I’ve been trying to write this post for two weeks now. Every time I begin I am consumed with a powerful rage that distorts my ability to communicate in a civilized fashion. Hardly what one would expect from me after close to five years of “Katrina Blogging.” Still, there it is.
Every single day my email box and Facebook accounts overflow with reports from the Gulf. First hand perspective from friends, former neighbors, fellow bloggers and engineers. None of it is good. It’s easy to sit up here and be horrified, but it’s a little bit worse for my social circle back home where it truly and honestly is a matter of breathing petrochemical fumes.
So to be honest I just don’t have it in me right now. I watch another man made disaster, another engineering failure, destroying the area my family has called home for nearly 300 years and I become completely inarticulate. So, being a native New Orleanian long before I became a Northsider I’m going to respond the way I am culturally programmed to: with satire. Very appropriate in an era when Jon Stewart is one of the most trusted newsmen out there. So here is a laugh that will make you cry. It’s all I can muster as I watch the slow motion tragedy unfold across the Gulf.
-Loki, Founder and Publisher
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
I don’t have any words Loki. I guess thats why I haven’t posted either. Just kinda of feel helpless.
:’(
oh blackwater…
that has several meanings…
Blackwater mercenaries? You mean like this excerpt from my post in December ’05, four months after Katrina and the levee failure?
“These are the guys stationed at the Jewish community center on St Charles guarding the FEMA workers. I know this is a disaster area, but I have watched one of these mercs spend 45 minutes (by my watch) standing over an elderly man and his wife with his hand on his gun trying to intimidate them. The young man could not have been more than thirty at the oldest, and sported a “macho,” demeanor and a mistaken idea that standing six inches from someone and assuming a threatening posture is the way to treat a disaster victim (or ANY US citizen for that matter). Read up on these guys, they should not be deployed stateside. Period.”
From http://humidcity.com/2005/12/05/toxic-mercenaries/
I could only watch 56 seconds.
yes blackwater.
not only are street names like halliburton common in grande isle, but blackwater? / halliburton?
my encounter at the jewish community center was me and my two landladies in their eighties… I took them up to apply for fema. pulled up to the handicapped entrance, pulled out the wheelchairs, and blackwater came up and said… “you can’t park here”. I said “handicapped”, he said
“you don’t have handicapped plates”… I unfolded the wheelchairs, ignored him, opened the doors, put Flo and Glo in their chairs, and started to wheel them in. He said, “you can’t park here”….
Miss Gloria, in her early eighties replied….”young man, get out of the way, and show some respect… I’m in a wheelchair, and your in my way.”
assholes.
oh yeah, then I drove off, came back later and picked them up. She was there, GLARING at him, he was uncomfortable… then went through the same routine.
she said again. “get out the way”
we loaded up, and drove off.
i wept through the entirety of watching this, except for one little part where i giggled but i don’t remember where and i’m not watching it again to find out. to have lived in such a time of scintillating wonders and galvanizing horrors – i do wonder what the last 200 years will look like in the history books for our grandchildren.
I only made it 37 seconds. ;-(
If you make it to the end, the song shifts focus to BPs enablers – us.
By my bistro math the oil that has creamed the coasts of the gulf & everything inside it – we would have burned through it in less than a week.
Quimbob,
The world goes through one Macondo-sized reservoir in ONE DAY.