumpet by a ragged cardboard box full of pocket change.

How long, before that city reforms. Some people say it never will.

But I have seen these people dance, laughing, to the edge of a grave.

I believe that, now, they will dance back from it.

They will. They will.

(no subject)

It's signs like this:



that make me sure New Orleans will rebuild.

Give 'em hell, big guy.

(no subject)

fignuts (Chris's friend, Joe) posted Michael Moore's letter to President Bush. Someone on Joe's flist took great issue with it, and now the argument is on. Doug brought up Rudy Guiliani, about whom I was talking with Mom last night. Personally, I can't stand Guiliani. I think he's way too-thinned skinned and pissy (I couldn't STAND how defensive he got after the Diallou shooting, as though people had no right whatsoever to be upset at the shooting of an unarmed civilan who was doing nothing wrong). I thought he made things worse between the police and black residents.

However, politically, I liked a lot of his policies. And I was really impressed by his actions on 9/11--he was a true leader and went into the heart of darkness and led. He was amazing. Mayor Nagin, the mayor of New Orleans, was talking about physically walking the people in the Convention Center up the Expressway out of there. That's what a leader does. It's like in the Middle Ages, when kings were judged in part by how they fought in battle, how they responded to an actual physical (as opposed to metaphorical) assault on their country. At times like this, the actual physical presence is as important as what you may be delegating or arranging or whatever.

(no subject)

I know all my flisters are too smart for this but I thought I'd post it anyway:

(Remember to give ONLY to reputable organizations--the Red Cross, etc.)

Assholes taking advantage of generous strangers.

Suspicious Web pages supposedly raising money for Gulf Coast relief efforts keep springing up about as fast as authorities can shut them down. The latest are www.hurricanekatrinapics.com, www.hurricanekatrinarelief.com and www.katrinadamage.com, all of which ask for Paypal donations but do not make any claims that the money collected will benefit any relief organizations.

...

SANS also is reporting another e-mail scam that tries to trick recipients into clicking a link in the body of the message. The link attempts to install computer code that could give attackers complete control over your computer. The subject line of the e-mail: "Is Government Reaction to Katrina Because of Loss of Life, or Loss of Property?" If you receive this e-mail, just hit the delete button.

And especially despicable:

The Internet Storm Center's chief technology officer, Johannes Ullrich, pointed me to a few more apparently fraudulent Katrina-relief Web site addresses. These URLs all point to a single site that accepts PayPal donations but shows no indication of being affiliated with any nationally recognized charity.

Those sites include: www.neworleanscharities.com, www.donate-katrina.com, www.christiandonations.org parishdonations.com, www.clergydonations.com, www.katrinafamilies.com, www.katrina-donations.com www.internetdonations.org. Each will forward visitors to Internetdonations.org, which is registered to one Frank Weltner, 64, of St. Louis. Internet address records show Weltner also is the curator for a site called JewWatch.com. The site claims it "is NOT a hate site," but rather "a scholarly research archive of articles." A cursory glance at the links, however, indicates that the "research" may be a bit one-sided. (Editor's note: The site did not appear to be available at 2:15 p.m. ET today.)