Wednesday, September 28, 2005

~ HEY... WHO SHIT IN MY HAT???

For you bibliophiles out there, you might reflect on my mumbling about quietly missing New Orleans. At least I was missing the mythical Crescent City of my youth, the New Orleans of the Veaux Carre, of waking up drunk in Jackson Square with a bunch of my KA brothers after we had driven thru the night so that we could pretend to be sophisto worldly wise veterans. Childish... I know, I know. But that was all mixed up with my own Faulknerian emotional knowledge of the Old South as manifested in the wonderfully decadent city of New Orleans.

I was cautious of trying to retain the old pleasure I had... like remembering the imprinted scent of an old girlfriend after a bout of particularly athletic monkey sex. You didn't love her and you still cringe at the thought of leaving a sperm trail through her loins. Oh God! What will I do if she calls me next month with talk of eternal child support? Oh, no. Oh, no. Uh, tell me... why does it hurt so when I try to pee? She gave me what? Yeah, but she smelled so good as we rolled off and lay there puddled in the sweet smell of sex and cigarettes, of the licorice taste of absinthe all mixed up with the acrid taste of Jamaican tops. Sweaty sheets all twisted up with JOB rolling papers scattered all over the kitchenette table... last week's pizza stuck to the floor along with dirty bras and other women's panties. What was your name again honey? Where are we? Your place? This guy is your pimp? Jesus, my head hurts. Where are my friends? Bail? For what?

Memories of New Orleans weekend trips. My friend Dan Gilmartin and I once were sitting in a biker bar in Leesburg drinking shooters of tequila and talking about a trip to the French Quarter, then after closing time we found ourselves careening through the night in my elderly VW, singing tuneless riffs from Greatful Dead albums and talking about Rimbaud. Then waking up back in Leesburg after forgetting where we were going (duh... um... duh) somewhere in Alabama then turning around and driving back. Waking up sick and shaky with vague memories of girls with green teeth and hair on their tits...then doing more tequila shooters just to get the shakes down. Ice water and aspirin. God... I still hate myself. But the memory of the smells of the French Quarter are all mixed together with that frantic sex with ugly women and fear and then going out to Preservation Hall to listen to antique jazz while we pretended to be terribly cool and hip like... uh, you know... like Jack Kerouac or some such shit as that... Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg and Muddy Waters and all the rest of that lame white guy idea of hip. Sort of like pretending to know all the words to those lame lyrics to Bob Dylan songs. Sigh.

So... here comes some nightmare stories of dangerous evilness coming out of the stylized ghettos of the quiet nastiness of my childhood memories of the Crescent City. Gasp... then he was Paying for a blow job from some black French girl then we went to Pete Fountains place where we practiced being cool, then we took turns throwing up.

Ah... youth! And all that bullshit of evil New Orleans came creeping back to haunt my highly selective memories. Shit... I LOVED that dirty old whorehouse! And now it turns out that we were all PLAYED. Yeah. PLAYED! All that crap about babies getting their throats slit at the big football arena was just that... a lie. And there were no stacks of corpses there. Nope. Lies. Troops of gang thugs wierding their way through the ghetto streets... all just a bullshit lie. We... all of us twisted, sick, frightened white people were played by the media who wanted to give Bush a blackeye so badly that they were running a propaganda blitz that would have given the Weimar Nazis a case of amazed admiration. But they overplayed their hand. They overdid it. They were willing to just pass over the big lie and no one would notice that reality was not matching up with the Big Lie the MLM was peddling to the suckers.

But... a few of the papers admitted that it was all bullshit. And all the bloodthirsty, unrelenting bloggers of the internet never giving the MLM a breath to try to cover up their dopey attempt to smear Bush by making him the enemy of the people... hates blacks, drags his feet by making FEMA the boogeyman. How? Why, don't you know, Bush hates blacks.. especially the ones who are raping and slitting innocent babies throats while helpless women are starved and Republicans are holding them back. Huh? This has nothing to do with the gentle grace of courtly New Orleans. Where did this crap come from? Why... it's just a Democrat mayor and a Democrat governor in a state that is 75% Democrat politicians (you do rememer Huey Long don't you? Ah, the original kingfisher).

