An open letter to Terry J. Lundgren, chairman, president and CEO of Federated Department Stores Inc.
Dear Mr. Lundgren,
You possum fucker. You should be dunked in raw sewage and gasoline, locked in a steel cage on the corner of State and Randolph and set on fire.
You and your executive team should be flogged, not praised, for your decision to sacrifice yet another piece of Chicago’s history to the almighty Gods of the Share Price. Dropping the Marshall Field’s name from the sad collection of mall stores scattered throughout the Midwest might be forgivable. But stripping the Chicago flagship store of that proud name has earned you a city full of enemies, no matter what your twisted research told you.
It was wise of you to announce the change in a cowardly news release from the safety of Cincinnati and to brief the Chicago media in their buildings, above the streets. Once you leave town you’d better not show your face in Chicago ever again, you soft turd.
How dare you profess “great respect for the legacy and traditions of Marshall Field’s.” Bullshit. And fuck you for saying so. You don’t show respect of any sort for legacy and traditions by throwing them in the trash. The legacy and tradition aren’t solely in the building or the merchandise, you flunky. They’re in the name, too. I heard you talking about how Marshall Field’s wasn’t “moving forward.” But later you said the merchandise, which was selling well, and the sales associates, who sell the well-selling merchandise well, will remain. So what’s the problem? You want to increase your profit margin by cutting marketing costs? Fine. Keep a skeleton staff to market the State Street Store as “The Original Marshall Field’s Store” or something. How much could that cost? Then you can get your precious economy of scale and still give a little nod of respect to Chicago.
What are we supposed to do, meet under the Macy’s clock? Ain’t gonna happen. And you can’t go to the Walnut Room at Macy’s. The Walnut Room isn’t Macy’s. It’s Marshall Field’s. Or maybe you’re planning on converting the Walnut Room to a McDonald’s; you know, to “better serve [your] customers in this highly competitive retailing environment.”
And exactly how do you plan to, as you stated in your press release, “do everything we can to honor the Marshall Field’s heritage, particularly in its Chicago birthplace” as part of the name change process? Honor it how? By dropping the very name you say you plan to honor? What kind of corporate doublespeak babble is that? Look, this isn’t Cincinnati or Ohio for that matter. Most people here are sophisticated enough to easily see through your empty homage. When you rip the brass Field’s nameplate off the State Street store and replace it with a cheap plastic Macy’s sign, people will notice. And they’re going to be pissed.
Already the immediate reaction has been swift. Although you claimed your “research” showed two-thirds of the respondents felt “neutral to positive—largely neutral—about the name change,” according to your quote in the Tribune, an unscientific poll conducted by the same Tribune showed DISapproval in the high 90-percent range after the news hit the streets.
Alas, we are a people with a short attention span. By the time the Field’s name is stripped from the State Street store, many folks will likely have lost their rage. People will continue to shop there, as they should, because the employees shouldn’t be punished with losing their jobs just because Federated is focused on competing with Wal-Mart.
But in the interim, some of those pissed off people might get in their cars and drive to your corporate headquarters at 7 West Seventh Street in Cincinnati. Others may call your company switchboard at 513.579.7000, or inundate your troglodyte manager of community and public relations, Jean Coggan, at 513.579.7315. Coggan, by the way, should be stripped of that title. Instead, she should be Manager of Community and Public Violations. Because that’s what her employer has done to Chicago.
We’re supposed to be grateful, I guess, that Federated won’t lay anyone off at the State Street store, or shut it altogether. More than six thousand other employees, of course, won’t be so lucky. That’s consolidation for you, eh? Companies like Federated can buy a store, strip it of its name and then imply we should thank them for saving some jobs. Even Chicago Mayor Richard Daley got into the spirit Thursday, calling the name change a business reality and saying, in effect, that at least we get to keep the jobs.
Well fuck that. That’s like being robbed and beaten and then having to thank the perpetrator for not killing you. It’s worth remembering here that neither Dayton Hudson nor May felt the need to change the Field’s name when they bought the retail chain.
