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Col. Terry Ebbert, director of homeland security for New Orleans, after reporting that armed thugs now control the city and are raping and assaulting stranded tourists and other survivors, looting and hijacking vehicles, said
the whole recovery operation had been carried on the backs of the little guys for four goddamn days. The rest of the goddamn nation can�t get us any resources for security. ...We are like little birds with our mouths open and you don�t have to be very smart to know where to drop the worm. It�s criminal within the confines of the United States that within one hour of the hurricane they weren�t force-feeding us. It�s like FEMA has never been to a hurricane.�New York TimesThe whole coastal area of the state has been destroyed, virtually destroyed. It was quiet. It was eerie. It was horrible to behold.�Sen. Thad Cochran (R-MS)
I�ll say it again�and BTW Sen. Cochran's choice of word �behold� definitely indicates that he grew up hearing the King James version of the Bible read aloud�I just LOVE how southerners put words together....
Stan Goodenough, a website columnist, described Katrina as "the fist of God" in his Monday column.
What America is about to experience is the lifting of God's hand of protection; the implementation of His judgment on the nation most responsible for endangering the land and people of Israel. The Bible talks about Him shaking His fist over bodies of water, and striking them.�Deborah Caldwell, �Did God Send the Hurricane?� BELIEFNET 9.1.2005)
On Sunday, Bridgett Magee of Slidell, LA, told the Christian website Jerusalem Newswire that she saw the hurricane "as a direct 'coming back on us' [for] what we did to Israel: a home for a home." �Deborah Caldwell, �Did God Send the Hurricane?� BELIEFNET 9.1.2005)
Interestingly, the embattled (finally) White House is referring to the Hurricane and flooding as �a catastrophe of biblical proportions too.�
And here�s a nice spin on the expected specious reasoning:
God brought the hurricane to punish America for its homophobia and for not burning Pat Robertson at the stake.�SSEGALLMD (ALTERNET)It was not enough for the president to bank his plan and look at the window and say "O, what a devastating site." Instead of looking out the window of an airplane, he should have been on the ground giving the people devastated by this hurricane hope.�Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg, (D-NJ), s, as quoted in the New York Times
I thought I couldn�t possibly be the only one who had noticed that, for days now, we have been inundated with discomforting noblesse oblige images of white people rescuing black people from the flooded waters. Well today the New York Times reports
there has been a growing sense that race and class are the unspoken markers of who got out and who got stuck. Just as in developing countries where the failures of rural development policies become glaringly clear at times of natural disasters like floods or drought, many national leaders said, some of the United States� poorest cities have been left vulnerable by federal policies.In New Orleans, the disaster�s impact underscores the intersection of race and class in a city where fully two-thirds of its residents are black and more than a quarter of the city lives in poverty. In the Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood, which was inundated by the floodwaters, more than 98 percent of the residents are black and more than a third live in poverty.�(NYT
No one would have checked on a lot of the black people in these parishes while the sun shined. So am I surprised that no one has come to help us now? No.��Mayor Milton D. Tutwiler (Winstonville, MS)
"I assume the president is going to say he got bad intelligence," said Charles B Rangel (D-NY), who noted that the danger to the levees was clear:
Wherever you see poverty, whether it�s in the white rural community or the black urban community, you see that the resources have been sucked up into the war and tax cuts for the rich.
Professor Mark Maison asks:
Is this what the pioneers of the civil rights movement fought to achieve, a society where many black people are as trapped and isolated by their poverty as they were by segregation laws?
If Sept. 11 showed the power of a nation united in response to a devastating attack, Hurricane Katrina reveals the fault lines of a region and a nation, rent by profound social divisions.
And Charles Steele Jr,, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, said
Most of the people that live in the neighborhoods that were most vulnerable are black and poor, so it comes down to a lack of sensitivity on the part of people in Washington that you need to help poor folks. It�s as simple as that.
Meanwhile, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice is really enjoying the US Open and those Broadway shows.
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One cool story I came across said that citizens are paddling their canoes down to New Orleans in throngs and going building to building to rescue people We're talking a volunteer citizen navy with its own flotilla, people. Americans are so cool sometimes.