What makes me bug my eyes out is the certain knowledge that the poor president can't run again, but the Democrats are still trying to run against him. Will someone please tell those idiots that President Bush is not running for anything. He's just stumbling towards the end of his second term. What the fuck is wrong with those guys? Hey, you doofs... you're grappling with a whisp of smoke.He's not your enemy. You just hate him so bad that you can't think forward towards the NEXT election. Bunch of maroons!

Shit, we should take up a collection, pull on our beslobbered Go Gators/Kappa Alpha sweatshirts, clamber into my old VW microbus, and take George Bush to the French Quarter, then buy him a blowjob from one of those sweaty cajun girls who seem to live only in my jaded memories.

Bob

Saturday, September 24, 2005


~ THE OFFICIAL KID

Look at the size of that kid! The hit of the day was Matthew honking down a biscuit on his first trip as a sensiate being to Golden Corral. Stanley gave him a chunk of one of his pieces of bread and you would have thought that the kid had never eaten solid food before.Come to think of it, I guess that he hadn't. Anyow, the boy woofed it down as if he just discovered what teeth were for and maybe he would get some soon. This grandfather stuff is more fun than I thought. I get to do all that granddaddy stuff, buy the kid more biscuits and suggest a steak to his semi-irate mother, then just hand him off when he gets that distant look that bodes future stinkeybutt. Plus, it's fun to talk about all the stinkeybutt stories featuring his mother as the main character. The sperm donor Stanley the Dad seems to enjoy those. What a life.

Bob

Friday, September 23, 2005


Tuesday, September 20, 2005

~ REAPING WHAT WE SOW

One of the most interesting things that has occurred to me while watching the debacle of post-Katrina is the snapshot that the catastrophe of New Orleans and the anti-social behavior of the inner city hooliganism that was on display to the safe comfortable living rooms of lilly white America. Gasp! How could those wicked pore folks act that way? Yeah.. I know. I had the same reaction. I was unhappy with the idiots who were left to their own devices there at the Superdome. And I was unhappy with the TV images of looters. And I was unhappy with stories of rapine and pillaging coming out of the policeless Sin City (secretly exulting in the agonies of a city famous for its whore houses and speakeasies).

But that was actually just the horror of a middle class white guy watching children (and a whole lot of adult males without parental guidance) finally getting their hands on a plasma screen TV even if they didn't have electricity to run the damned things back at the hovels they lived in. Hell, they probably didn't have the necessary cable hookup they would need to see themselves gutting the Circuit City on Canal Street. What maroons!

What has been lacking is the intellectual connection. Why did those folks act so uncivilly? I know for a fact that New Orleans, in spite of its seedy reputation as a place where college boys could practice their projectile vomiting skills there at Jackson Square and as purveyors of the mostly fictional city of sin (decadent Anne Rice novels and all that crap)... is in truth a city mostly of courtly antique Southern manners and the quiet courtesy of traditional black manners. A place where even beslobbered college freshmen would be treated with courtesy by the elderly shoeshine boys plying their trade outside that wonderful donut shop around the corner from Pete Fountain's club (ah, powdered sugar on hot pastry served all night long... just the right mixture of decadence.... classic jazz and diabetes!).

How did it all turn out so ugly? Well, City Journal's Kay Hymowitz has revived the discussion of the Moynihan Report (will the Great Society ever release us from the strangle hold it has on our collective throats?)

Do you really want to understand what has been happening in New Orleans? Well, go read this thing. I know, I know.. the talk radio crowd has it all figgered out. The loony left is blaming evil Bush and the angry right is blaming loony liberals... but we all know that this is just the pointless finger pointing of people who really don't have a clue because they need their understanding to come in sound bites rather than whole sentences with subjects and verbs. Ah, the joys of post modernism.

Hymowitz wrote a really good book called Liberation's Children -- Parents and Kids in a Post Modern Age. This article is just a slice of that.

Go read a book. Learn something.