Next time you come to Chicago, Mr. Lundgren, if you ever manage to screw up the courage again, you’d better wear a haz-mat suit, because when word of your incursion leaks out—and it will—Chicagoans will line the route from the airport to the Loop and hurl all manner of foul, toxic and smelly objects at you. And you’ll deserve to swallow every one of them.
You are the worst kind of slime. You should be stripped naked and forced to run a gauntlet of hoots and jeers from the ghosts of Potter Palmer, Montgomery Ward, Richard Sears and, of course, Marshall Field—Chicago’s captains of industry, men who understood what it meant to BUILD, to create things of value.
If there is any justice in this world, you will be exposed soon as another in the growing line of corrupt chief executives. You will be convicted, stripped of your $1.2 million salary and your $3 million bonus and sent to the prison at Joliet where you’ll bunk with a large, sexually frustrated man with an image of a “Thriller”-era Michael Jackson tattooed on one arm and “Fuck You” tattooed on the other. There, your screams will fade until eventually they are silent, lodged in your throat. The everlasting pain will cause you to
forget your own name and when you are released someday you will stumble blindly through the streets, eventually falling into a canal full of raw sewage where you drift in and out of consciousness before washing up next to a scraggly homeless man living in a shit-smeared Macy’s mattress box, a man you will recognize as H. Lee Scott Jr.
Best wishes in your new “venture,” you Sam Walton supplicant.
Sincerely,
The Indignant Citizen
Wednesday, September 21, 2005
Tuesday, September 20, 2005
It’s just cheese
It might be difficult to believe that cheese could be a yardstick for measuring the decline of the intelligence of the American workforce. But it can. Oh, how it can.
To prove the point, the Indignant Citizen will pick on the sandwich chain Au Bon Pain. This is not to suggest that ABP, as we’ll affectionately call it, is alone in its cheese ineptitude. Far from it. The Indignant Citizen has found similar levels of ignorance at the Cosi sandwich chain and at several deli sandwich shops in the Midtown Manhattan area.
The Indignant Citizen likes turkey sandwiches with mayo, mustard, cheddar, Swiss, lettuce and tomato. It’s really pretty easy. There are six ingredients, and the Indignant Citizen often pairs them up and groups them when he orders, to be helpful. “Mayonnaise and mustard, lettuce and tomato, cheddar and Swiss.”
You spread the mayo and the mustard, lay on the turkey, top with lettuce and tomato and add one slice of Swiss and one slice of cheddar to each half of the sandwich. You’d think it’s simple until you try and order one at a sandwich shop. Suddenly it’s like you’re asking the staff to prove the Universal Coefficient Theorem for homology as they deliver the sandwich.
The Indignant Citizen has gotten mayo but not mustard, Swiss but no cheddar, lettuce but no tomato. Once he got ham. Occasionally he gets two slices of cheddar on one side and two slices of Swiss on the other, a messy problem, but at least it’s something to work with.
Today at Au Bon Pain typified the experience. ABP, if you haven’t been, gives customers sheets of paper which they can use to order from among the various specialty sandwiches, or create their own sandwiches. When the Indignant Citizen first saw this sheet a few years ago, he thought it would be foolproof. It has not turned out that way. What usually winds up happening is he checks “whole sandwich,” “smoked turkey,” “croissant,” “mayo,” “Dijon mustard,” “lettuce,” “tomato,” “cheddar” and “Swiss” (sometimes writing “both” in the margin and drawing lines from the two cheese boxes to the word “both”). When they charge the Indignant Citizen, they charge him for two kinds of cheese. When he opens the sandwich, there are two kinds of cheese, one slice of cheddar on one side, one slice of Swiss on the other.
Now think about this: If you order a sandwich and check Swiss cheese, you would logically expect one slice of Swiss on each half of the sandwich. Anything less and you’d take it back and say “They only gave me cheese on half the sandwich,” and demand either half of the 79-cent cheese surcharge back or that cheese be placed on the other half of the sandwich.
