Confessions of a Grade School Role Model

I have started a new blog, here, called "Charlie Letters."  Pretty banner and improved graphics are forthcoming.  I may occasionally still post on the blog here, but will probably concentrate my attentions for a while at the new site.  Be sure to read the "About" page first, link at top right, the new site will make far more sense after you do.  This is a project I've been wanting to do for ages, and finally started just last night.  Come on by!

Cindy Sheehan spoke on the campus where I work today.  I packed a sandwich and went to hear her on my lunch break.  I didn't think to count the number of people there with me, but I could have without stressing a third digit, and barely stressing two; there were generously maybe 60 of us counting both supporters and opposition.  Sure, it's Texas, and it's 100 degrees in April, and she spoke from a raised place on an unshaded lawn, in a bus circle, but I still found the lack of audience unsettling.  Two yawning cops stood by dutifully, half-heartedly, it must have been penciled in on their schedule this morning, but they weren't necessary.  A few entitled Young Republican-types and a blonde girl from the Army ROTC fell into barely-heated argument with a hippie and a body-modification enthusiast, but that was about the extent of passionate display.  The blonde girl wore a camouflage T-shirt with the university logo worked into the pattern, and the hippie guy wore a camouflage jacket with the logos all conspicuously torn off.  Her camouflage was neat and ironed and tucked in and worn proudly, his was faded and dirty and frayed and worn ironically, both yelled things they might have read off the event flier at each other, and both gave up easily when the Radio-TV-Film sequence student with the camera finally wandered off. 

Cindy Sheehan spoke for maybe ten minutes.  She said smart things, important things, things we already knew but probably needed to hear again, but nothing that hasn't been said before.  Mostly she yelled comebacks at the few who had bothered to show up to oppose her or support the war.  A few hastily-written block letter slogans on neon poster board, a couple canned pro-Bush/anti-Cindy sound bites yelled above the small gathering.  Her comebacks were good, no doubt she's had practice with countless unimaginative hecklers before today, and in person she is still the impassioned, quietly charismatic woman she was on TV.  But it felt like passion in a void.  The only other sweat worked up in that crowd came directly from the sun. Everyone else just struck me as obligatory token characters from some over-rehearsed play.  Where was the passion?  I'd been to a protest in Austin just a year ago, the first I'd been in the country for during this war, and there had certainly been passion there. Streets had been blocked off, news helicopters summoned, people cried and screamed and discussed and argued unselfconsciously, and stayed until it was nearly too dark to see.   Where did that go?

Cindy spoke for a few minutes and called for a march to the campus recruiting station.  I had to go back to work, and walked back with the little procession behind me.  So few voices chanted, that I could hear each individual one.  Their slogans weren't catchy or thought-provoking, they weren't together, they kept changing the words in hopes of sparking something that wasn't going to happen.  Someone would cry thinly, "No blood for oil!" a few others would join in for a few rounds, and I would just think about how they must have all driven their cars there,  past good bus routes and bike trails so they could park in a multi-storied garage a few miles from their homes.  They picked up with, "Bush lies, sisters die!  Bush lies, brothers die!" and I thought about how all these privileged healthy mostly white kids were here, on a college campus with ice-cold air-conditioning and a co-ed yacht club and well-trained landscapers, because they were fortunate enough to be born into families with extra money to fund college, and not there in Iraq, like someone else's brothers and sisters, trying not to die.

 

 

One largely forgotten, shameful episode in our history brought back to memory by Hurricane Katrina is the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, which was up until last week, the worst flood in American history.

Here is an excerpt from a 1997 review of a book on the subject, Rising Tide:The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America by John M. Barry.  Some similarities of that 78-year old New Orleans catastrophe and the one going on today, I find eerie.

[In 1927] the first cracks showed up in the levees. After biblical rains throughout the Midwest, the Mississippi started busting right though weak stretches of levees.

...

As the flood waters started approaching New Orleans, the close-knit cabal of New Orleans bankers who ran Louisiana from their exclusive krewes and clubs decided they were going to save their own skins by dynamiting a levee about 10 miles from the city. They were powerful enough that they didn't even need to do it under the cover of night -- they got the governor to sign an order making the operation legal.

On the afternoon of April 29, 1927, workers started blowing a massive hole in that levee. As New Orleans aristocrats watched from their yachts, the river buried St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes [mostly poor, black areas] under 30 feet of water. The story gets worse: Although the New Orleans bankers had promised to repay the families they had flooded, they later reneged. To compensate for the loss of their homes and livelihood, each family wound up with a pittance of less than $300.

