The Other Gulf

[submitted to Folio Weekly as a backpage op-ed piece]

This wasn’t like the tsunami. These were Americans… and not just any Americans. Southerners. They spoke my tongue in my vernacular on streets that I have walked in and loved with complete surrender. This wasn’t like September 11th. We saw this coming. It was sick torture as the hurricane gained unprecedented strength, aimed squarely for the Big Easy. Then landfall. Then the blackout as the storm rolled over.

Lights on. It’s Monday afternoon and the storm chaser’s videos pour in, so do the stories. Gulfport is leveled. Biloxi casinos have moved inland. New Orleans took a battering, but the “worst-case scenario” we were talking about over the weekend didn’t happen. They eye had passed just west of Apocalypse. Another potential catastrophe averted

Monday evening we hear strange rumors that a levee broke and some water entering certain neighborhoods. Tuesday I have my high school classes talk to two amateur storm chaser friends of mine who went through the storm in Gulfport. The Worst Case never happened, so it’s fair game to portray hurricanes being as fun as they are dangerous. I share with them videos I took from inside the eyewall of Frances last year.

After that is some sick and slow blur of a self-inflected torture through my television. A wound opened and exposed to endless hours of cable news and obsessively checking the news online while at work. The images and sounds blur together into a single memory: the angry dreadlocked man at the convention center staring into the lens with his voodoo stare before leading the hungry and sweaty mob behind him into a coordinated cry for help; Coast Guard helicopters dropping rescue divers on roofs, tearing holes into them with axes before pulling people out; the front page papers showing a chemical slicked lake with rooftop Lilly-pads spread out in front of a crippled downtown island ahead; the grandmother quietly pushed into a corner of the Superdome with a blanket gently laid upon her decomposing body; behind her, another body; and above all, the underlying horror in the voices of those there. You could hear it in both the survivors and news anchors, you could hear it in Anderson Cooper as he choked up and attacked Senator Mary Landrieu for “patting politicians on the back” after he had watched rats eating a corpse all night because there was no means of disposing of Katrina’s victims.

You could hear it in the voice of a husband as he described his home splitting in half as the water came, then his wife slipping out of his hands as she told him to take care of the kids. “I don’t know what I’m going to do… I don’t have anywhere to go. I’m lost,” were his last words as the camera panned him walking off into the dismal abyss of Biloxi.

On Thursday the horror deepened as I heard in the voice of another CNN anchor asked Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael Brown about the deteriorating situation at the Convention Center. On air, he responded that “we learned about that [today], so I have directed that we have all available resources to get that convention center to make sure that they have the food and water and medical care that they need.” This was the same FEMA director that didn’t ask for military help until Tuesday evening. This is the same FEMA director whose pre-government career was in Arabian horse breeding. He somehow managed to get fired him from that job and hired into FEMA.

Horror turns to anger. We hear that National Guard troops were playing cards as New Orleans reverted to some sick Hobbesian nightmare. Upwards of half of New Orleans fire department and police department have not reported for duty. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, may he run for President one day, is on the television speaking the words right out of all of our minds, “Don’t tell me 40,000 troops are on the way! They’re not here! Get off your asses and do something and let’s fix the biggest goddamn crises in U.S. history!”

Insulated 3,000 feet above the carnage was the detached horror of our Commander and Chief as he asked his pilot to fly low so he could take a peek at the anarchy below. When he finally got back to D.C., his words of wisdom were to buy only as much gas as is needed. Though perhaps it’s to be understood he hasn’t had to fill his own tank in at least five years, perhaps an advisor should have informed him what $3 a gallon feels like to most America. Perhaps the full effect of the tripling of gas prices during his blood-soaked tenure isn’t quite clear to him yet. We’re not buying any more gas than is absolutely necessary.

Could Bush have tried harder to séance Nero as he strummed his guitar during a photo op in San Diego as the storm came ashore? Perhaps his round of golf Wednesday, closing out a five-week vacation, was an outdoor emergency cabinet meeting? Could his approval of the handling of the response be anymore disconnected from reality when he told the FEMA director, “"Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job," as he toured Biloxi.

As the skies clear and the waters recede, the focus is sharpening. Despite calls for restraint, it’s time for blame. We knew Saturday that this was a massive and growing storm that was heading towards the Mississippi Delta. On Sunday, I listened to an LSU professor tell the world that there was a 50/50 chance we’d be saying on Monday, “Dear God… we’ve lost a city.”

Despite the National Geographic articles and a clear disclaimer from the Corp of Engineers that the levees were only built to handle a Category 3 storm, we learn now from Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff that no plans existed to deal with the flooding. Despite Mayor Nagin’s mandatory evacuation because of flooding threats, Chertoff found the destruction "breathtaking in its surprise." None of this was surprising to any regular reader of current events.

