Wrong city, RUR.

You could always do this.

This is getting linked everywhere but in case you haven't seen it: Two out-of-town paramedics' recount their experiences in New Orleans during and after Katrina.

Here with comments.
The original at the Socialist Worker plus a letter from the authors.

What I find amusing is that according to google (print screen) a number of sites linked to this and then apparently dropped it just as quickly when they spotted the Socialist Worker connection, including Craigslist and the US Embassy in Moscow.

Some interesting thoughts on the previous pages.

I was down in the Astrodome today helping people out, and the dynamics involved are simply hard to fathom. A lot of things were done to cause situations for which the solutions are difficult to arrive at. Who is to blame?

Who cares? The government will pretend to sort all that shit out, come to conclusions no one will be satisfied with, and it won't change the reality one damn bit. The beauracratic nonsense is still getting in the way. FEMA is handing out one way tickets, and we are having to figure out how to get mothers to children to husbands in 3 different states reunited so that they can all go and find a new life in a new home. Now multiply this by a hundred thousand...

I spent most of the day thinking on how it was to be helping and not be the one needing help. Wondering, as I helped someone carry the last of their worldy possessions up out of the pitted arena and wind our way through the circular maze and out into the baking hot parking lot to find the driver who would take them off to some new unknown, what would I have packed in my two plastic garbage bags? How would I handle it when days had passed and the search engines for my loved ones names still came up empty? On my way home I wondered where would I want to go if I had nothing left to go back to?

I get this strange sense that some people think helping might be bad in some way. If you have enough time on your hands to come up with convoluted scenarios in which your efforts will be squandered away by evil greedy vampires, you should also have plenty of time to think of ways to make sure your aid is effective before you give it out. Use your time wisely.

Good on you, dragon.

It just me, or does Bushy boys seem to be away on "long vacations" an awful lot?

Well done ED.

quote:

It just me, or does Bushy boys seem to be away on "long vacations" an awful lot?

It's not just you.

An infamous Washington Post article:

quote:

The August getaway is Bush's 49th trip to his cherished ranch since taking office and the 319th day that Bush has spent, entirely or partially, in Crawford -- nearly 20 percent of his presidency to date, according to Mark Knoller, a CBS Radio reporter known for keeping better records of the president's travel than the White House itself. Weekends and holidays at Camp David or at his parents' compound in Kennebunkport, Maine, bump up the proportion of Bush's time away from Washington even further.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/20...005080201703_pf.html

Perhaps he's our first Foucauldian President: Intent on doing nothing, in order to avoid a hypocritical act.

Pauline wrote Wrong city, RUR.
Wrong planet, too.

Good karma be on you, electric dragon. People tend to blot out pain and suffering, eventually, but they never seem to forget kindness.

You are not wasting your time. Trust me.

Correct planet:

I hate every ape I see/From chimpan-A to chimpan-Z/No, you'll never make a monkey out of me./Alas, I was wrong/it was Earth all along/Guess you finally made a monkey out of me.

What I meant was that I'm in the wrong planet!!
Help!!!!!!!!

"The only danger is if they send us to that terrible Planet of the Apes. Wait a minute... Statue of Liberty... that was our planet! You maniacs! You blew it up! Damn you! Damn you all to hell!"

quote:

Originally posted by Pauline:
Correct planet:

I hate every ape I see/From chimpan-A to chimpan-Z/No, you'll never make a monkey out of me./Alas, I was wrong/it was Earth all along/Guess you finally made a monkey out of me.

"Yes, we finally made a monkey..."

At least Bush is visiting New Orleans now.

Ask and ye shall receive, Splitcoil. The following was written for Suddeutsche Zeitung/Radio Bavaria. Yours in event-induced alopecia, JW.


As I write this, the disaster in New Orleans has been unfolding for nearly two weeks. The latest polls show that 38 percent of the American public believe the President has done a great job responding to the disaster. This correlates nicely with simultaneous poll results noting that the President's approval rating nationwide now stands at 39 percent -- the same as President Nixon's, in the midst of Watergate.

Considering the results of last year's election, I'm not surprised that a large percentage of my countryfolk -- including some of the media, still -- continue to be as willfully blind as their leaders. This large percentage sees the same images on television as the rest of the world, but interprets them far differently.

They look at black children on cots in the Astrodome and see the future looters of America. They look at the Gulf Region’s tens of thousands of dispossessed lining up to receive the help that sometimes arrives, and sometimes doesn’t, and see an army of beggars looking for a handout. They look at the bodies of the elderly left in their wheelchairs to rot in the sun, and see people who, as a California radio talk show host put it, “didn’t have the common sense to get out of the way of a hurricane.” They, like a number of our right-wing thinkers this past week, look at estimates that the death toll may, mercifully, not be as high as was feared and say baldfaced that we shouldn’t consider this much of a tragedy, after all.


And they look at the President and see a good person, a fine, caring fellow, just like themselves, who has the best of intentions but is simply unable to do everything he would really like to do, if only he could -- thanks to state and local officials, or bureaucrats, or Clinton, or the victims themselves, so selfishly unwilling to put the nation’s interest ahead of their own by remaining alive. “If only the Tsar knew,” as they used to say, in Russia.


Ah, this large percentage of my countryfolk, good people all. The good people who have spent the past four years telling all who disagree with them to shut up. The good people happy to believe Guantanomo is only a little worse than a summer camp, and who saw Abu Ghraib as a place where unappreciative Iraqis could be more directly shown the care and concern our government has to offer. The good people who stopped at the inspection desks set up this past July in the New York City subway, following the London bombings, happy to open their bags and purses without being asked to prove to the police that they haven’t done anything wrong, that they’re good people -- good people who would be only too happy to point out who the bad people probably are.