Bob

Sunday, September 18, 2005

~ A GOOD READ THANKS TO DAN GILMARTIN:

Ya'll: Food for thought and consideration....DG

EssayForgetting Reinhold NiebuhrBy ARTHUR SCHLESINGER JR.
Published: September 18, 2005

THE recent outburst of popular religiosity in theUnited States is a most dramatic and unforeseen development in American life. As Europe grows more secular, America grows more devout. GeorgeW. Bush is the most aggressively religious president Americans have ever had. American conservatives applaud his "faith-based" presidency, an office heretofore regarded as secular. The religious right has become a potent force in national politics. Evangelicals now outnumber mainline Protestants and crowd megachurches. Billy Graham attracts supplicants by the thousand in Sodom and Gomorrah, a k a NewYork City. The Supreme Court broods over the placement of the Ten Commandments. Evangelical stake over the Air Force Academy, a government institution maintained by taxpayers' dollars; the academy's former superintendent says it will be six years before religious tolerance is restored.Mel Gibson's movie "Passion of the Christ" draws nearly $400 million at the domestic box office.In the midst of this religious commotion, the name of the most influential American theologian of the 20th century rarely appears - Reinhold Niebuhr. It may be that most "people of faith" belong to the religious right, and Niebuhr was on secular issues a determined liberal. But left evangelicals as well as their conservative brethren hardly ever invoke his name. Jim Wallis's best-selling "God's Politics," for example, is a liberal tract, but the author mentions Niebuhr only twice, and only in passing.Niebuhr was born in Missouri in 1892, the son of a German-born minister of the German Evangelical Synod of North America. He was trained for the ministry at the Synod's Eden Theological Seminary and at the Yale Divinity School. In the 1920's he took a church in industrial Detroit, the scene of bitter labor-capital conflict. Niebuhr's sympathies lay with the unions, and he joined Norman Thomas's Socialist Party. Meanwhile, NewYork's Union Theological Seminary, impressed by the power of his preaching and his writing,recruited him in 1928 for its faculty. There he remained for the rest of his life. He died in1971.Why, in an age of religiosity, has Niebuhr, the supreme American theologian of the 20th century,dropped out of 21st-century religious discourse?Maybe issues have taken more urgent forms since Niebuhr's death - terrorism, torture, abortion,same-sex marriage, Genesis versus Darwin,embryonic stem-cell research. But maybe Niebuhr has fallen out of fashion because 9/11 has revived the myth of our national innocence.Lamentations about "the end of innocence" became favorite clichés at the time.Niebuhr was a critic of national innocence, which he regarded as a delusion. After all, whites coming to these shores were reared in the Calvinist doctrine of sinful humanity, and they killed red men, enslaved black men and later on imported yellow men for peon labor - not much of a background for national innocence. "Nations, as individuals, who are completely innocent in their own esteem," Niebuhr wrote, "are insufferable in their human contacts." The self-righteous delusion of innocence encouraged a kind of Manichaeism dividing the world between good (us)and evil (our critics).Niebuhr brilliantly applied the tragic insightsof Augustine and Calvin to moral and political issues. He poured out his thoughts in a stream of powerful books, articles and sermons. His major theological work was his two-volume "Nature and Destiny of Man" (1941, 1943). The evolution of his political thought can be traced in three influential books: "Moral Man and Immoral Society" (1932); "The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of Its Traditional Defense"(1944); "The Irony of American History" (1952).In these and other works, Niebuhr emphasized the mixed and ambivalent character of human nature -creative impulses matched by destructive impulses, regard for others overruled by excessive self-regard, the will to power, the individual under constant temptation to play God to history. This is what was known in the ancient vocabulary of Christianity as the doctrine of original sin. Niebuhr summed up his political argument in a single powerful sentence: "Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible;but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary." (Niebuhr, in the fashion of the day, used "man" not to exculpate women but as shorthand for "human being.")The notion of sinful man was uncomfortable for my generation. We had been brought up to believe in human innocence and even in human perfectibility.This was less a liberal delusion than an expression of an all-American DNA. Andrew Carnegie had articulated the national faith when,after acclaiming the rise of man from lower to higher forms, he declared: "Nor is there any conceivable end to his march to perfection." In 1939, Charles E. Merriam of the University of Chicago, the dean of American political scientists, wrote in "The New Democracy and the New Despotism": "There is a constant trend in human affairs toward the perfectibility of mankind. This was plainly stated at the time of the French Revolution and has been reasserted ever since that time, and with increasing plausibility." Human ignorance and unjust institutions remained the only obstacles to a more perfect world. If proper education of individuals and proper reform of institutions did their job, such obstacles would be removed. For the heart of man was O.K. The idea of original sin was a historical, indeed a hysterical,curiosity that should have evaporated with Jonathan Edwards's Calvinism.Still, Niebuhr's concept of original sin solved certain problems for my generation. The 20th century was, as Isaiah Berlin said, "the most terrible century in Western history." The belief in human perfectibility had not prepared us for Hitler and Stalin. The death camps and the gulags proved that men were capable of infinite depravity. The heart of man is obviously not O.K.Niebuhr's analysis of human nature and history came as a vast illumination. His argument had the double merit of accounting for Hitler and Stalin and for the necessity of standing up to them.Niebuhr himself had been a pacifist, but he was a realist and resigned from the antiwar Socialist Party in 1940.Many of us understood original sin as a metaphor.Niebuhr's distinction between taking the Bible seriously and taking it literally invited symbolic interpretation and made it easy for seculars to