And from a USNews article on the same event:

To save New Orleans, the leaders proposed a radical plan. South of the city, the population was mostly rural and poor. The leaders appealed to the federal government to essentially sacrifice those parishes by blowing up an earthen levee and diverting the water to marshland. They promised restitution to people who would lose their homes. Government officials, including Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover, signed off.

On April 29, the levee at Caernarvon, 13 miles south of New Orleans, succumbed to 39 tons of dynamite. The river rushed through at 250,000 cubic feet per second. New Orleans was saved, but the misery of the flooded parishes had only started. The city fathers took years to make good on their promises, and very few residents ever saw any compensation at all.

The 1927 flood killed 246 people and displaced 700,000, mostly African-Americans.  We've barely started to count the toll of Katrina, but we already know it's going to be far, far worse.

Just in case you thought race might have something to do with what's going on in New Orleans, here's Important Gulf War Newsfigure Wolf Blitzer from The Situation Room, link via Slate:

"You simply get chills every time you see these poor individuals, as Jack Cafferty just pointed out, so tragically, so many of these people, almost all of them that we see, are so poor and they are so black, and this is going to raise lots of questions for people who are watching this story unfold." [Emphasis added by Slate.] [Watch the video.]

Whoa.

I went to lunch today with the co-workers in my small team at my new job.  I work for the State, and my co-workers are very "normal" people.  Whereas most of my former co-workers in the college town I live in have been pierced, tattooed, unnaturally-coiffured, and often artists and musicians who generally spend half the workday hung-over from the night before, my new bureaucratically-employed co-workers are very mainstream -- they like football, television, Republican leadership, Church morals, pastel clothing, casual Fridays, and cubicle decorations inspired by syndicated cartoons.  It's a weird new world for me.

Apparently, I'm a weird new world for them, too.  When we pulled into the parking lot of Chili's for lunch, I casually mentioned it was my first time to go there.  "You mean to this one?"  they asked me.  "No, to any Chili's.  I've never been," I admitted, not too shockingly, I thought. 

Their mouths dropped open.  "I can't imagine that! You live in such a weird world!"  said one.  "It's like that thing they said once on Seinfeld, it's like you live in Bizarro-world!"  gasped another.  They were serious.

I don't even want to tell them I don't own a television, or that I don't like meat.  I don't think they're ready yet.  They're still getting used to my Chuck Taylors.

Lunchtime conversation began, and I was quickly left behind.  It seems "Our" sports team had just won something or other, and then there was something something  about divisions I think, and I wanted to interrupt and ask what sport they were talking about, did they mean football?  but I couldn't, I didn't want them to realize yet just how much I don't fit in.  I felt like I was in Bizarro-World too.

And then the talk turned to politics.  I immediately felt nervous, like the lone monkey who'd snuck into a Creationist meeting, when they surprised me.    Every single one of them was angry at the government, regarding the current situation in New Orleans.  They were shocked by the ineptitude of FEMA, they were horrified at the degree of mishandling of resources, and they were furious at the way so many thousands of people were failed, and so spectacularly.  Not one of these people, my family-values-saluting, pro-Bush-voting, gay-marriage-fearing, American-flag-on-their-cubicle-wall-hanging co-workers, was any less angry about the situation than I am.  I was overjoyed, or at the least comforted.

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On that note, Salon has an interesting article contrasting federal handling of Hurricane Frances, a hurricane in an important swing state during an election year, with that of Hurricane Katrina, a hurricane that wiped out mostly poor areas during the second term of a lame duck president.

Here's an excerpt:

...According to [Charles] Mahtesian, "The story on the ground... [during Florida's 2004 hurricanes] was FEMA's performance. By the end of September, three hurricanes later, the agency had processed 646,984 registrations for assistance with the help of phone lines operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Fifty-five shelters, 31 disaster recovery centers and six medical teams were in operation across the state."
...

[In Florida in 2004] Gov. Jeb Bush sought federal help Friday while Charley was still in the Gulf of Mexico. President Bush approved the aid about an hour after the hurricane made landfall. By Monday afternoon, the cavalry seemed to be in place."

...