Let’s extend that logic: If you order two kinds of cheese, each of which will cost you 79 cents, you expect both kinds of cheese on both sides of the sandwich.
So today, the Indignant Citizen walked into the ABP on N. Wells Street, between Adams and Monroe. There, a helpful employee took the Indignant Citizen’s order, which seemed a little strange since the store had provided multiple order pads and a cup full of little pencils on a stainless steel table right in front of the prep area. But who’s to quibble? A dude’s gotta earn a living and if taking folks’ sandwich orders and handing them to guys actually doing some fucking work—you know, making the sandwiches an’ shit—is how you earn a buck, more power to you.
Anyway, the Indignant Citizen watched as this helpful fellow took the order, paying particular attention to the part where the guy checked the cheese selections. He checked both cheddar and Swiss, writing “1/2” beside each. In hindsight, he should have been stopped there, since it’s now obvious that meant “half-order on each side.” But since this whole process reached the point of being ridiculous long ago, the Indignant Citizen will consider it a work in the process of refinement. That means: next time he’ll know to clarify before the order is handed across the counter.
The Indignant Citizen got just what he expected, one slice of cheddar on one side, one slice of Swiss on the other and a receipt showing he’d been charged for both kinds of cheese at 79 cents each.
He considered going back, but he’s done this before and the employees invariably stare at him in their gap-toothed way as if he’s some kind of freak. “I don’t understand the problem, sir.” “Well, the problem is you charged me for two kinds of cheese.” “You got two kinds of cheese.” “Yes, but in total, I got only as many slices of cheese as if I’d paid for one. Two halves of the sandwich, two slices of cheese. If I ask for two kinds of cheese, there should be four slices of cheese total, two on each half of the sandwich.”
[Long pause, and alternate stares exchanged with the receipt, the open sandwich and the Indignant Citizen, then around again.]
“But you got two kinds of cheese.”
It just doesn’t seem that difficult. It seems logical. If the Indignant Citizen were making the sandwiches, he’d get it. Why can’t these people?
The answer, the Indignant Citizen fears, can be one or both of only two things: Either the employees are stupid, they don’t care, or both. It signals a decided drop in the barometric pressure of commerce. The only thing many of these shops like Cosi and ABP have going for them is that someone else makes a sandwich the customers didn’t have time to make in the morning before trudging off to work. If the employees of these stores can’t get it right, you would think business would drop off.
But then, the Indignant Citizen keeps returning … what to make of that? It’s a kind of entertainment at this point. And these places remain crowded, so either others have resigned themselves to inferior sandwich making, or they’ve chosen to order only the sandwiches with ingredients that are predetermined—a turkey club, for example.
And so we slide down this slope of mediocrity, toward a world where “build your own” sandwiches are a faint memory and where restaurants lower the quality and quantity of their offerings to suit the intelligence level and/or work ethic of the employees they can manage to coax through the doors at meager wages.
Customers will resign themselves. Or learn to make their own sandwiches.
To prove the point, the Indignant Citizen will pick on the sandwich chain Au Bon Pain. This is not to suggest that ABP, as we’ll affectionately call it, is alone in its cheese ineptitude. Far from it. The Indignant Citizen has found similar levels of ignorance at the Cosi sandwich chain and at several deli sandwich shops in the Midtown Manhattan area.
The Indignant Citizen likes turkey sandwiches with mayo, mustard, cheddar, Swiss, lettuce and tomato. It’s really pretty easy. There are six ingredients, and the Indignant Citizen often pairs them up and groups them when he orders, to be helpful. “Mayonnaise and mustard, lettuce and tomato, cheddar and Swiss.”
You spread the mayo and the mustard, lay on the turkey, top with lettuce and tomato and add one slice of Swiss and one slice of cheddar to each half of the sandwich. You’d think it’s simple until you try and order one at a sandwich shop. Suddenly it’s like you’re asking the staff to prove the Universal Coefficient Theorem for homology as they deliver the sandwich.
