Katrina: still an agenda club

---by Micheal

At this one year anniversary of hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans, it is apparently still in vogue to use Katrina to push personal/political agenda.

On Monday, commentator/author Marcellus Andrews said, "Katrina's destruction of New Orleans is a symbol of our greatest collective sin. Our society ties the right to survival, even down to surviving a natural disaster, to the size of one's wallet. In the old New Orleans, people with money lived on high ground, while poor people lived way below sea-level. When the flood waters came, poor people drowned. They didn't have enough money to leave town."

Andrews is obviously angry that poor people died, but his socio-economic agenda just doesn't fit Katrina. There are many reasons people chose to live in New Orleans. Lack of money is not all there was to it.

No doubt Andrews favors programs to boost lower strata incomes, redistribute wealth so that the "poor" have enough money to do whatever rich people do. Equal wealth, however, would not necessarily have saved lowland dwelling people.

Andrews argues that public safety projects should equally protect the public. They cannot, however. Every design project has to strike a balance between strength vs cost. The public safety decision makers in New Orleans drew that balance line at Cat4. Up until Katrnia, a Cat5 hurricane, their design/cost decisions were right.

When a publicly funded levee fails, the low land will be flooded. Water doesn't care about wallets or a lack thereof, it just follows elevation.

In New Orleans, much of the land is below sea level. Only a fraction of higher ground remains. Even with equal wealth, someone would have been living in the low areas. Redistributing wealth would not raise New Orleans' lowlands. Why, does Andrews think that if everyone were wealthier, no one would live on the low ground. You really can't blame the entire US capitalist economic system for the fact that some people live in disaster-risk areas.

Andrews is beating us with Katrina to push his personal economic agenda, but it doesn't fit. We cannot buy complete safety from acts of God, even if with total wealth equality.

Red, Blue, but no red-white-and-blue

---by Micheal

America, the land of red white and blue, seems to be breaking into two separate nations, one red, one blue. I discovered yet another symptom of this change while doing some photo research for a project. I needed some images of chimpanzee faces. Among the expected wildlife shots, were many caricatures of president Bush made to look like a chimp.

The vast majority of these caricatures were simple homemade hack jobs, like copying and pasting chimp's ears onto an image of Bush, or clipping Bush's face and pasting it over a chimp's face. I'm sure each "artist" imagined he had created something unique and clever.

All those chimp-faced caricatures reminded me of some propaganda pictures from World Wars One and Two. During WWI, allied propagandists created images of German soldiers as apes, or the Kaiser as a fat chimp. In WWII, American poster artists created images of Hitler, Goering, Goebbels, etc. as chimps. There were posters of Tojo or other Japanese military officials as chimps.

The goal of those propaganda posters was to vilify an enemy, to liken him to a "lower form of life." With such images, we comforted ourselves about our intrinsic superiority over our enemies. It was okay to be insulting. They were enemies.

What does that say about America when our president is vilified as if he were a foreign enemy? Does it indicate that the Blue nationals don't regard Bush as their nation's president, but the leader of an enemy nation?

As much as I felt Bill Clinton's morals and ethics were deplorable, I cringed inside to hear Reds vilifying him as if he were the leader of a foreign nation, not the duly elected president of America. Does the office hold no respect anymore?

So there you have the symptom. We don't seem to have one president over one nation. We have, instead, the notion of a Red Nation and a Blue Nation. The leader of one, is seen as the evil occupier of the other. How long can that go on?

United we stand, divided we...

Klingons Conquer Shoe Industry

-- by Micheal

If my old tennis shoes hadn't finally fallen apart, I wouldn't have suspected about the invasion.

My old shoes had been coming apart for months, but I was in denial. If they failed, I knew I'd have to go shopping. I loathe shopping. If I have a "feminine side," as pop culture likes to say, I'm pretty sure it loathes shopping too.

"Don't I have a dental appointment?" I asked my wife. "No," she smiled. "We're going shopping." I slumped in resignation.

All I wanted was a plain pair of white sneakers. No extra colorful stripes, no logos. Granted, it had been a few years since I'd shopped for shoes, but I honestly held onto a slim hope that plain white shoes could be found. Not the case. I might as well have been looking for a left-handed monkey wrench. No simple white shoes.

I did, however, discover that the Klingons have begun their conquest of Earth. They started with the shoe industry, probably because shoe makers had the poorest security. Proof of Klingon victory is on display on the shoe stores.

In case you didn't waste your youth watching Star Trek on TV like I did, the Klingons are an over-the-top warrior race who totally dress the part. Klingon costumes always sported spikes, lumps of metal and jaggedy bits sticking out everywhere. To make Klingon shoes, NBC's wardrobe people would add a rhino horn to the toe and miscellaneous spikes elsewhere. Klingons liked pain, you see.

As I stood before the tennis shoe aisle, it was obvious to me that the Klingons had taken over. There wasn't a plain simple shoe anywhere. They all had stripes, lumps and bulges. They had more ridges than a Klingon's forehead. They had fake cylindrical thingies to resemble the underside of an "air ride" moving van or fake tubes and bulges, as if to barely conceal marvelous hi-tech machinery. All that was missing was the rhino horn.

They're shoes! For crying out loud. Rubber soled tennis shoes! They're not space ships. Do I have to buy into this fake cyborg look? Can't a guy just buy a plain simple pair of white sneakers, I shouted. The clerks just look at me suspiciously. Obviously, they've been assimilated. I whistled a nonchalant tune as I walked out of the store, pretending not to know about the invasion.

For now, duct tape is keeping the soles attached to the uppers on my old shoes. My quest for simple earthling shoes will have to resume later, when the heat dies down. The Klingons won't get ME.