The sheer incompetence of the relief effort will be the subject of intense national debate in coming months. Already I hear people blaming victims for staying town, ignorant of both the logistical impossibility of emptying a major city in two days and the lack of transportation available to those who were worse hit. The partisan lines are forming.

Republicans must answer for cutting funding for the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Program (SELA), which would have reinforced the levee system. The Corp of Engineers will have to answer for not pushing for long term solutions to the Mississippi River Delta, which will completely disappear by centuries end if the existing system isn't dramatically redrawn. FEMA and Pentagon must answer for not mobilizing days before the storm.

It’s time for heads to roll in Washington for all the dead bodies in 7th Ward attics. It’s time to start thinking the consequences of our decisions and think progressively about the long term problems that face our troubled nation. It’s time for an end to this goofy optimism that God will only bless America. Someone must answer for the horror.

Sex, Drugs, and Milkweed

As a deist baptized in a protestant church and separated by the Catholic Church by at least two generations, I withhold as much opinion as possible concerning the impending selection of Pope John Paul II’s successor. It’s simply not my place to interject my own theological ideas into a debate whose churches I have stepped into only as a freshman touring European with Core Abroad. My inquiries into whereabouts of the “Sunday school” rooms were in the St. Jean Cathedral in Lyon attests to the breadth of my native ignorance of the Mother Churches ways.

Though my knowledge of Vatican II and Canon Law are as profound as my understanding of a woman’s mind, I had a lot of respect for John Paul II. His moral conservatism was of a different strain than what I encounter in America. Though I disagree with his view on abortion, I respected his moral consistency that had him fight against unjust war, torture, and the death penalty just as hard with the same underlying principle that life is sacred.

The only complaint I feel comfortable in vocalizing is the churches ban on contraception. Modern alchemists have turned milkweed and poinsettia plants into one of the most cost effective birth control measures of all time, stopping both STD’s and unwanted pregnancies if used correctly. John Paul, however, issued several fatwa’s banning Catholics from using condoms. Our Malthusian population nightmare aside, one can imagine the decree this has had in Africa, Catholicism’s fastest growing demographic. Over twenty-five million sub-Saharan Africans are infected with HIV/AIDS with an infection rate of 7.5%. It is of unconscionable bad taste to exalt a single command given to a nascent human race over the entire theme of compassion that AIDS; another 2.4 million children are infected themselves. What would Jesus do?

John Paul II’s moral consistency was matched by only by his rigidity. What will taint his legacy more than the scandals amongst America clergy was this iron-willed persistence in damning Catholics who practiced birth control. Granted, God had some good words to say back in the day about fruitfulness and multiplicity. Those words were exceptionally relevant as late as 1492 when the Europeans had just found a new patch of grass to soil and the world population was still under 500 million. I just don’t know how much more fruitful God wants us to be in an age of 6 billion people. The founders of the Universal Church made a decision some two thousand years ago that even though Biblical law required circumcision, things, you know… changed. Three times as many people live on under $1 a day as lived on the planet when the Good Man himself preached in Judea. I think it’s fair to call God’s “Go Forth” campaign a complete and resounding success. We should at least put the program on pause until the polar ice caps melt and become habitable.

There is hope yet. Cardinal Tettamanzi of Milan, Vegas’s favorite to win the papacy, has been quoted as saying, "one African child sick with AIDS counts more than the entire universe." He has called on Western nations to contribute more to the fight. His economic stances are in line with international calls to de-commercialize the AIDS-drugs industry and provide zero-fee licensing for generics. It would be an amazing step forward to make a religious imperative out of treating AIDS victims, as Tettamanzi suggests. I counter that preventing the disease is even more important. The pride of the Church is at stake, especially after taking such a hard line for so long, but the next pope could slowly back off the official. He doesn’t need to recant the Church’s contraceptive policy – merely shying away from reinforcing it every chance he gets would be a tremendous help. After all, would Jesus spend more time arguing for the banishment of modern hygienic techniques or would he spend his time preaching love for all?

Terry Shaivo [unfinished]

Originally, I wanted to make this column another partisan rant about Terri Shiavo in league with everything else filling the airwaves and op-ed pages of newspapers. I wanted to point out the ethical obscenity of a political party that has no problem having Medicaid paying most of the $80,000 a year medical bills of a brain dead women but refuses to discuss the possibility of making healthcare a not-for-profit industry like every other industrialized nation has. I wanted to dwell on how sad it is to see this helpless soul caught in the first bout of 2006 campaign posturing but then I realized I would be playing right into that very game and skirting more important issues.

Despite 65% of Americans realizing that this more a political circus than a morally driven crusade, most of us are genuinely concerned over the repercussions it will have on the American political landscape. This media circus spotlight on Shaivo highlights the deepest philosophical and ethical debate of our time: what is life worth and how equally distributed is that worthwhility?