The Indignant Citizen has gotten mayo but not mustard, Swiss but no cheddar, lettuce but no tomato. Once he got ham. Occasionally he gets two slices of cheddar on one side and two slices of Swiss on the other, a messy problem, but at least it’s something to work with.
Today at Au Bon Pain typified the experience. ABP, if you haven’t been, gives customers sheets of paper which they can use to order from among the various specialty sandwiches, or create their own sandwiches. When the Indignant Citizen first saw this sheet a few years ago, he thought it would be foolproof. It has not turned out that way. What usually winds up happening is he checks “whole sandwich,” “smoked turkey,” “croissant,” “mayo,” “Dijon mustard,” “lettuce,” “tomato,” “cheddar” and “Swiss” (sometimes writing “both” in the margin and drawing lines from the two cheese boxes to the word “both”). When they charge the Indignant Citizen, they charge him for two kinds of cheese. When he opens the sandwich, there are two kinds of cheese, one slice of cheddar on one side, one slice of Swiss on the other.
Now think about this: If you order a sandwich and check Swiss cheese, you would logically expect one slice of Swiss on each half of the sandwich. Anything less and you’d take it back and say “They only gave me cheese on half the sandwich,” and demand either half of the 79-cent cheese surcharge back or that cheese be placed on the other half of the sandwich.
Let’s extend that logic: If you order two kinds of cheese, each of which will cost you 79 cents, you expect both kinds of cheese on both sides of the sandwich.
So today, the Indignant Citizen walked into the ABP on N. Wells Street, between Adams and Monroe. There, a helpful employee took the Indignant Citizen’s order, which seemed a little strange since the store had provided multiple order pads and a cup full of little pencils on a stainless steel table right in front of the prep area. But who’s to quibble? A dude’s gotta earn a living and if taking folks’ sandwich orders and handing them to guys actually doing some fucking work—you know, making the sandwiches an’ shit—is how you earn a buck, more power to you.
Anyway, the Indignant Citizen watched as this helpful fellow took the order, paying particular attention to the part where the guy checked the cheese selections. He checked both cheddar and Swiss, writing “1/2” beside each. In hindsight, he should have been stopped there, since it’s now obvious that meant “half-order on each side.” But since this whole process reached the point of being ridiculous long ago, the Indignant Citizen will consider it a work in the process of refinement. That means: next time he’ll know to clarify before the order is handed across the counter.
The Indignant Citizen got just what he expected, one slice of cheddar on one side, one slice of Swiss on the other and a receipt showing he’d been charged for both kinds of cheese at 79 cents each.
He considered going back, but he’s done this before and the employees invariably stare at him in their gap-toothed way as if he’s some kind of freak. “I don’t understand the problem, sir.” “Well, the problem is you charged me for two kinds of cheese.” “You got two kinds of cheese.” “Yes, but in total, I got only as many slices of cheese as if I’d paid for one. Two halves of the sandwich, two slices of cheese. If I ask for two kinds of cheese, there should be four slices of cheese total, two on each half of the sandwich.”
[Long pause, and alternate stares exchanged with the receipt, the open sandwich and the Indignant Citizen, then around again.]
“But you got two kinds of cheese.”
It just doesn’t seem that difficult. It seems logical. If the Indignant Citizen were making the sandwiches, he’d get it. Why can’t these people?
The answer, the Indignant Citizen fears, can be one or both of only two things: Either the employees are stupid, they don’t care, or both. It signals a decided drop in the barometric pressure of commerce. The only thing many of these shops like Cosi and ABP have going for them is that someone else makes a sandwich the customers didn’t have time to make in the morning before trudging off to work. If the employees of these stores can’t get it right, you would think business would drop off.
But then, the Indignant Citizen keeps returning … what to make of that? It’s a kind of entertainment at this point. And these places remain crowded, so either others have resigned themselves to inferior sandwich making, or they’ve chosen to order only the sandwiches with ingredients that are predetermined—a turkey club, for example.
And so we slide down this slope of mediocrity, toward a world where “build your own” sandwiches are a faint memory and where restaurants lower the quality and quantity of their offerings to suit the intelligence level and/or work ethic of the employees they can manage to coax through the doors at meager wages.