join the club. Morton White, the philosopher, spoke satirically of Atheists for Niebuhr. (Luis Buñuel, the Spanish film director,was asked about his religious views. "I'm an atheist," he replied. "Thank God.") "About the concept of 'original sin,' " Niebuhr wrote in1960, "I now realize that I made a mistake in emphasizing it so much, though I still believe that it might be rescued from its primitive corruptions. But it is a red rag to most moderns.I find that even my realistic friends are inclined to be offended by it, though our interpretations of the human situation are identical."The Second World War left America the most powerful nation in the world, and the cold war created a new model of international tension.Niebuhr was never more involved in politics. He helped found Americans for Democratic Action, a liberal organization opposed to the two Joes,Stalin and McCarthy. He was tireless (until strokes slowed him up) in cautioning Americans not to succumb to the self-righteous delusions of innocence and infallibility. "From the earliest days of its history to the present moment,"Niebuhr wrote in 1952, "there is a deep layer of messianic consciousness in the mind of America.We never dreamed that we would have as much political power as we possess today; nor for that matter did we anticipate that the most powerful nation on earth would suffer such an ironic refutation of its dreams of mastering history."For messianism - carrying on one man's theory ofGod's work - threatened to abolish the unfathomable distance between the Almighty and human sinners.Niebuhr would have rejoiced at Mr. Dooley'sdefinition of a fanatic. According to the Irish bartender created by Finley Peter Dunne, a fanatic "does what he thinks th' Lord wud do ifHe only knew th' facts iv th' case." There is no greater human presumption than to read the mind of the Almighty, and no more dangerous individual than the one who has convinced himself that he is executing the Almighty's will. "A democracy,"Niebuhr said, "cannot of course engage in anexplicit preventive war," and he lamented the"inability to comprehend the depth of evil to which individuals and communities may sink,particularly when they try to play the role of God to history."Original sin, by tainting all human perceptions,is the enemy of absolutes. Mortal man's apprehension of truth is fitful, shadowy and imperfect; he sees through the glass darkly.Against absolutism Niebuhr insisted on the"relativity of all human perspectives," as well as on the sinfulness of those who claimed divine sanction for their opinions. He declared himself "in broad agreement with the relativist position in the matter of freedom, as upon every other social and political right or principle." In pointing to the dangers of what Justice Robert H.Jackson called "compulsory godliness," Niebuhr argued that "religion is so frequently a source of confusion in political life, and so frequently dangerous to democracy, precisely because it introduces absolutes into the realm of relative values." Religion, he warned, could be a sourceof error as well as wisdom and light. Its role should be to inculcate, not a sense of infallibility, but a sense of humility. Indeed,"the worst corruption is a corrupt religion."One imagines a meeting between two men - say, for example, the president of the United States and the last pope - who have private lines to the Almighty but discover fundamental disagreements over the message each receives. Thus Bush is the fervent champion of the war against Iraq; JohnPaul II stoutly opposed the war. Bush is the fervent champion of capital punishment; John PaulII stoutly opposed capital punishment. How do these two absolutists reconcile contradictory and incompatible communications from the Almighty?The Civil War, that savage, fraternal conflict,was the great national trauma, and Lincoln was for Reinhold Niebuhr the model statesman. Of all American presidents, Lincoln had the most acute religious insight. Though not enrolled in any denomination, he brooded over the infinite mystery of the Almighty. To claim knowledge of the divine will and purpose was for Lincoln the unpardonable sin.He summed up his religious sense in his second inaugural, delivered in the fifth year of theCivil War. Both warring halves of the Union, he said, read the same Bible and prayed to the same God. Each invoked God's aid against the other.Let us judge not that we be not judged. Let us fight on with "firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right." But let us never forget, Lincoln reminded the nation in memorablewords, "The Almighty has His own purposes."Thurlow Weed, the cynical and highly intelligent boss of New York, sent Lincoln congratulations on the inaugural address. "I believe it is not immediately popular," Lincoln replied. "Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them. To deny it, however, in this case, is to deny that there is a God governing the world. It is a truth which I thought needed to be told and as whatever of humiliation there is in it, falls directly on myself, I thought others might afford for me to tell it.""The combination of moral resoluteness about the immediate issues," Niebuhr commented on Lincoln's second inaugural, "with a religious awareness of another dimension of meaning and judgment must be regarded as almost a perfect model of the difficult but not impossible task of remaining loyal and responsible toward the moral treasures of a free society on the one hand while yet having some religious vantage point over the struggle."Like all God-fearing men, Americans are never safe "against the temptation of claiming God too simply as the sanctifier of whatever we most fervently desire." This is vanity. To be effective in the world, we need "a sense of modesty about the virtue, wisdom and power available to us" and "a sense of contrition abou tthe common human frailties and foibles which lieat the foundation of both the enemy's demonry andour vanities." None of the insights of religious faith contradict "our purpose and duty of preserving our civilization. They are, in fact,prerequisites for saving it."The last lines of "The Irony of American History," written in 1952, resound more than ahalf-century later. "If we should perish, theruthlessness of the foe would be only thesecondary cause of the disaster. The primarycause would be that the strength of a giant nation was directed by eyes too blind to see all the hazards of the struggle; and the blindness would be induced not by some accident of nature or history but by hatred and vainglory."-end-About Arthur Schlessinger, Jr.

