I can't begin to tell you how draining my trip to New Orleans was last week--draining in a good but complete way. I had exactly zero inspiration to pull out the keyboard this weekend and instead whittled my hours away in my LL Bean bathrobe and slippers, playing Lego Star Wars on the XBOX 360.

And I've been thinking about what to say about New Orleans, how it's like a ghost town there. How the people living there have a little of that same spirit as former lovers still in a marriage long over where both of them are thinking of cheating if they haven't already done it.

I could tell you about the great 80s cock rock band with the black lead singer who hit the high notes in White Snake's Here I Go Again.

Or I could tell you about how I broke down in tears three times walking through the D-Day World War II museum. Once when I saw the helmet of a Marine who died from the bullet which blasted out a three inch hole in the helmet. The second time was when I saw a video of a young Japanese toddler found by Allied forces who was huddled underneath his dead parents, covered in blood and standing there with a blank look on his face like, "What's next? What hell have I been born into?" And the third time was just a welling up in the eyes as I read the document that Truman sent to authorize the dropping of the first Atomic bomb.

I could tell you about all those things in more detail but instead I'll tell you about the short walking tour I took of the upper 9th Ward, the neighborhood where my company had sent us to help build a neighborhood for local New Orleans musicians for Habitat for Humanity. My good friend and I snuck out and took a short walk which didn't stray too far because I felt those mean streets start to lick its lips at the thirty-something Midwestern cracka ass crackas and the warning bells started going off which told me to get the fuck out of there or something bad was going to happen.

But before I did, we came across this house that had the door kicked in (see photo) We walked up on the porch and looked in--there was shit everywhere. No one had come back to claim any of it, it looked like. There were hats still hanging on the wall, clothes in piles, furniture which 500 days ago was all floating under water. There was even a stuffed panda bear lying innocent on a chair like it was waiting where its small-handed owner left it for safe keeping. I wondered why the child didn't take it with them when they left (if they left!) or if they instead chose to take another toy more beloved than that poor panda.

As in so many other cases in life, it all comes down to priorities. Where are our priorities? What are our priorities in the War on Terror? To kill all Muslims who harbor negative sentiments about America? To mobilize a half-million man army who marches for war instead of for peace? And what does it mean to march for peace anyway? Isn't peace a state of rest? Marching is the antithesis of peace, is it not?

What does it say about a country who was unable to allocate and mobilize internal resources for days after the biggest natural disaster in many of our lifetimes when the country immediately to our north had Mounties down there pulling bodies out of the water to safety 48 hours after the storm hit land?

What does it say about our country when the SPCA Human Society tagged a majority of stray animals in New Orleans and relocated them to Texas a week before the storm but old people lay dying and suffering while they relied on gang bangers to loot the local Wal-Marts to bring them food and fresh water but the mayor and the governor and the president sat back and played mouse trap, risk and battleship instead of stepping up to their civic duty?

I have never been so full of hope, so full of dread, so full of admiration at the human spirit to achieve greatness in times of tragedy and so pissed off at the incompetence of a system of government to perform the only function is has ever been charged with--the welfare of the common citizen.

There is going to be a hell of a recompense come due soon for the neglect and borderline crimes against humanity that this ineffectual government perpetrated on the citizens of New Orleans while thousands continue to do in a War supposedly meant to spread freedom.

Freedom for what? To do unaided while politicians from both sides of the aisle worry about poll numbers and reelection strategies? Remember the panda bear and remember your priorities.

Which would you grab first: the Declaration of Independence, the Bible, the rifle or the human hand reaching out to lift you out of the storm?

TAGS:

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• Biden Warns Against a Space Arms Race
  

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• Gingrich will run as a "last resort" (I would still vote for Newt Gingrich if he ran)
  

• Iran legalizes prostitution with temporary "one-hour marriages"
  

• Dude Plans to Propose with $2+ million Super Bowl Ad
  

• Look inside the new 747
  

• Study finds Holocaust survivors are still owed $175 billion in reparations
  

• How Legos are made
  

• What really goes on in the Playboy Mansion

My aunts and uncles are in their seventies. My mother was born almost 30 years after my youngest aunt was born--she was a surprise to say the least.