To break my view of the Shaivo circus down to its crudest and truest form, it is my contention that in a world as ours of finite resources and starvation it is not worth the time or money to sustain the breath of a woman brain-dead for 15 years. Being that she has lost sentience – the ability to comprehend her own existence - she is merely a shell of human life. She is propped like a puppet with tubes instead of strings, complete with involuntary motor reflexes reacting to stimuli that captivate the true believers who desperately want to see consciousness churn beneath her eyes

My own feelings on the Shaivo case have begged difficult questions. Does a paralyzed deaf, mute, blind and severely retarded man have the same right to live as I do? What exactly would be the cognitive cut-off point where someone begins loosing their rights? Who decides?

I don’t think the questions get any easier for the right-wingers backing Shaivo’s parents. One could vaccinate 28,500 children in impoverished nations with the $80,000 a year it takes to keep Terri Shiavo breathing. That speaks nothing of the 43 million Americans without health insurance. The pro-life movement seems concerned with life only when it appears as a glow, a waxing or waning of pre-birth and near-death. What about preserving the life we already have?

Underling this entire debate is a perforated fantasy that almost every American believes in: no human has the right to kill another human. The holes become wider after terrorist attacks and serial killings. The holes become indefinable and smaller when it comes to civilian death in war, “collateral damage,” or unhooking the elderly from breathing tubes, or terminating pregnancies.

All life is not sacred to the vast majority of us. We pick and choose our [unfinished because it was unpublished [Richard wrote an editorial on this very topic to my surprise])

In Memory of Gonzo

Though Dr. Hunter S. Thompson nauseated most, he intrigued the rest of us through his undiluted and manic caricature of the American Dream marked with a hedonistic realization of the pursuit of happiness and a self-authoritarian styled liberty of conscious few will ever acquire. Dropping ink and acid lavishly, he chronicled the excesses of American culture - Vegas, Nixon’s re-election campaign, biker gangs, etc - by living through them in a detached psychedelic haze rich in absurd details provoked largely by his own interactions. His death was but a detour of a wildly self-destructive life where he always remained firmly in command of his own downward spiral.

Social Security Reform

After I blew out the transmission in my first car (a Ford, imagine that) my father asked if it was doing anything funny before the final death throw. I told him yes, but that I just didn’t have the money to fix it and would rather suffer the drivetrain oddities than shell out cash from my anemic McPaychecks. He told me something that I’ve followed to this day: fixing problems early is hella cheaper than waiting until the entire system collapses.

Accordingly, I applaud Bush for pushing Social Security reform. Though the devils are in the details and I might not agree with him that the system is heading for guaranteed solvency in coming decades, I do believe the margins of error are too tight for comfort. I applaud him for having the political courage to reach out, touch that political third rail, and look at a problem before it blows up in our collective faces, potentially costing our generation the social safety net we are expecting.

Democrats should take a skeptical stance right now, in contrast to unflinching opposition. This is an assured method to be left out of the negotiation process. I earnestly want to believe Bush when he said he was open to any suggestion that allows for some sort of private account, does not raise payroll taxes, and is not a temporary solution. These are terms that Democrats should agree to on an ad hoc basis for the sake of coming to an acceptable compromise with a hesitant Republican majority.

Much the same as with Bush’s original tax cut proposal, his numbers are elephantine (and economically disastrous) on purpose – starting on higher ground to wage battle so that the inches ceded leave him with a result closer to his original goals. Allowing the Social Security to have its income slashed by 65% (4% of income, which will come out of the 6.2% payroll rate) would bankrupt the system as we know it. Though guaranteeing funding, albeit smaller than current payouts, for current freshman, it would nonetheless axe benefits for the non-traditional students. Already well into their careers, they have subsequently not had time to significantly pay into these accounts before costs exceed revenues in 2012 because of the accounts.

Bush purportedly has not ruled out raising the ceiling on taxable income. Currently, Social Security dishes out benefits proportional to what workers put in while they worked. In a bit of regressive-tax logic, only the first $90,000 of income is taxable – maxing out at $5580 a year. In raw numbers, that means that most liberal arts UNF graduates will be taxed 6.2% on all income, while an MBA peer making $900,000 yearly is only paying a tenth your tax rate at .62%.

Depending on Republican momentum on this issue, it is likely Democrats will have to make a “deal with the devil” to ensure the survival of America’s largest entitlement program’s. If allowing for small private accounts is necessary to eliminate the taxable income bar and make other steps necessary to ensure the programs solvency, , then that's a deal that should be made.