(SOURCE:http://www.encyclopedia.com/html/S/SchlsngrA1J1r.asp)Schlesinger, Arthur Meier, Jr. Related: Biblical History United StatesBiographies1917-, American historian and public official, b.Columbus, Ohio, son of Arthur Meier Schlesinger .He achieved early success as a historian with thepublication, the year after his graduation, ofhis Harvard honors thesis, Orestes A. Brownson: APilgrim's Progress (1939). In World War II heserved with the Office of War Information(1942-43) and the Office of Strategic Services(1943-45), and he was professor of history atHarvard from 1946 to 1961. His Age of Jackson(1945), a brilliant reinterpretation of thesocial, political, and economic aspects of theera, stimulated numerous American historians toreexamine Jacksonian America and won the PulitzerPrize. The Age of Roosevelt (3 vol., 1957-60) isa sweeping narrative and analysis of the New Dealperiod in U.S. history, written from a stronglysympathetic viewpoint. Active in liberalpolitics, Schlesinger was a cofounder of theAmericans for Democratic Action (1947). He servedas an assistant to Democratic presidentialcandidate John F. Kennedy , and in 1961 PresidentKennedy appointed him special assistant for LatinAmerican affairs. His study of Kennedy's WhiteHouse years, A Thousand Days (1965), won thePulitzer Prize for biography. He began teachingat the City Univ. of New York Graduate Center in1966 and became an emeritus professor in 1994.His other works include The Politics of Hope(1963), The Bitter Heritage (1968), The ImperialPresidency (1973), Robert F. Kennedy and HisTimes (1978), The Cycles of American History(1986), and War and the American Presidency(2004).Bibliography: See his autobiography, A Life inthe 20th Century, Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950 (2000).

