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September 12, 2005, around 4:30 a.m.
For those mercifully unaware of it -- and God, I wish I was one of them -- Super Girlfriend has an ex husband who, more and more each day, seems to be exhibiting increasingly unstable and genuinely psychotic behavior.
There is genuine madness in his family. The Evil Ex's brother is certifiably disabled due to mental illness -- he falls into fits of paranoia in which he raves about gangs of mysterious midgets that mean him harm, and while he's in these fits, he destroys property and threatens his own and other people's safety with anything he happens to have handy, which, as this is Kentucky, often includes firearms.
Apparently, the ex is now obsessing on squirrels. Reportedly, his next big project, which he is trying to involve the girls in as conscript labor, is putting up heavy mesh screens over the basement windows at his house to foil squirrel infiltration. Now, squirrels in your basement can be annoying, I grant you, but in the ex's case, we're all getting more worried about squirrels in his attic, since, based on several remarks he's been heard to make while speaking on the cell phone with Super Girlfriend (he tends to shout), he seems to be in some way no one else can follow associating these insidious infiltrating squirrels with a perceived increase in spyware he is finding on his personal computer.
There is also, apparently, a concern that these squirrels are somehow passing along information regarding his television viewing habits, especially during the two weeks he doesn't have the kids in the house.
I don't know. He's been sleeping with a steadily rotating array of internet skanks ever since the marriage went south on him; maybe he's picked up syphilis from one of them and it's eating his brain. Or perhaps he's got mad cow disease.
Can you get mad squirrel disease?
The latest conservative meme now is "let's not rebuild New Orleans at all, it's crazy to rebuild a city that is six feet below sea level in an area prone to coastal flooding".
I have a big problem with this, because, well, I tend to agree with it, and you know how crazy I get when i find myself agreeing with Kaye Grogan on anything. My own feeling is, rather than print up another $100 billion in deficit, fiat currency to funnel directly into the pockets of Cheney and Bush's biggest corporate contributors so they can build a newer, better, whiter New Orleans on a different site (which is what the 'let's not rebuild New Orleans' meme translates as, in conservative-ese), we should simply spend a much smaller amount to do minimal clean up on the ruins of New Orleans, and then declare the area so recently rendered uninhabitable by Hurricane Katrina to be the "New Orleans Memorial Wilderness Preserve", or some such.
Give it back to the delta, in other words.
Nearly all of mankind's cities distort and destroy their surrounding environment to some extent or another. New Orleans did so in a manner that was excessive even for most human urban areas, however, completely warping the natural progression of the Mississippi delta for the last three centuries to the point where over an acre of Mississippi bottom land was being swallowed up by the steadily encroaching Gulf of Mexico each and every year. Within another couple of decades, New Orleans would have been an island, anyway (an island, I probably need not point out, whose surface level would be a steadily increasing distance below its surrounding sea level).
The time was going to come, and not slowly, either, when the only way to preserve New Orleans was going to be by doming it over like, you know, Lori Lemaris' Atlantis, and the only access to it was going to be by submarine.
I'm not going to make any wrath of God arguments, because I'm of the honest opinion that if there is a Divine Being of some sort, He/She/It doesn't pay much attention to what we are doing on this planet. I feel this way mostly because it's a very pretty planet we live on, and if I'd made it, I'd feel a certain proprietary interest in it, and if I discovered some appalling strain of microbe or insect had somehow infested my pretty little planet and was currently in the process of ruining it, I'd probably, I don't know, spray my pretty little planet with RAID, or wipe it off with Listerine, or something. And any Divine Creator as may exist hasn't done this as yet (unless you believe in the various Great Deluge legends common to most human mythologies, in which case, you also have to accept that the Creator, after going to some lengths to get rid of us, then went to some even more absurd lengths to spare us, as well, which only makes Old Testament sort of sense, which is to say, none), so I'm not someone who tends to say things like "Hurricane Katrina wiping out New Orleans was God's will, and it would be blasphemy to fly in the face of that by trying to rebuild the city".
However, I do think we have a perfectly good opportunity now to, well, not spend a great deal of money rebuilding a completely ruined and entirely uninhabited former city on a demonstrably and overtly hazardous site in a region of the country that could badly use a lengthy period of natural recuperation anyway.
I admit, a lot of this is simply my utter revulsion at the thought of firing up the U.S. Mint for the express purpose of printing up $100 billion in greenbacks which would then be shoveled directly from the Treasury's loading dock into great big trucks with HALLIBURTON written on the side.
If we are determined to rebuild New Orleans, though, I think it would be nice if some gesture was made towards prioritizing construction contractors actually from, and headquartered in, New Orleans. Hire former residents of New Orleans first, ahead of anyone else, for the task of rebuilding their drowned city.
Of course, that would essentially work out to giving an unending convoy of truckloads full of Federal cash to black people, and you just know THAT's not going to happen under this Administration.
I'm starting a newer, better job today, and have to catch a very, very early bus, so I'll have to work more on this page later.
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4/13/05
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