september eleventh
That sounds familiar. Is it the anniversary of something? If only I could remember...Of course! It's my mother in law's birthday! Happy birthday, Sue! How you remain twenty-nine year after year is both a bafflement and a cause for celebration!
Shifting gears, I recommend this post about someone else who is normally associated with today's date, a Saudi Arabian terrorist named Osama Bin Laden. It's called
Lost at Tora Bora.
Also, coming out in next month's Harper's is this article: the uses of disaster, in which we read about the disaster of our government. I read it yesterday. It's ok.
I work with a guy... let me back up.
Yesterday on the radio as I was working among the shelves in a Harvey-Pekar-type capacity, the radio was on NPR and a woman was being interviewed. I don't know her name, but she was the director of FEMA from its inception during the Carter administration for twenty years and change. She came on and said, very nearly, "The federal response to the hurricane Katrina disaster is the worst response we have ever had." Not too hard to understand. At this point some guy I work with walks by and grumbles something about the liberal media, and how they're only representing one side of the story as usual.
Ok, guys, every story doesn't have two sides. There's such a thing as the facts, and these facts support that the federal response sucked like a remora, a mosquito, a vampire bat, and a black hole rolled up into a vacuum cleaner. It sucked the chrome off a trailer hitch, it sucked light past the even horizon, sucked so bad it altered the fabric of space time, and it sucked more than all the hookers in Times Square. Just for shits and giggles, let's try to imagine how the "other" side would sound:
"The federal response was good! We got in there right away and took care of business like Bachmann Turner Overdrive! The people got helped, and the government was there just like we promised! It's going to take more than a stupid Russian Hurricane to put a dent in our awesome disaster relief infrastructure, which is as strong as a lev-- I mean, as strong as the rock of Gib-- I mean, as strong as our good old American resolve!" Would that have made my coworker happy?
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