So my aunts and uncles are much more like grandparents than they are aunts and uncles. And my maternal grandfather was a wonderful son-of-a-bitch. He drank whiskey like water. He won and lost thousands playing poker (not to mention a few hogs and cows along the way--forget Wil Wheaton and those fags in Vegas because farmers are the most serious poker players you'll ever find).

He sometimes fell asleep drunk on the toilet but he did it with class. He was a harsh man but I remember he had the most gentle hands and the biggest room-filling laugh.

My oldest aunt despised him when he was drunk--so he'd see she was coming and go to the cabinet and get out every liquor bottle in the house and do a couple shots so it smelled like he'd been drinking all day.

He'd invite his grandchildren over on Easter Sunday, after church, so he could give them melted chocolate that would ruin their nice outfits.

I remember being two years old and sitting on my grandfather's lap while we counted money. I learned to count, add and subtract at a very young age because I shuffled thousands of dollars in coins into piles for rolling.

On one of those occassions, he let me sip from his Jaggin' Coke and I remember liking the taste of the Coke a lot more than the whiskey. And this is where my Paw-Paw and I are different. I'm happy about that difference--it has made my life a lot more easier and far more enjoyable.

During times, the rest of the family probably felt like my grandfather made everyone's life around him harder except for me and my mother. He bought us a house when she was a single mother, divorced after less than a year of marriage, and forced to move back to a great big I told you so coming from her family.

But she had me with her and because I was so damned cute, I was like a Talisman against any criticism my family could heap on my mother for up and marrying a man who hadn't shown much initiative except for being a smart ass troublemaker and who was now out of basic training and headed for a spectacular career as an enlisted United States Marine (my father went on to become one of the most driven and gifted individuals I know and I am very proud that most of my inspiration and genetic drive for success comes from him and my grandmother).


But these memories of my grandfather I have just described to you are my family's memories that have been handed to me as sloppy seconds. These are things that happened before my time and are therefore easy for me to dismiss.

The most striking memory I have about my grandfather is that he was kind, gentle, and fiercely protective of me. And to a seven-year old child--that is God and it's a hell of a thing when your mother takes you aside on a Sunday and tells you that God died and that you won't be seeing him around here no more and sorry 'bout your luck but this is how the big bad world works.

So the seven-year old kid shed his tears at the service and when he lost it, everyone lost it, because even though the man was a wonderful son of a bitch to most of the people in his life, he loved that little Juicy unconditionally and that had to count something toward his character. It had to be something he could offer up at the gates of heaven to barter for admission despite the sins of his past.

When I cried, everyone cried because I cried like Mary Magdalene at the cross--I cried because God was dead and it didn't look he was ever coming back.

Well, imagine my surprise when my aunts and uncles came to Ohio to visit last week and my youngest aunt handed me a faded yellow envelope that had been folded into fourths. On the front of the envelope, written upside down, was my name with three lines underneath it--in my grandfather's handwriting.

She told me he had left this in a drawer and they found it cleaning up his house after he died. The envelope had been lying in the back of a drawer for years and finally showed up at an opportune time to bring it to me in Ohio.

I opened the envelope and shook the contents into my other hand.

• There were three 1979 Susan B. Anthony dollars
  
• There was one new 1983 nickel (this was also the year he died)
  
• And there was a 1971 Kennedy half dollar with a black X marking out the eagle

Now, immediately, my mind fixed on this strange X and I wondered why my grandfather left me defaced US currency.

Could this mean that he was the eldest member of a secret organization that sought to replace the government-controlled communications delivery process like the Tristero in The Crying of Lot 49?

But when I flipped the coin over, I saw that a low arch had been penned from Kennedy's left eye to the base of his skull. Now I thought:

Is my grandfather trying to tell me that he was the one who shot Kennedy because he was an elder member of a secret organization that sought to replace the government-controlled communications delivery process?