Four years ago on September 11 the nation, desperate for reassurance, watched the President go into hiding until it was safe to emerge. When at last he reappeared, stammering out words of condolence before offering vague threats to the world at large, the American people -- the media, included -- understood they had no option but to make the best of the leadership on hand. A perfect synergy emerged: if we asked no questions, harbored no doubts, expressed no concern, and proffered no dissent, our leaders assured us they would shield us from harm. They presented themselves as utterly competent and eminently trustworthy. Sometimes they would need to not tell us things; sometimes their actions might prove puzzling; sometimes their actions would seem to make no sense at all, but were we not like the blind men, encountering the elephant? How could we mere citizens appreciate the multiform threats with which our elected leaders were dealing?


Meanwhile, Bush said, go shopping.


The good people of America accepted the administration’s actions in good faith, and welcomed every new anti-terrorist law that passed, ignoring -- perhaps never noticing -- that each law seemed far more designed to exercise control over the population supposedly being safeguarded. But good people, who never break the law, had no reason to be concerned -- only the deserving would find themselves stuffed into sleeping bags and beaten to death, or flown off to foreign countries for interrogation, or held in prison without access to lawyers forever, and even if some of those happened to be American citizens, or even innocent of any crime at all -- well, better safe than sorry. Everyone might lose a certain degree of liberty, a certain degree of freedom, but so what? It isn’t a problem selling your soul if you don’t generally use it anyway.


But as time passed a large percentage of the public -- not large enough -- came to see that our leaders were, in the guise of defending the homeland, doing anything and everything they’d always wanted to do, little of it having much to do with national security. (A smaller percentage of the news media saw this prior to the election, or if they did, chose not to mention it) Meanwhile the faith of the good people in their leader reached near-religious levels -- simply to question became heresy. And, any time the faith seemed to waver new evils emerged to scare the believers back into the ranks of the elect: anthrax, weapons of mass destruction, the media, leftists, liberals, Democrats, traitors. In our Judeo-Christian society -- the Judeo being, as always, pro forma -- Satan must be personified: how can hatred be sucessfully focused upon an abstract concept? Evil needs a face, and in lieu of Osama, John Kerry, or the fellow next door who voted for him, would do.


And today, for the true believers who remain -- and there are many -- the face of evil is the face of a now-homeless black woman sitting with her hungry children on the sidewalk of a drowned city.


It is human nature to find it hard to admit you were wrong, but harder still for a believer to see that his or her god has failed. During the past two weeks the believers, the good people, that large percentage of our nation that reelected Bush and his gang has been forced into a confrontation with unignorable facts, though many -- a declining percentage, we can hope, but we will not know for sure for weeks or months to come -- continue to try and ignore them; and some will succeed.


These are the facts: Our leaders are liars and cowards. They have no one’s interest at heart but their own. They have no idea how to protect their citizens even if they wanted to. They will be in office for three more years and act as if they believe they’ll be in power forever. They have no shame. There is so much more damage to do, and so much willingness on their part to do it. The lesson of our last election is that the United States is now capable of ruining multiple countries simultaneously and permanently, beginning with our own. And all Bush can say is go forth and shop, until you drop.

What would you suggest be done, Mr. Womack?

What have you done?

I am terrified that BushCo, who seems convinced that theirs is as important as ww2, will attempt to pull an FDR. You know, 3 terms?

What then???

I understand the anger, but what we need is a solution, and I think it's too late to find one.

We've been had, and all I see to be done is riding it out...

quote:

I am terrified that BushCo, who seems convinced that theirs is as important as ww2, will attempt to pull an FDR. You know, 3 terms?

What then???

DISOBEY

DISOBEY

DISOBEYDISOBEYDISOBEYDISOBEYDISOBEYDISOBEYDISOBEYDISOBEYDISOBEY
DISOBEYDISOBEYDISOBEYDISOBEYDISOBEYDISOBEYDISOBEYDISOBEYDISOBEY
DISOBEYDISOBEYDISOBEYDISOBEYDISOBEYDISOBEYDISOBEYDISOBEYDISOBEY
DISOBEYDISOBEYDISOBEYDISOBEYDISOBEYDISOBEYDISOBEYDISOBEYDISOBEY
DISOBEYDISOBEYDISOBEYDISOBEYDISOBEYDISOBEYDISOBEYDISOBEYDISOBEY

it's really the only option, and it outs you as an "enemy combatant."

You know, right about the time Mr. Womack posted that, I suddenly got the urge to leave work, walk to the library, and check the WGB.

quote:

Ask and ye shall receive, Splitcoil. The following was written for Suddeutsche Zeitung/Radio Bavaria. Yours in event-induced alopecia, JW.

[falls over backward, climbs back into chair]

I told you so!

I must confess that while he's probably right about most Americans' attitudes toward the dispossessed, I hadn't stopped to think about it. No one in my bubble felt that way (though I'm in a pretty strange bubble), and I avoid TV news like the plague, so I've been a bit in the dark on popular reaction to the issue.

Those in my bubble have been very involved; much of my wife's family evacuated, and some acquaintances of mine have been involved in the rescue/recovery work since the storm hit. I hope it won't be ignored. I hope the refugees won't be demonized. I hope I get off my ass and figure out a way to stay more in touch with my own country.

But then, I left the South so I wouldn't have to be in touch with those people.

quote:

Meanwhile, Bush said, go shopping.

Sharp and true...

Thank you, Jack!