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So yesterday an NPR reporter contacted me because she was doing a poetry show last night and came across a photo of my brother in his Walt Whitman T-shirt that I posted on my Flickr blog. My caption includes some stuff I wrote about Whitman and then she asked me for more commentary for her show: Why Whitman? What�s his appeal to me, to my brother, that kind of stuff. And then she quoted me on the show. Too cool.
Meanwhile, check out christianexodus.org if you want to see a website created by real Christianist wackos who want to �reestablish a constitutionally limited government founded upon Christian values� by relocating 2,500 families to two South Cackylacky counties�I guess �cause my home state is not filled with ENOUGH Christianist wackos already!!�and so gain the electoral majority needed to put their officials in every public office. Yep, they want to build a little stealth intentional Christianist community around the people who already live there so that they can dictate how they can live their lives.
Here�s their spiel:
ChristianExodus.org is coordinating the move of thousands of Christians to South Carolina for the express purpose of re-establishing Godly, constitutional government. It is evident that the US Constitution has been abandoned under our current federal system, and the efforts of Christian activism to restore our Godly republic have proven futile over the past three decades. The time has come for Christians to withdraw our consent from the current federal government and re-introduce the Christian principles once so predominant in America to a sovereign State like SC.
Notice their use of the past three decades. The Religious Right�s moral lapses include spousal and child abuse laws put into place in the last three decades (because Gawd, in their eyes, gave men absolute dominion over their families and the government has no right to interfere when, say, an abused woman is sick of the abuse and wants to leave).
Federal laws granting equal rights to African Americans also fall into this three-decade category.
Randall Terry uses incredible specious reasoning like this three-decade spiel:
Look what we�ve seen since the second wave of feminism�more violent crime, more child abuse, more divorces, sexual immorality....
but what he fails to mention is that the second wave of feminism helped outlaw domestic violence and encouraged women to leave violent relationships. There is more violent crime now because men who beat their wives and children are more likely to be charged for their violent crimes now. Factor that in, and violent crime is actually lower than it was in the 1950s.
It�s just all over the television screen now and Fox News et al. sensationalizes every story so we perceive of our landscapes as overrun by violence.
I hope that my South Cackylacky experiences are biased and that everyone isn�t as rabidly fundamentalist as I remember, but I worry that the exodus group won�t encounter much resistance in the sunny Palmetto State. Still, I think about all the queers I know who are stubborn and decided to stay there....
The area they want to resettle is near Greensville, near Bob Jones University. (Remember the flap that ensued when Bush visited that Christianist university, with its strict no interracial dating policy? Dunno if it�s still true but, when I lived in that Gawdforsaken state, I was told that the university had separate pink and blue sidewalks because male and female students had to maintain a huge, chaperoned separation between each other. And I can say with certainty that a chain-link fence with razor-wire traps students on the grounds�perhaps because so many are there because their parents forced them to be.
(Which at least gives me hope.)
Women have to wear knee-length or longer dresses; men, cannot wear dresses at all, natch, nor can their hair touch their collars. Or course, few men these days are interested in looking like Neil Young or his cinnamon girl anyway.
I can�t help but think about these two gay men in Greensville who have a humongous Christmas in July party every year. I�m talking a thousand queers decorating trees, folks. Fucking huge event. Will they be forced out? Ostracized? Outlawed? Lynched?
This may surprise people, but part of me thinks this squatting approach is just democracy in action. Sure, I don�t want to abide by laws I don�t believe in, have done my time at protests and civil disobediences, and will continue to fight for equal rights for ALL citizens, not just mainstream ones. And I don�t feel that I shove my ideas down everyone else�s throat generally (although I do on this blog). And I certainly don�t try to infiltrate anything, Instead, I am perfectly willing to be forthright (and am more than a little suspicious of people whose modus operandi is stealth invasions).
Maybe concentrating superstitions in a few parts of the country will free the rest of us up to just move on with our lives, island-hoppin� style (a la Dan Savage again).
