Watching N'awlins Go Down With a Smart Redneck

I took M back up to school today which always leaves me a bit angst ridden. But enough of me.

New Orleans will soon be no more, according to everything I see. I guess this is the first time that the technology has existed to enable us to watch, in beautiful triple doppler and satellite, the destruction of a city. It's a strange thing. Terrible beyond belief, strange beyond imagining. I have never been to New Orleans, but, like many places, I have always wanted, meant, to go there. It's a big place in my imagination, in many peoples' imaginations: it has staked out a huge claim in our subconscious. And now, well, we wait and see. I am very glad right now that my brother hurt his shoulder on his last pass through the Caribbean evading hurricanes (my brother is a ship captain out of New Orleans, moving cargo & oil & etc around the Atlantic) and is recuperating with acupuncture at my Mom's house in south Asheville. So, what with the hurricane and the kid back in school and all, I of course went to the Westville with A.

We saw R, which was no surprise, since he is there a lot, and he was sitting with this guy with a big hat on. I thought at first that big hat guy was going to be a drag, because I saw the hat, the Nascar T-shirt, and heard the straight outta Madison County accent, but it turned out that big hat guy was really smart, and funny, and sweet. Big hat guy and A & me & R, who turns out to be more scarily Republican than I thought (figures, R is pretty much the only one of my friends who has any kind of money) got into this intense 3 hour conversation about global warming and weather and then, politics. Serious politics, which makes me stammer and shake, but on which I nevertheless have strong and intensely intelligent comments. Yes. They are very intelligent. Uh huh. At any rate, they're the ones where I talk non-knowledgeably about plutocracies, wax furious about Dubya, and explain the reality of socialism (it's a good thing) to whoever is listening. All 1/2 of them.

R started saying that Dubya had said that he now believed in global warming, which is bullshit. Then he said that Dubya had sent 1000 ships to the Antarctic to dump steel shavings which would produce an algae bloom which would combat global warming. That is some serious insane bullshit. Big hat boy immediately responded with Dubya scuttling the Clean Air Initiative, and I started talking about mercury levels, and how the krill in the Antarctic, which feed all the sea life, are not going to be helped by steel shavings, if in fact that is actually happening, which I doubt. I called my brother, who is up on weird science and all shipping movements, and he knew nothing about it except that he'd heard odd rumours of the government harvesting plankton off the Marshall Islands. Which is the kind of cryptic answer you tend to get from my brother. The conversation launched and moved from there, into what Dubya and his cronies do for the working people - nothing - and the destruction of the middle class in American - ongoing - and so on. It was good. And nice to be surprised and smack myself in the head for stereotyping, generalizing, and generally being an ign'rnt fool.

It's raining now and if Katrina comes on up here we will probably flood again. My friend C called from Baltimore with scuttlebutt and evil gossip and the news that she has bears in her Colorado backyard: all good. Well maybe not the bears.

Stupidity aside, thoughts and prayers, such as they are, for the Big Easy tonight.