Customers will resign themselves. Or learn to make their own sandwiches.
Wednesday, September 14, 2005
September 11
Today’s topic is September 11.
Not “nine-eleven” as it’s commonly referred to, September 11. September for the month, 11 for the day. Let’s give the date the respect it deserves by at least calling it what it is, not some ill-conceived abbreviation designed for easy media packaging.
For those who don’t know the story, the Indignant Citizen and his wife were living in Brooklyn Heights and getting ready for work and school the morning of Sept. 11 when word came over WNYC that there had been an explosion at the World Trade Center. There wasn’t any particular note of alarm in the announcer’s voice, and we hadn’t heard anything in our apartment, which was about a mile from the Trade Center site as the seagull flies. We continued getting ready, tying ties, making breakfast, looking for shoes. At about 10 to 9, the announcer came back on after a break to plug upcoming programming and said reports were now coming in that a plane had hit the north tower of the Trade Center. This was interesting enough that the Indignant Citizen flicked on the TV and turned to NY1, the local all-news station, to see if there was any footage of what he assumed would be the tail of a small plane sticking out of the building.
The image on TV was from the north, and it showed a gaping, flaming, smoking hole near the top of the tower. That was no Cessna, the Indignant Citizen remembers thinking, and perhaps saying out loud. At about that time, the Indignant Citizen’s wife came into the room and saw what was on TV. Expletives were exchanged. One of us suggested we should grab our cameras and walk three blocks out of our way to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade to snap some pictures before we went into the subway and to work. Each of us took our 35 millimeter cameras and started walking toward the river.
We were not alone. By this time word of the crash had spread, and others in the neighborhood were making their way to the promenade, among them our upstairs neighbor, an off-duty New York cop. It was about a block from the ramp leading from Columbia Terrace to the promenade when the Indignant Citizen first glimpsed the gray smoke, and then millions of sheets of paper fluttering in the blue sky across the river, kind of toward us but just to the south. The sound of helicopters and of emergency vehicles’ sirens filled the air, mixing with road noise from the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway underneath us and the hum of boats on the East River. Both of us broke out our cameras and began taking pictures. The Indignant Citizen quickly shot up the 10 or so frames left on the roll of film in his camera, which he had started four days earlier on Saturday, when we spent the day around the World Trade and World Financial centers, shooting the buildings from different angles.
As the Indignant Citizen dropped back, away from the railing and under the canopy of sycamore trees, he noticed for the first time people on cellular phones with worried looks on their faces, staring achingly at the smoking tower and pleading with whomever was on the other end for information, or to get out. One woman close by was asking if whomever she was talking to had seen her husband that morning.
Just then the Indignant Citizen noticed another plane moving across the harbor. His first thought was that it was a flight on approach to LaGuardia. It was not uncommon to see planes fly up the Hudson or over Brooklyn. Still, something seemed odd about it. It was too low, or it was on a strange trajectory. Something prompted the Indignant Citizen to say, out loud, “I’m surprised they haven’t closed the flight pattern.” Then time seemed to speed up, the plane appeared to go into a kind of fast forward for a moment, quickly closing the gap between it and the Lower Manhattan skyline. It banked, and the morning sun clearly revealed that it was a United Airlines jet. We could hear the whine of the engines, a sound that continues to haunt both the Indignant Citizen and his wife to this day.
Then the plane disappeared behind some of the taller buildings along the East River. Although it should have emerged and continued up the island, instead we saw a fireball, followed almost instantly by two distinct concussions—boom ... BOOM! As the black smoke mushroomed up upward, the Indignant Citizen’s wife turned into his shoulder and sobbed, but only for a moment. People gasped. A woman screamed. Next to us, a New York cop who had been on a bike talking on a pay phone yelled, “The plane hit the building. It flew into the fuckin’ building!” Then he slammed the phone down and rode away, presumably toward downtown. With his arm around his wife, the Indignant Citizen turned and looked for his neighbor, who had been standing just over his left shoulder seconds ago. He was gone.
