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AFTER THE GOLDEN AGE for 09/05/2005
Vol. 2, #175
Last week I complained while watching the first onset of Katrina that comics never gets into events like these in a significant way because it's still fighting World War II whose soldiers built up such enormous circulations for the new superhero form of the medium.
I was wrong!!
The comics have completely taken over the Katrina story. Never before in the history of the USA has such a gang of stumbling, bumbling, idiotic, inept and tragically-comic characters been able to so effectively muck up whatever real rescue attempts were possible had sane people been at the helm.
No need to begin with the fact that despite warnings that the levees might not hold, Bush personally saw to it that a substantial part of the funds for restoring the levees be eliminated from the budget.
With the Feds days late on the final disaster scene, hundreds of thousands remained helplessly unable to escape the flooded disease stricken city because despite being ordered to evacuate, no one thought of providing those left behind with the means to evacuate. Presumably, they were expected to fly out of the danger zone. Even with hundreds of school busses sitting in their garages with the keys in their ignition, only one enterprising teenager was able to think of grabbing one bus and using it to evacuate a handful of survivors from the floods.
Every kind of catastrophe from water borne diseases to shortages of gasoline, which any idiot could have foreseen, were left unconsidered. The President stumbled in late, trying to sound like the hero who pulled us through the 9/11 catastrophe. This is the same man who then launched the Katzenjammer war in Iraq where instead of being greeted with flowers by a joyous population got the US military so bogged down in a wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time for the wrong reasons, that National Guard itself was too decimated to offer much of its strength at home. And then, the President got to the show two days late, hiding out from this latest catastrophe just as he had at first hidden out when 9/11 struck.
But everybody now knows all this. Yet the stage managing goes on and the blunders double and triple, and those of us who understand the nature of water borne disease realize with horror that far worse is yet to come. Mighty America, led by the greatest collection of idiots the world has ever seen gathered in one place, led by AN ILLEGAL PRESIDENT THROUGH AN ILLEGAL ACT OF THE SUPREME COURT and against which the Denocratic contender Al Gore hadn't the guts to make a stand in spite of the fact that he had a powerful position. And now, the Troglodytes have broken through the walls, well advanced on their long planned rampage against a society meant to serve all Americans and not just the privileged, turned the nation from a democracy into an arrogant oligarchy wrapped in a religious cloak that precisely matches the religious zealotry of the worst of Islam for an endless war about whose divine system of punishment and reward shall rule the globe. And meantime, the punishments are being meted out on both sides to the weak and ineffectual.
Is there a way out? Is there a possible political solution? I don't see it in today's democratic party, even with Howard Dean somewhere still out there, but this time, he's not making noises. A complete route?
Somehow, we've got to take this country back. We've got to start all over from the grass roots, from the real democrats instead of the comedians now in charge. At the moment, I see little light anywhere in this bleak tunnel. But I keep hoping there's something brewing out there that will prove me wrong. Hey, maybe Bush'll make his Star Wars dream work. Won't that be something. We can use it to bomb the hell out of those coming water borne diseases, if only we can get them to fly.
--Alvin
<< 08/29/2005 | 09/05/2005 | 09/12/2005 >>
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