Wednesday, September 14, 2005




~THE REAL DEAL THANKS TO YON

The guy on the left in the picture here is LTC Erik Kurilla, big dog with the Duce Four (24th) in Iraq. He and his squad of warriors were in Mosul last Aug. 31 and had Michael Yon along. Yon was there when Kurilla was wounded in an exchange with some insurgents. Ironically, the incident occurred shortly after Kurilla had talked to the parents of one of his men who had been injured a little earlier. The picture to the left was when he was connecting up with the parents of this guy... he wanted to tell them that the guy was OK before the official channels scared the crap out of them. What a guy!

Anyhow, shortly after that call the squad came under fire and Kurilla was shot (he took 3 in the leg, breaking his femur). Just to prove what a hardass he was he then continued to direct his men while they were under fire and he was wounded, and to top it all off he called his own wife (love those satellite phones, eh?) to tell her that he was OK and not to sweat the official reports.

I tell ya... guys like that give be a giant boner. What a man! What a soldier! What a leader of men! I mean, it just gives the the tingleys. I'm so envious of these guys that I can hardly stand it.

Hemingway said that every generation of young men needed a war to test themselves on. His was in Spain. Mine was in Viet Nam. These guys are proving again that the American fighting man is the absolute best in history. Bar none. And Michael Yon was there to chronicle the action, in the same way that Hemingway was there at the bridge talking to that old man sitting in the road. Damn... I'm getting all wet. I love these guys.

Just for the record, Kurilla hooked up later with the injured soldier he was calling about earlier and made him his bodyguard while he was transiting out. Oh, damn. What a man! I'm doing it again... I'm just so damned proud to be even remotely associated with them (careful... an elderly grunt has to be proud from a distance from these warriors). Thank you gentlemen. And thank you Michael Yon. You're the kind of journalist that the rest of those pukes wish they were. I think Hemingway would be proud too.

Bob

Friday, September 09, 2005



Compliments of Hurricane Ophelia.

Sunday, September 04, 2005

~ FINGERPOINTING AT THE FINGERPOINTERS

The great thing about the internet is that it is almost impossible for any collective entity to pass the buck. My usual ritual on Sunday mornings is to lie in bed until all the talk shows full of so-called experts have filled us all with the wisdom of the ages. But this morning I just shut the thing off when ABC ran some footage of George Stephanopolis and the governor of Louisana doing a flyover. There was George crouched close to the window of the plane while her governatorness (or whatever she is) pleaded tearfully with the Federales to please please help us pore folks down here on the delta. I just couldn't take any more. These assholes were pretending to "see" the tragedy from several thousand feet in the air. Class Limo Liberals. Aaargh!

What's that got to do with the bloggoshere? Well, the guys over at THIS location have access to some images that should add some color to the finger pointing. The good folks at Junkyardbloggers has photographic proof that the mayor and governor had a solution to their problem all along. These assholes were busy begging for someone to help them while they are off getting their hair done so that they could ride around in limos with ABC news. Too busy to do their job. The evil assholes! The losers! The city fathers of the Big Easy had enough busses on hand to haul about 16,000 of those pore folks to safety. Sixteen thousand at each rotation. Did they use the busses? Oh, nooo. Of course not. The busses sat there in comfort through the storm and they are STILL sitting there! These assholes have been so busy trying to find someone to blame that they still haven't opened the gates. They don't want to help the citizens of New Orleans. They just want to ride around in air conditioned comfort with some blinder wearing liberal suckwad from the mass media liberal cabal. The folks that invented the concept of gimme-gimme. And it was local government that caused the really scary stuff by releasing all the prisoners in the New Orleans jails so that they could turn the city into a war zone in the first place. Idiots!