“Where did the plane go?” the Indignant Citizen's wife asked. In hindsight, the question seems surprising, given her initial sobs. But the brain is a funny instrument. Sometimes, when you see something like a plane fly into a building and explode, you instantly recognize it for a tragic event, but only moments later you have reduced it mentally to a best-case scenario. We didn’t just see that. The plane must’ve been empty. It wasn’t as large a plane was we thought. Nobody was in the buildings.
“It’s in the building,” the Indignant Citizen responded quietly. We stared at the now two buildings on fire. More paper was fluttering through the air around the towers, and the sound of emergency sirens filled the air. Murmurs among the growing crowd now turned into shouts. “That was deliberate. This is an attack!” Sounds of panic began to swell, joining sobbing and unintelligible screaming. All the while more people were arriving at the promenade. The Indignant Citizen asked his wife if she had more pictures left. Yes. You should take some. She did.
Suddenly the Indignant Citizen was overcome with the sense that we—everyone on the promenade—were in danger. We had to leave immediately. It seemed like we were exposed, an easy target for whatever further evil would come hurtling from the sky. Behind us was a wall of oncoming onlookers. We headed north along the promenade. Close to the end, we encountered a crazy person, yelling about the apocalypse and how our sins had wrought this destruction.
There was no thought of going to work now. We had to get inside. As they walked hand in hand through the filling streets, the Indignant Citizen and his wife did not speak. Along the way we heard snippets of conversation, but nothing that stuck with us. We went upstairs and turned on the TV.
Subways and roads into Manhattan: closed. There would be no going to work. The Indignant Citizen called his parents in Oregon. 7:30 a.m. there. His mother answered. Hearing his voice, she asked if he was OK. “Yeah, I’m OK. We saw the second plane from the promenade.” “What are you talking about?” his mother asked. “You haven’t been watching TV?” “We just got up.” “You should turn on the TV. We’re safe. I have to go. I love you.”
Then the Indignant Citizen called a coworker in Midtown. As he was making arrangements to coordinate some kind of coverage for the magazine, he heard a roar like another jet. From the other room, his wife called out, “I think the building just collapsed.” The Indignant Citizen hung up and went to the living room. Indeed, the South Tower had just caved in, reduced to a smoking pile of metal and dust. The North Tower fell a short time later, in the same way. Later, workers clearing the debris described their amazement at clearing rubble from two massive office buildings but not finding a single desk, or even a phone. Everything had been pulverized or smashed beyond recognition. One chunk of debris four feet thick comprised four floors of one of the buildings—more than 40 vertical feet, plus everything in between.
We spent the rest of the day stupefied watching TV. The Indignant Citizen spent a good part of the following night, and many subsequent nights watching TV. Later that afternoon, after the skies above our apartment cleared, we walked down to the promenade again. Just as we arrived, 7 World Trade Center collapsed, the drifting dust and smoke driving us back inside, and we again cranked the windows shut.
As summer faded into fall, and northwest winds brought cooler air, they also brought the stink of ever smoldering Pile into our bedroom. Closing the windows helped, a little, but the stench of burning oil and tires and God knows what else seeped through the cracks. It was stifling and we couldn’t breathe.
Why bring all this up now, four years later? Because we can’t forget. We were lucky. Everyone we knew in the towers got out. Some people we know well knew people who didn’t. The firehouse on Middagh Street, a few blocks from our apartment, Engine 205, Ladder 118, lost eight firefighters. They were guys we’d see around the neighborhood, in the Key Food, hanging out in front of the firehouse. The New York Daily News ran a photo on the front of its Oct. 5 of Ladder 118 racing across the empty Brooklyn Bridge with the two towers burning in the background. Someone in a high rise had taken it by chance. It is a haunting image, like so many from that day.
It is a day that haunts all of us still; and will perhaps forever. The day is gone, but what it wrought has sent us hurtling in a direction perhaps none of us could have imagined. War. More death. Fiscal hardship. Censorship. Government encroachment upon civil rights and personal liberties. Fear.