Iran and Such

Rumors of an impending invasion of Iran are a wild overstatement of what the administration is considering. These rumors stem from a New Yorker article written by Seymour Hersh, who broke the Abu Ghraib story, that US special operations teams were scouting Iran looking for targets for a potential air strike should negotiations with the EU to close a nuclear power plant collapse. The simple truth is that we do not have the means to occupy a nation with nearly three times the land mass and population as Iraq.

In columns I wrote nearly a year ago I supported such air strikes against Iran. I argued that nations with significant military threats and minimal means of defense have no reason to negotiate away their only deterrence, weapons of mass destruction. Negotiating away even small percentages of our overwhelmingly redundant and oftentimes obsolete array of nuclear weapons can take years to complete even when the tradeoff has been fewer nuclear weapons aimed against us. Consequently, the only way you could take care of proliferation threats is to attack them in their nascent stages, the way Israel attacked Saddam’s Osirak nuclear complex in 1981.

The reason I am more reluctant today to support such a direct attack on Iran’s nuclear facility is because Iran is much more of a position to retaliate than Iraq was in 2003 or Iran was in the same year, when the degree of the nuclear threat became more lucid. Launching a military strike on Iran would be a declaration of war which would be fought both in our own cities and in Iraq. Iran holds many of the cards in Iraq and would no doubt go out of its way to provide the weapons, cash, and intelligence to insurgents. The Shi’ite city of Basra would quickly become the next Fallujah, conveniently blocking major access to the rest of Iraq from logistical bases in Kuwait.

A bigger danger is Hezbollah, the “Party of God” that was founded by the Iranians to spread the Islamic Revolution. Deputy of State Richard Armitage has been quoted as saying that it might well be that al Qaeda is the “B-team” of terrorism and Hezbollah is the “A-team.” They were in large part responsible for America’s withdrawal from Lebanon in the 1980’s, killing 241 Marines in their barracks in 1983. The consequences would be devastating were Hezbollah deployed in America.

We must approach this delicate situation with the respect that it deserves. We must abandon our view that only America and its allies have the right to a nuclear defense, though we should act vigilantly to stop proliferation. We must realize that the more we threaten, the more likely nations will want to deter. We must also accept the danger we will be putting ourselves into should we choose to launch air strikes against Iran.

Rumors of Budget Cuts

The rumors of a possible decommissioning of the aircraft carrier U.S.S. John F. Kennedy (CV-67) have spread like a nightclub fire through Jacksonville, carrying with it fears that Mayport will go the way of NAS Cecil Field. In a deft political response, Congressman Crenshaw and Senators Martinez and Neilson are drafting legislation making it illegal for the Navy to carry any less than the current number of carriers: twelve. Though aircraft carriers are a vital part of our nation’s defense, having twelve is an arbitrary number set to insure the careers of military brass, defense contractors, and a few congressmen.

President Eisenhower warned us in the 50’s of the military-industrial complex, which is the triad of power between congressmen, the military, and defense industry giants who build the hardware. On one side of the triangle stand the generals and Pentagon brass whose careers follow the success or failure of individual weapon systems. On another side of the triad are the industries that make the weapons and reap in the profits. Finally there are the Congressmen who have jobs created in their districts through the design, production, and basing of all this hardware who often receive direct bribes in the form of campaign donations to solidify support. The obvious problem that arises is there are incentives throughout the entire process to over-order equipment and build extravagant machines with unproven technologies almost solely because of their expense.

The brass at Mayport don’t want the Kennedy retired because it will likely cost them their careers, the congressmen have to fight keep the 3000+ sailors and support staff in town, and the myriad of companies responsible for keeping the 37 year old ship in service another two decades don’t want to loose the business. But who in authority is asking the real questions. Do we need 12 aircraft carriers in an age where we have unquestionable air and naval supremacy wherever we sail? If one carrier were to go, shouldn’t it be the one that requires the largest logistical network (the Kennedy is the only aircraft carrier in US Navy that needs to be refueled at sea during extended tours, the rest are nuclear powered)?

With war comes loss. Along with the nearly 20,000 troops who have lost life or limb in Iraq, we need to start making budgets that reflect the reality of the costs of Iraq. Almost half of Congress’s discretionary spending goes to the military, so it’s the obvious first place to look for waste – and it’s everywhere. We have an anti-ballistic missile system that can’t even hit the easiest of targets and can be easily decoyed, a 90-ship nuclear attack submarine fleet that can be outfoxed by diesel sub a tenth the cost, a two decade program to make hybrid helicopter-airplane that’s met with nothing but blood and failure, and a dozen aircraft carriers built to sink a fleet that’s rusting away in Russian ports. It seems there’s plenty of room for cuts to pay appropriate salaries, buy appropriate armor for troops in field, and make the sacrifices necessary to make victory in Iraq a possibility without breaking the bank.