...in 2004 the FEMA cavalry was roaming all over Florida, including parts almost completely untouched by the hurricanes, such as Miami-Dade County. Within weeks of Hurricane Frances hitting the Florida coast, 19,500 residents of Miami-Dade applied for disaster relief. FEMA quickly approved 9,000 of the claims and set aside $28.9 million in tax-free grants to help them rebuild.

But rebuild from what? Frances never hit Miami-Dade. Locally, top sustained winds the day the storm struck only reached 47 mph and did minimal damage to just a handful of buildings. Just 5 percent of county residents even lost power, according to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, which uncovered FEMA's unusual largess. The newspaper reported that within two days of Frances' arrival FEMA officials knew Miami-Dade had been unscathed, and yet the checks soon flowed into the county. "They were just doling out this money like it was Christmas," a spokeswoman for Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Fla., told the Sun-Sentinel. (Eventually, 14 Miami-Dade residents who received assistance were indicted on fraud charges.)

The irony was that when he took over the relief agency in 2001, Allbaugh testified before Congress that he was worried FEMA had evolved into "an oversized entitlement program." But with an election looming in 2004, there appeared to be little concern about Bush's FEMA being too generous with relief funds.

The Miami-Dade financial windfall came courtesy of President Bush who, following the request of his brother, declared the county a disaster area as the hurricane began to strike the coast. But Miami-Dade officials never even asked for disaster designation, for a very simple reason: Frances came ashore 120 miles to the north.

Contrast that with almost anyone's account of Hurricane Katrina. Even Fox News'.

Lacking a television, I didn't hear about Hurricane Katrina until a few hours ago.  One of the lasting effects of spending most of post-9/11 and the Iraqi war in a different hemisphere with spotty media and family contact, is that I still have a compulsive paranoia about being out of touch with the news.  I found out about so many important events so late and through such handed-down sources, that I still wake up every morning and login first thing to a news site -- even before I stumble to the bathroom or start the coffee, just in case something incredible happened while I was asleep.  It occurred to me that had 9/11 instead been 10/11, with the timing of my departure for Japan, I wouldn't have found out about it for weeks after the fact, and it's a shaking I still haven't gotten over.

Thankfully, I finally have a working computer again.  I've been watching this live news stream from New Orleans.

This is my new favorite site.

I just threw tomatoes at the Clear Channel, made a dog poop on the Starbucks logo, had the Michelangelo arm of God cast lightning at the 700 Club, and infested an ex's weblog with worms.  The Fox News site is strangely immune, I had hoped to set the "Text Sucker" after it.  I can't make up my mind what to do yet with Walmart.

Cindy Sheehan humbles me.  She has given people hope, focus, a leader, an example, and a forum.  I've spouted angry bits of monologue at like-minded friends, but done nothing. 

I've also lost nothing in this war, not like she has.  Sure, I've lost a civil freedom or two or ten (who's counting anymore?), I've lost trust in government and media, I've lost incalculable hope and pride in my country, I've lost face by association in the world community, and I've most likely lost all possibility of a reasonably-comfortable retirement.  But I haven't lost a son.  Or a father, sister, brother, daughter, mother, uncle, aunt, or cousin.  As far as I know, I haven't even lost any friends or well-known acquaintances in this war.  My friends are mostly too old to be sent, and too young to lose children in the war.  I feel, despite its omnipresence in media and its numerous trickle-down social and economic effects, very very distant from this war. 

Apparently, so does the President.

I've been out of the country for nearly the entire war and its antecedents.  I left for Japan barely three weeks after the World Trade Center bombings, and watched in surreal confusion and bewildered mild panic as untranslated Japanese newscasters broadcast color-coded maps of unfamiliar land masses with stylized retaliatory -- explosions?  fireworks?  cherry blossoms? --  into my hotel room.  By the time I located an English newspaper weeks later, media excitement had subsided.

On March 19, the day of the official invasion of Iraq, I again had my bags packed to leave.  I was in Texas that day, with only a few days left of my brief stateside sojourn before my second turn in Japan, a much longer one.  I had a long flight to worry about, and a new job.  The war was always something happening to my country, far away, but not to me.

When I talked to friends back home in America about the situation, they always sounded to me paranoid, fatalistic, and gloomy.  I wasn't around when they passed the Patriot Act, I never saw the armed airport guards with my own eyes, and the stories I heard about police-abused protesters in my own hometown sounded like frenzied rumors.   Sometimes I question whether it's my recent disconnection from an outside perspective and news source, or whether it's the more accurate point of view of re-immersion in American culture, but I sometimes now feel every bit of that paranoia, fatalism and gloom that used to horrify me in my acquaintances.