Ah yes, The Fear. In lighter moments, the Indignant Citizen tells people Sept. 11 is proof that the sun will shine even on a dog’s ass some days. His personal opinion: the terrorists succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, and will never again be able to pull of a similar stunt. The odds are against it. One wind shift here or a solar flare there and Sept. 11 never happens at all. But it doesn’t matter if Al Qaeda or some other group ever attacks the U.S. again. They’ve already sown The Fear, and that Fear is causing us to do strange things.
At this point, the Indignant Citizen fears The Fear more than he does the terrorists.
Not “nine-eleven” as it’s commonly referred to, September 11. September for the month, 11 for the day. Let’s give the date the respect it deserves by at least calling it what it is, not some ill-conceived abbreviation designed for easy media packaging.
For those who don’t know the story, the Indignant Citizen and his wife were living in Brooklyn Heights and getting ready for work and school the morning of Sept. 11 when word came over WNYC that there had been an explosion at the World Trade Center. There wasn’t any particular note of alarm in the announcer’s voice, and we hadn’t heard anything in our apartment, which was about a mile from the Trade Center site as the seagull flies. We continued getting ready, tying ties, making breakfast, looking for shoes. At about 10 to 9, the announcer came back on after a break to plug upcoming programming and said reports were now coming in that a plane had hit the north tower of the Trade Center. This was interesting enough that the Indignant Citizen flicked on the TV and turned to NY1, the local all-news station, to see if there was any footage of what he assumed would be the tail of a small plane sticking out of the building.
The image on TV was from the north, and it showed a gaping, flaming, smoking hole near the top of the tower. That was no Cessna, the Indignant Citizen remembers thinking, and perhaps saying out loud. At about that time, the Indignant Citizen’s wife came into the room and saw what was on TV. Expletives were exchanged. One of us suggested we should grab our cameras and walk three blocks out of our way to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade to snap some pictures before we went into the subway and to work. Each of us took our 35 millimeter cameras and started walking toward the river.
We were not alone. By this time word of the crash had spread, and others in the neighborhood were making their way to the promenade, among them our upstairs neighbor, an off-duty New York cop. It was about a block from the ramp leading from Columbia Terrace to the promenade when the Indignant Citizen first glimpsed the gray smoke, and then millions of sheets of paper fluttering in the blue sky across the river, kind of toward us but just to the south. The sound of helicopters and of emergency vehicles’ sirens filled the air, mixing with road noise from the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway underneath us and the hum of boats on the East River. Both of us broke out our cameras and began taking pictures. The Indignant Citizen quickly shot up the 10 or so frames left on the roll of film in his camera, which he had started four days earlier on Saturday, when we spent the day around the World Trade and World Financial centers, shooting the buildings from different angles.
As the Indignant Citizen dropped back, away from the railing and under the canopy of sycamore trees, he noticed for the first time people on cellular phones with worried looks on their faces, staring achingly at the smoking tower and pleading with whomever was on the other end for information, or to get out. One woman close by was asking if whomever she was talking to had seen her husband that morning.
Just then the Indignant Citizen noticed another plane moving across the harbor. His first thought was that it was a flight on approach to LaGuardia. It was not uncommon to see planes fly up the Hudson or over Brooklyn. Still, something seemed odd about it. It was too low, or it was on a strange trajectory. Something prompted the Indignant Citizen to say, out loud, “I’m surprised they haven’t closed the flight pattern.” Then time seemed to speed up, the plane appeared to go into a kind of fast forward for a moment, quickly closing the gap between it and the Lower Manhattan skyline. It banked, and the morning sun clearly revealed that it was a United Airlines jet. We could hear the whine of the engines, a sound that continues to haunt both the Indignant Citizen and his wife to this day.
