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About Lee's documentary: it's an American masterpiece, a historical document of immense importance that should be watched by every American in order to reinforce the simple but often obfuscated truth that the government can never be a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

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)

Dear Georgie,

Since you won't return my phone calls or my e-mails and since you haven't posted on your ultra secret blog that you've been keeping from Laura and those tight asses in your Secret Service detail; I have to post this publicly. Now c'mon Georgie--you and I go back too far for you start acting like a punk, man. And this letter is an attempt to fix what's gone wrong with us because I care.

You know, when you and I started this thing in the summer of 2000; I had such high hopes for us--I really did. I thought we were going to be the Silver Anniversary surfers, my man--taking life by the big waves and smiling at the sun while the other surfers around us ate foam and wiped out one by one. Damn there's been a lot of wipe outs since that summer, hasn't there? But we've had a few good wave runs too, can't forget that and we shouldn't forget that you were the king dong on the board during those times. But we also can't help but pointing out that you were the Faust in charge when we ate it also.

Dude, I was with you in the days after 9/11--you were in my thoughts and prayers. I was with you when the lights starting flashing and the rocks started flying in Afghanistan. And I was even with you when the tanks rolled into the desert of Iraq and embedded media showed us, the populace and people who gave you the job, how a war begins in real time for the first time in human history.

I didn't get as bent out of shape as the rest of the country with the human pyramid torture pictures because I know that what Dr. Meade said in Gone with the Wind is some true shit: "Good Heavens,...this is war, not a garden party."

I was even with you on the surveillance stuff for the most part. Taking away the privacy of communications from the populace isn't anything new during war time. After all, Lincoln authorized simultaneous raids on every telegraph office in the North and seized the record of ever telegram written for an entire year by anyone in the north. He suspended Habius Corpus and authorized the seizing and imprisoning without being formally charged of hundreds of citizens. He took a shit load of money from the US Treasury and just handed it over to the Lords of Industry to procure the instruments of war from their impressive social and business networks and didn't even ask for a receipt.

So bad shit has been done by Presidents in the past who have also been picked by the three sisters who choose, measure and cut the string. Nobody's saying that you're the only one or even that you've gone way too far and deserve to get fired like your predecessor (even though he wasn't removed).

But I've been reading up on Lincoln a lot lately and things started to come into focus when I read this portion of a speech he gave to Congress on July 4th while the Civil War was still in its newlywed stage:

This is essentially a People's war. On the side of the Union it is a struggle for maintaining in the world that form and substance of government whose leading object is to elevate the condition of man, to lift artificial weights from all shoulders, to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all, to afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance in the race of life...Our popular government has often been called an experiment. Two points in it our people have already settled, the successful establishing and the successful administering of it. One still remains--its successful maintenance against a formidable attempt to overthrow it. It is now for them to demonstrate to the world that whose who can fairly carry an election can also suppress a rebellion, that ballots are the rightful and peaceful successors of bullets, and that when ballots have fairly and constitutionally decided, there can be no successful appeal except to ballots themselves at succeeding elections. Such will be a great lesson of peace, teaching men that what they cannot take by an election, neither can they take by war--teaching all the folly of being the beginners of a war.

That utterance put so many things into perspective for me--with what we're trying accomplish in Iraq and the Middle East in general.

It's a monumental task to take a conglomeration of human minds so entrenched in their belief and in their worship of their deity (who in their minds calls for continued bloodshed in a ridiculous war which has lasted hundreds of years too long) and say to them that the age of religious zealotry has come to a crashing end and that instead of ascribing patterns and powers to the stars in the sky, mankind is now traveling to them and every race, creed and belief system is welcome to come along.

It's a bitch of a thing to say that to people, Georgie--believe me, I know. I've been trying to figure out a kind way to say that type of shit for over ten years ago and it still comes out harsh and unsympathetic. But since when has human history yielded to the sensibilities of the moment and the human emotion that swirls and fills the vacuum of the possibility of the next moment?

So, look--we're cool, Georgie. You can put my name back on speed dial in your Blackberry and you can start leaving comments on this blog again. Because we're down like that, I'm willing to wipe the slate clean in Two to the Double Aught Seven. Just make sure that everything you do is in the spirit of what Lincoln talked about in that speech because so long as you do that--you are still on the razor's edge, my man.

Keep it real in DC, Georgie Boy and next time you come to Columbus you don't have to hang out with just the millionaires. You can come to the crib and we'll throw down on the XBOX 360 in a little Call of Duty or Gears of War and my wife'll make her Shake-N-Bake pork chops, out of the box mashed taters and Bush's baked beans which is about as good a feast as any man needs.

Love,

Josh

LINKS:

• Don't look now, but somone you know just won the very first Blog Carnival for Ohio Bloggers (thanks to Sadie's Take on Delaware Ohio for hosting)
  

• Wal-Mart is Determined to Push Energy Saving Light Bulbs to 100 Million Homes