Now, this is because I think and write so much about how communication processes in our society are changing reality daily, and this fixation has retarded the portion of my brain that deals with rational thought. Lucky for us all, I am aware of this.

So, I went for what was behind supposition number two. And immediately, my mind gave me an image of my grandfather and I sitting at the table and playing tic-tac-toe with money for money (there were nine half dollar pieces as game tokens but we played for a nickel a round). Hey, to a seven-year-old, that's a lot of money.

So that X was probably a game marker and that suspicious arc across JFK's head was probably an O that got rubbed out over the years (even though it is a perfect demonstration of the internal damage arc of James Files's Firebolt bullet as it was fired from the grassy knoll and entered Kennedy's right temple, forcing his head "back and to the left" while Charles Nicolette's bullet from behind, only a fraction of a second later, pushed Kennedy's head forward....but I digress)

Two days later as I held the half-dollar with the X on it in my palm (it has now become my take everywhere pocket talisman because when I am superstitious, I go all out). And as I stared at the coin, tears that were stuck in the faucet from twenty-three years ago started to roll and I had a good fourteen second squinched up facial convulsion that passed like the pain of losing anything does, anything but your own life.

It's a hell of a thing when a dead relative reaches out and touches your hand years after they're gone. Everyone says we keep people alive by their memories inside of us but that's a bullshit lie because memories are stillborn experiences that weren't taken to the very end. Memories are residual interest payments on the pain we inflict on those around us every day.

I imagine my grandfather used the sauce to drown out a lot of memories and who can blame him?

My memories of my grandfather are no more valid than my theories on the Kennedy assassination--just because I have them doesn't make them true. I can imagine that my grandfather was a secret conspiratorial Patrick Henry assassin instead of a hard-drinking, harsh-talking, deep-loving man who was a skilled construction artist and who didn't start loving and appreciating the people around him until it was almost too late.

It doesn't matter to me how pissed off my Aunts and Uncles still are at him all these years later because of what a shit he was to them when they knew him.

It doesn't matter to me how he spent months at a time away from his family and often left my mother standing at the door crying for her daddy who loved her unconditionally and gave her everything she ever wanted and who she wouldn't see for several months at a time.

It doesn't matter to me that granddad was a traveling man because I knew him after his big accident, when his legs had been shattered and all that was left were a metal walking cane with a grey rubber grip, the few braincells he hadn't stomped out with fifths of John Daniels on the Interstate roads of Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois, and he had a heart the size of a god damned Illinois cornfield.


What matters is the way I still feel about him and about how good it felt to be touching a coin that was probably last touched by his hands.

I imagine him leaned over hunchbacked on that big kitchen table with the checkered vinyl tablecloth. I have just been picked up on Saturday morning after my weekly ritual of sleeping over at Paw-Paw's on Fridays. We had just finished the last of several games of tic-tac-toe and I was the big winner that day.

And my Paw-Paw was drunk but happy because he has a light in his life that he finally has the sense to walk toward. He is scrawling on a white #6 envelope that would eventually yellow with the age and wear of 23 years in my aunt's junk drawer. He is writing with a cheap ballpoint pen and he is writing the name of his toe-headed grandson which he underlines three times for emphasis; as if to say to his family:

You can tear down my house, haul out all my shit to the curb, sell it off and keep it. Send your kids to college with it or do something you love to do. I've been an ass and you've earned it. But whatever you do--you'd better make sure that this little boy gets these coins. He earned them! He's a hell of a tic-tac-toe player and one day, he might just surprise you, world. So you'd better watch out!

My memories of my grandfather are mine to dress up as I see fit but these coins belong to the both of us.

And no matter how hard I try, I could never erase that X across the eagle or the arc across President Kennedy's head.

But nor would I want to.

I was very privileged this afternoon to have been in attendance during a lecture given by Professor Douglas Brinkley, Professor of History and director of the Theodore Roosevelt Center for American Civilization at Tulane University. He spoke about his direct involvement in the Katrina disaster and its recovery in New Orleans. He just published a new book Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

The lecture was phenomenal but I asked a question during his Q&A session which probably made me look like a know-it-all asshole to the people I was with but also illuminated a valid point about the subject of history and why it is so important.