This past February, only a month back from Japan, I went to see the "Eyes Wide Open" exhibit that was traveling through my town.  The exhibit, touring nationally, collects and displays in a large open space one pair of boots for each American troop killed in Iraq, along with shoes and boots to represent some of the uncounted Iraqis who have also died.  When the exhibit began in January 2004, the collection included 504 pairs.  When I saw it just over a year later, they were 1,466.  It's an overwhelming number of individual memorials to see at one time, the number growing with each new city stop on tour.  I walked amongst them, realizing all those people had just died since I'd been out of the country.  But it wasn't until I stopped at one pair of boots, belonging to someone I didn't know but from my hometown and near my age, whose name was displayed on a little paper card damp with dew,  that I cried.

Cindy Sheehan is important, not just as a representative of all those who have lost children or parents or relatives or friends and who are all too close to the war, but also to all those of us who feel distant, and despite our outrage, impersonally related.  For those of us against the war, the idea of fighting such a large and broad opposition, or of supporting a growing but still-faceless movement is overwhelming. It is understandably beyond the ability and scope of most people to deal with, just as is the death and grief of thousands of unknown troops and civilians.  It is often easier to cry over the death of a single person whose name is known to you, even a stranger,  than it is to come to terms with the loss of countless ungraspable masses.  It is also easier to rally behind the cause and biography of one single brave person than it is to organize against the unknown bounds of a vague and disagreed-upon enemy, no matter how strong the fervor.  That is why Cindy Sheehan is so important.

The President is also dealing with this war in only vague, impersonal terms.  He gets the latest fatality reports, but his own daughters are safe at home.  It is certainly easier to make executive decisions from that distant standpoint, but it also gives him an dangerously unrealistic perspective.  He lives in a world isolated by statistics and field surveys and counsel, but he can't know what the war really is until he is at the least willing to put himself within touching-distance of a dead troop's boots.  He could start with Casey Sheehan's, or with his mother, but he won't. 

Many U.S. schools finished their school years this week, releasing their young back into the wild, to feed off what information they might find there.  If any of those young happened to check the Internet news, they may have found confusing guidance.

MSN.com this week features an article about today's prom-goers and their increasingly Hollywood tastes.    A featured website offers custom-made dresses starting at $489;  teenage designers can submit their own ideas online in the form of jpgs, generally stills taken from Oscar nights, designer ads, and music videos. 

One 17-year old girl commissioned to the website her dream dress, taken from a Gwen Stefani video.  The dress cost her parents $600, but why not, it was her senior prom.

“Once I put it on, I thought it just looked great on me,” David said. Her father might have objected to the price tag at first, but she says, “He said I looked beautiful. I know he liked it.”

And here is the moral of story #1:  if you cry enough tears, your financially-strapped loved ones are bound to find a way to give you what you want, if they really really love you.  (Where there's a squall, there's a way. ) Because, ladies, in the end, all that really matters is that men find you beautiful. 

Personally, I like this story better, from CNN:

A pregnant student who was banned from graduation at her Roman Catholic high school announced her own name and walked across the stage anyway at the close of the program.

...

Cosby was told in March that she could no longer attend school because of safety concerns, and her name was not listed in the graduation program.

An interesting side note:

The father of Cosby's child, also a senior at the school, was allowed to participate in graduation.

The moral of story #2: if you're going to get pregnant in high school, and graduate anyway in spite of the overwhelming odds, do your best to ensure that you're the male half of the couple.

I have a new hero.

From CNN.com:

Many a visitor to New York's Museum of Modern Art has probably thought, "I could do that."

A British graffiti artist who goes by the name "Banksy" went one step further, by smuggling in his own picture of a soup can and hanging it on a wall, where it stayed for more than three days earlier this month before anybody noticed.

The prank was part of a coordinated plan to infiltrate four of New York's top museums on a single day.

...

"My sister inspired me to do it. She was throwing away loads of my pictures one day and I asked her why. She said 'It's not like they're going to be hanging in the Louvre."'

He took that as a challenge. "I thought why wait until I'm dead," he said.

Read the rest of the story here. See more about the artist, "Banksy," including pictures of his smuggled art, here.