The horrors visited upon a now rapidly disintegrating Gulf state population continue to get unimaginably worse. Everyone by now knows that deep within the bowels of this tragedy lies America’s hellish future. The elderly, the poor, our workers of color, those whose only offense is that of suffering a frightful penury and powerlessness only throws into sharper relief the crimes of those who purport to rule in their name
The behavior of our national politicians and their local imitators has shocked even the most bucolic observer. Andersen Cooper of CNN just a few moments ago came close to decisively God-Damning the indifference of Senator Mary Landrieu as she offered yet another of her facile platitudes (she was “praising” the “response” [sic] of the Bush administration of all things). This while the corpses of her constituents were providing nourishment for New Orlean’s hungry rats. The city’s mayor, whose infamous decision last evening to abandon the search for the missing in order to protect the property of gouging convenience store owners whose depredations upon communities of color have been on a scale comparable to that of Katrina’s, is now nowhere to be found. He will no doubt turn up soon, one way or the other.
The national leaders of both parties have been complicitly silent. The mass deaths of many thousands of the penurious and unemployed is to them a dream come true, a sort of nightmare (for most of us) subsidiary of the Yuppie Capitalism inaugarated with Jimmy Carter and then cruelly perfected under every other Western Head of State since then. “When are you going to die and get out of the way?” Richard Lamm, the Democrat governor of Colorado asked the question in 1979 of the nation’s elderly and poor, a rare moment of candor for a politician. Back then, amid the squeamishness and ennui of Carter’s America, the Governor was forced to quickly apologize.
Lamm’s modern colleagues wouldn’t have bothered. To them, there are the people who count and those — the vast majority — who do not. And those who do not show up sooner or later on our tv screens amid the filth and stench and death of SuperDomes and football stadiums and Abu Ghraibs. Here and everywhere.
But, could our modern “prisoners of starvation” after all have the last word? There is a growing, palpable anger among a people who refuse to cooperate with Bush’s America and just die off quietly. For the moment, they have nowhere –that is, the Democrats– to turn. They will mill about angrily for awhile, the most entrerprising among them parlaying the people’s misery into various federal grants and pork projects. But the mass of people will get nothing.
But, America now is not the America of 1965 Watts, or Detroit in ’67 or even Rodney King’s Los Angeles circa 1992. Things have changed and continue to do so. Victims of corrupted power can only be drilled into a sullen acquiescence for so long.
I believe that this is, as they say, “It”. Or, at least the beginnings of “It”.
Stay tuned.
In the meantime, my fellow carpenters in Louisianna have set up a relief fund for the destitute and destroyed in their ranks. If you will, please get in touch with them at Louisianna Carpenters Katrina Relief Fund at 8875 Greenwell Springs Road, Suite A, Baton Rouge Lousianna 70814 In any case, do what you can.