I asked him a What If question. I said, "What would the world look like today in terms of World War II, the Cold War and the War on Terror and the economics of New Orleans the city had Huey Long not been murdered and ran against and beat FDR in 1936?"

There were a lot of murmurs in the crowd after I asked my question and Professor Brinkley did his best to relate his answer to the discussion at hand and the interest level of the audience, making a very valid point about the nature of corruption in Louisiana politics, leaving the audience to deduce that this corruption would have made its way into national politics.

To me, the What Ifs are the best thing about history. You know, when Newt Gingrich writes a fictionalized account of what might have happened post-Battle of Gettysburg had Robert E. Lee not made a crucial error which he had never made in any of the previous campaigns prior to this one--what would the world look like? Would the North and South have continued as two separate nations existing side by side like in Europe? If so, what would the North American response to World War I look like? And how would that have affected World War II?

Fascinating stuff. This are the things that make history as a subject so pertinent in our daily lives.

...Holy SHIT!!! Talk about raising the bar. This show is incredible!

In anticipation of my upcoming visit to New Orleans, I picked up the four hour Spike Lee documentary about Hurricane Katrina When the Levees Broke.

If you recall, I greeted the initial announcement of Spike Lee's project with, ahem, great skepticism. I'm an admirer of Lee's dramas, especially Malcolm X; but he really pissed me off back in the late 90s when he refused to speak at my college (the rumor was that there wasn't enough black students to merit his effort) but I was distrustful of his motives what with the emphasis in the media at that time of his focusing on the conspiracy theory that the government blew up the levees to flood the 9th Ward in order to prevent the much wealthier lake front properties from being flooded.

It's funny but I wonder how many other political Independents out there began breaking from the Bush camp after the ridiculously incompetent government response to the Gulf Coast disaster and the continued waste and ineptitude which continues to this day while people still wait out the rebuilding from their too-little too-late FEMA trailers and shady all-too-small insurance payouts.

I was very hard on Ray Nagin at the time, but I have to say that after watching all four hours of Lee's documentary, Nagin came across as the most genuine and most concerned public official throughout the entire debacle.

I'm not sure what to expect when I hit the Crescent City. Word is that the crime is so bad that the government is seriously considering instituting mandatory curfews like some Third World war zone. I'll be spending a day helping rebuild something in the community of New Orleans and I'm taking my camera to document what likely can't be described in words.

About Lee's documentary: it's an American masterpiece, a historical document of immense importance that should be watched by every American in order to reinforce the simple but often obfuscated truth that the government can never be a natural provider for its citizenry and cannot replace the will and ingenuity of the individual human being.

About Hurricane Katrina: I fear the wrong people learned the wrong lessons and how to profit from them and I can only pray that the right people learned the right fears and how to subvert the wrong people from their dastardly ends.

LINKS:

• 101 Common Sense Management Truths
  

• James Cameron Wants to Make This Generation's 2001 Only It Will Be in 3D
  

• JJ Abrams on the Next Star Trek Movie
  

• Peter Jackson Will Likely NEVER Make The Hobbit
  

• Turn Your Blog into a Book

TAGS:Hurrican Katrina New Orleans Ray Nagin When the Levees Broke Spike Lee

I came across this quote on my daily calendar today:

Tiny children want to learn to the degree that they are unable to distinguish learning from fun. They keep this attitude until we adults convince them that learning is not fun.

EDUCATOR GLENN DOMAN

Why do people stop learning? There was a time when people got together, they asked the question, "Have you read [this book] by [this author]? And I imagine that more than often, the answer came back in the affirmative. Try that nowadays. 8 times out of 10, you'll get laughed at.

So when did illiteracy become the norm? When did that act of not learning become a badge of honor? There is such a deep undercurrent of anti-intellectualism in our society that to make a literaray reference in a conversation is to marginalize oneself or go totally misunderstood to point of having might as well not even have said anything at all.