It just fills me with rage when I realize that this is what passes for leadership in this country. It isn't often that I can say that I'm very glad that I live where I do... but today I'm very glad that I live in Orlando, Florida... Orange County... Sheriff Kevin Berry.... Governor Jeb Bush (yeah... the President's kid brother). Leadership... that's what is needed. My sheriff is a hardass who actually owns his own armored personel vehicle (read tank). And that guy would not have time to beg for help... he would have been out protecting the citizens he had been hired to protect.

And I'll guarantee you that he would have had those empty busses full to capacity and hauling his citizens off to safety, not sitting on his ass whining about how he needs the Feds to come bail him out.

It's amazing. They had a whole yard full of busses sitting there the whole time. Amazing! I'm surprised the thugs hadn't stolen them so that they could start their own system. God knows the elected officials there didn't have the stones to accomplish anything.

Bob

Friday, September 02, 2005

~ FUNDAMENTAL THINGS

I've been following the circus in New Orleans with some interest. I will pass myself as something of an expert in such things... we had three hurricanes pound our homes in Central Florida last year. The wind blew and the trees all fell down and the phones went out and the lights went out and we all generally were mega-screwed for weeks and even months until we worked our way out of the mess. And a whole lot of people are still trying to get their roofs on their double wides fixed. The most common sight around here is those Chinese blue tarps spread across the roof while the children are sleeping in all too soggy bedclothes tonight... even after months and months of damage control. But through it all I never saw any looting or mayhem or whining or complaining. Nobody ever blamed the government for not flying in boxcars of hot meals and air conditioners. And we needed them BAAAD! Nobody expected the Feds to come down and pick anyone up at the T.D. Waterhouse Center or provide limo service to and from the Tangerine Bowl. What's with these whiners?

The question that first comes to my mind is -- what would I do if I was confronted with this disaster? What exactly would I do? Well, I would not go downtown and sit on my ass waiting for President Bush to come get me. I would gather up my wife and kids, and I would load up the wheel barrow or whatever I had to tote my worldly goods away from the drowned neighborhood that used to be home... and I would start hoofing it to higher ground. The last thing I would do is sit there and wait... Wait for what? What are they waiting for? A rebirth of wonder?

Hey... pack it in guys! While you are sitting around the corpse that used to be the Big Easy your children are starving to death! This is a fundamental fact that refugees the world over have learned time and after time since the first time the villagers noticed a group of Goths on the horizon fingering their swords and leering at your daughters. Get out of town dummies!

These losers are so used to the gimmie-gimmie culture that they were raised in that they are allowing mad dogs to take over their lovely city. They are standing outside the hospital watching thugs shoot at policemen and instead of lending a hand by killing a few of the damned vermin they're whining about how George Bush isn't helping them get the air conditioning back on fast enough. What's with these idiots? We Floridians had a whole string of terrifying storms tear us a new one last year... and we never had a breakdown of civil authority. What's wrong with these dorks?

I've got a few ideas. First, let's accept the fact that the mayor of New Orleans and the governor of Louisiana should be summarily sacked. They've done NOTHING. No leadership. None. It's not George Bush's job to provide protection and maintain civil authority. Those are local things. The Feds can help, and they will, and are. This was a managable situation and FEMA was all lines and pre-staged for the entry into the city. But the morons in New Orleans parish released all the prisoners in the jails because they might have gotten wet sneakers if they had stayed in the pokey. Hey... morons! Now you're wondering who is shooting at the cops outside of the hospital? How stupid are you? Jesus!

Second, if you're stuck for transportation how about scrounging up a boat? I saw thousands of private boats that had gone astray in the storm. Why not gather up your kids and put some rags up in the air and head for Texas? Oh, no... you'd rather sit in your own shit and watch your wife get gang raped by hoods and your daughters get gangbanged by the criminals who were let out of the parish lock up. Duh!

What it comes down to is this --- how about you dingbats helping yourself a little bit?

Bob