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found its bathtub
Thursday, September 1 2005
The Convention Center, New Orleans, September 1st, 2005: Desperate people are crammed together with their accumulating excrement and prevented from leaving by the moat that used to be their city. Crazy from the loss of everything and desperate for food and water, they are, nevertheless, well armed and take out their frustrations by shooting at rescue workers who aren't rescuing them fast enough. It's inexcusable to be so naïve, but nevertheless I find myself asking, "Who knew Americans had the potential for such desperation and violence?" Then again, ours is the most gun-crazy nation on the planet and when one loots a Walmart, guns and ammunition are things that can be looted. Part of the price being paid in New Orleans is the one for the freedom to bear arms. That freedom isn't free, even if the guns are, for the time being.
Then there's the matter of what was done to prevent the situation and what's now being done to fix it. The intellectual foundation of the current federal government was the idea to reduce its scale until it could be "drowned in a bathtub." It appears to have found its bathtub. Over the past four years FEMA has been systematically gutted and cannibalized, with the competent members of its administration being replaced with the same sort of party hacks and yes men who ran the Provisional Authority in Iraq with such aplomb and acclaim. Now that they're being tested, we see that the sort of skills necessary to deal with a Biblical disaster are not necessarily the same as those needed to part the waters of a Florida recount.
The peoples of other nations in the world must be scratching their heads in puzzlement over the ongoing crisis.
What, after all, does this screaming failure of society and its support systems say about American Exceptionalism? And where the fuck is God? Maybe there is no God but Allah.
After a morning housecall and a series of visits to hardware stores, I spent most of the day down in the boiler room installing new equipment. This was a much bigger effort than the one on Monday where I turned off the house's drinking water supply and attached that dual hydronic water resupply system. Today I cut into existing hydronic pipes for both the basement slab heating system and the indirect hot water heating system, the two zones with appreciable heat storing capabilities. (The next one down the list in terms of heat-storing capablity is the upstairs bedroom zone, which includes a cat bed atop a big piece of hydronically-heated bluestone.) My goal was to build an alternative solar-powered hydronic heating system for these two zones. So I cut through copper pipe and soldered in brand new valves in existing pipes as well as new ones. By the end of the day I had enough plumbing in place to install the new circulator motor and air scoop (which Gretchen had referred to as "an anvil" when jokingly expressing her displeasure with the plumbing-related clutter on the dining table today).
As I worked, I listened exclusively to KCRW's World News internet stream so as to stay abreast of all the third-world style misery our banana-Republican government has made possible.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?050901 feedback
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