I already know that you all (my readers) read, as a general rule, but I'm interested in hearing your thoughts about this issue.

In the past, I have told you all that there are only two periods of history I consider worthy of studying (speaking personally here) and those are 1763-1783 in Colonial America and 1919-1944 in Germany.

But I want to amend that statement to include a third period, equally important to the other two: 1860-1864 in America. That's right, the Civil War and what led directly to it.

Here's my justification for this hypothesis. I believe that the entire present state of human culture and its immediate and long-term future are intimately tied to these three periods of history.

Yes, these historical periods are very America-centric and if that makes me an ardent nationalist, so be it. But hear me out for a moment. Prior to the 1760s, there was never a civilization in the history of world founded upon the precept that the individual human being was inherently free from the tyranny of an earthly power, be it parliament or king. Prior to the United States, no man was above the rule of law and the rule of law was ordained by God.

But after America, laws became an extension of the rights of individual human beings instead of slave cages to herd masses of nameless and faceless human forms through history in service of the state or church.

But America was a loose union of idealism from the 1790s up to the 1860s. Prior to the Civil War, we used to refer to our country as "These United States." The state was the organizing principle of government and the federal government was little more than a frame drawn around the states to ensure they stayed within the bounds of the Constitution which laid out how the inherent rights of mankind were to be protected from infringement by other men or by the institutions of men.

And like a dysfunctional marriage where one spouse is constantly looking to cheat--states prior to the Civil War were always threatening to secede from the Union. The Federalists tried to secede back when Jefferson, Madison and Monroe pulled off the three-peat to keep Virginia planters in the White House for a generation. South Carolina was close to seceding under Calhoun when Andrew Jackson was in office but he shut that shit down quicker than a gay man being offered a hand job by a female stripper.

And then there was Lincoln. His very election caused half the American South to secede and the other 45% followed shortly thereafter, prompting old Abe to initiate a campaign of warfare that led to the death of thousands of his own countrymen in order to keep the frame drawn around the states intact. Could you imagine what the world would be like now if that frame hadn't been fought for and had hundreds of thousands die for in order to preserve? North America would be Europe all over again and the Civil War would have only been the beginning of wars of aggression and outright politic on this continent.

And the Industrial revolution truly blasted off in an age of cheap immigrant labor and monopolistic cartels with the money and resources to direct towards society building in America and you come to the First World War which as we all know was perhaps the most ridiculous war ever fought in the history of mankind and which directly led to the Second World War and totally redefined the United States government's power over its citizenry and the further shrinking of the law as protector of the rights of individuals--moving further and further back towards the cage of restitutional demands upon the individual in servitude of unscrupulous men and the systems they create to dazzle and bewilder denizens who know no better than to bow to the will of what seems like natural authority.

What happened in Nazi Germany is a litmus test for the tyranny of man run rampant in a massive social setting and the dichotomy of what brilliant and powerful men can accomplish when opportunity, circumstance and raw will conglomerate together could not be more diametrically opposed than in the men who pulled off the Revolutionary War in America and the men who pulled off the mass murder of 11 million human beings from the face of the earth in a reign lasting less than twelve years.

History has many truths which reveal themselves only to the lucky and patient among us but there are also many truths as plain as the moon in the sky on clear and cold night.

LINKS:

• Watch the trailer for this documentary about a group of frontline soldiers during the 1994 American occupation of Fallujah (hat tip to Fantastic Bastard because this looks like it will be a great movie well worth watching)
  

• Lazy Dork (hat tip to Glardon)
  

• Where the hell were co-ed naked parties at when I was in college?
  

• Don't mind the man behind the curtain--it's just President Bush and his 100 billion dollar nuclear warhead
  

• Did Judas Iscariot get a bad rap?
  

• Did the Carl Sagan Martian probes from the 70s actually kill off the microbial life they were sent to search for?
  

• A great documentary about the BGNews (my newspaper in college where I wrote an opinion column for a couple years)