Saw this commetary on the web:
These groups are clever. They are going beyond the "intentional community" model that we�ve seen to date. It is difficult to create an intentional community trying to live with a common set of moral values if your values are not reflected in the laws you must abide by.
I�d like to believe that ... only I grew up on the fringe in a largely uniform place and it was friggin� hard. There were few freethinkers there and many, many people intent on sledgehammering me and everyone else into the particular shape they found acceptable.
They�re not fringe and the Bill of Rights is actually under threat because the are so goddamn well organized and willing to pretend to be something they�re not in order to achieve their ends. So Nazilike. So dishonest.
They South Carolina squatters group got its idea from the Free State Project, which started in 2001. The Project currently has 6,600 committed participants who are ready to move or have already moved to New Hampshire. (Their goal is 20,000 people.) It�s a simple concept: Find a state, move there en masse, and set up a government that�s run the way you always thought it should be, passing laws that explicitly reflect your values.
They�ll gain the electoral majority they need to put dozens of officials into every local office from the city council to the school board and expand from there.
Also from the Web:
Christian Exodus believes the federal government has extended its reach way too far into the lives of Americans, and has far exceeded the powers reserved for it by the Constitution. They also share many of the Christian right�s viewpoints on hot-button issues (they�re against gay marriage and legalized abortion, they think kids should be able to say Christian prayers in school, and that the Ten Commandments should be displayed prominently in courthouses). But they don�t consider themselves part of the Christian right. They�re anti-war and anti-Bush, and founder Cory Burnell went so far as to describe President Bush as �that big-government liberal.
Here�s their splash page:
WELCOME TO THE CHRISTIAN EXODUSChristianExodus.org is coordinating the move of thousands of Christians to South Carolina for the express purpose of re-establishing Godly, constitutional government. It is evident that the U.S. Constitution has been abandoned under our current federal system, and the efforts of Christian activism to restore our Godly republic have proven futile over the past three decades. The time has come for Christians to withdraw our consent from the current federal government and re-introduce the Christian principles once so predominant in America to a sovereign State like South Carolina.
THE PROBLEM
Christians have actively tried to return the United States to their moral foundations for more than 30 years. We now have a "Christian" president, a "Christian" attorney general, and a Republican Congress and Supreme Court. Yet consider this:
� Abortion continues against the wishes of many States
� Sodomite marriage is now legal in Massachusetts (and coming soon to a neighborhood near you)
� Children who pray in public schools are subject to prosecution
� Our schools continue to teach the discredited theory of Darwinian evolution
� The Bible is still not welcome in schools except under unconstitutional FEDERAL guidelines
� The 10 Commandments remain banned from public display
� Sodomy is now legal AND celebrated as "diversity" rather than condemned as perversion
� Preaching Christianity will soon be outlawed as "hate speech"
Attempts at reform have proven futile. Future elections will not stop the above atrocities, but rather will exacerbate them and lead us down an even more deadly path.
THE SOLUTION
So what can be done? ChristianExodus.org offers the opportunity to try a strategy not et employed by Bible-believing Christians. Rather than spend resources in continued efforts to redirect the entire nation, we will redeem States one at a time. Millions of Christian conservatives are geographically spread out and diluted at the national level. Therefore, we must concentrate our numbers in a geographical region with a sovereign government we can control through the electoral process.
ChristianExodus.org is orchestrating the move of thousands of Christians to reacquire our Constitutional rights and, if necessary to attain these rights, dissolve our State's bond with the union. Click on our Plan of Action page to find out how we can experience God-honoring governance once again.
If you are tired of government-endorsed sin, then stand up and be counted! Register a user account to join the discussion forum, and submit a membership form to join the movement.
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All right. It�s 12:20 and I need to leave in 10 minutes. Never even made it through my e-mails this morning, but need to go get my oil changed so I can be in the mountains by 4:30. Wonder if I�ll find the gas to return Tuesday AM?
Happy long weekend, y�all.
BEST OF SPAM SUBJECT LINE: Wanna Have Harder E-rection? 90VX
12:21 p.m. - 2005-09-02
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