Then the plane disappeared behind some of the taller buildings along the East River. Although it should have emerged and continued up the island, instead we saw a fireball, followed almost instantly by two distinct concussions—boom ... BOOM! As the black smoke mushroomed up upward, the Indignant Citizen’s wife turned into his shoulder and sobbed, but only for a moment. People gasped. A woman screamed. Next to us, a New York cop who had been on a bike talking on a pay phone yelled, “The plane hit the building. It flew into the fuckin’ building!” Then he slammed the phone down and rode away, presumably toward downtown. With his arm around his wife, the Indignant Citizen turned and looked for his neighbor, who had been standing just over his left shoulder seconds ago. He was gone.
“Where did the plane go?” the Indignant Citizen's wife asked. In hindsight, the question seems surprising, given her initial sobs. But the brain is a funny instrument. Sometimes, when you see something like a plane fly into a building and explode, you instantly recognize it for a tragic event, but only moments later you have reduced it mentally to a best-case scenario. We didn’t just see that. The plane must’ve been empty. It wasn’t as large a plane was we thought. Nobody was in the buildings.
“It’s in the building,” the Indignant Citizen responded quietly. We stared at the now two buildings on fire. More paper was fluttering through the air around the towers, and the sound of emergency sirens filled the air. Murmurs among the growing crowd now turned into shouts. “That was deliberate. This is an attack!” Sounds of panic began to swell, joining sobbing and unintelligible screaming. All the while more people were arriving at the promenade. The Indignant Citizen asked his wife if she had more pictures left. Yes. You should take some. She did.
Suddenly the Indignant Citizen was overcome with the sense that we—everyone on the promenade—were in danger. We had to leave immediately. It seemed like we were exposed, an easy target for whatever further evil would come hurtling from the sky. Behind us was a wall of oncoming onlookers. We headed north along the promenade. Close to the end, we encountered a crazy person, yelling about the apocalypse and how our sins had wrought this destruction.
There was no thought of going to work now. We had to get inside. As they walked hand in hand through the filling streets, the Indignant Citizen and his wife did not speak. Along the way we heard snippets of conversation, but nothing that stuck with us. We went upstairs and turned on the TV.
Subways and roads into Manhattan: closed. There would be no going to work. The Indignant Citizen called his parents in Oregon. 7:30 a.m. there. His mother answered. Hearing his voice, she asked if he was OK. “Yeah, I’m OK. We saw the second plane from the promenade.” “What are you talking about?” his mother asked. “You haven’t been watching TV?” “We just got up.” “You should turn on the TV. We’re safe. I have to go. I love you.”
Then the Indignant Citizen called a coworker in Midtown. As he was making arrangements to coordinate some kind of coverage for the magazine, he heard a roar like another jet. From the other room, his wife called out, “I think the building just collapsed.” The Indignant Citizen hung up and went to the living room. Indeed, the South Tower had just caved in, reduced to a smoking pile of metal and dust. The North Tower fell a short time later, in the same way. Later, workers clearing the debris described their amazement at clearing rubble from two massive office buildings but not finding a single desk, or even a phone. Everything had been pulverized or smashed beyond recognition. One chunk of debris four feet thick comprised four floors of one of the buildings—more than 40 vertical feet, plus everything in between.
We spent the rest of the day stupefied watching TV. The Indignant Citizen spent a good part of the following night, and many subsequent nights watching TV. Later that afternoon, after the skies above our apartment cleared, we walked down to the promenade again. Just as we arrived, 7 World Trade Center collapsed, the drifting dust and smoke driving us back inside, and we again cranked the windows shut.
As summer faded into fall, and northwest winds brought cooler air, they also brought the stink of ever smoldering Pile into our bedroom. Closing the windows helped, a little, but the stench of burning oil and tires and God knows what else seeped through the cracks. It was stifling and we couldn’t breathe.
Why bring all this up now, four years later? Because we can’t forget. We were lucky. Everyone we knew in the towers got out. Some people we know well knew people who didn’t. The firehouse on Middagh Street, a few blocks from our apartment, Engine 205, Ladder 118, lost eight firefighters. They were guys we’d see around the neighborhood, in the Key Food, hanging out in front of the firehouse. The New York Daily News ran a photo on the front of its Oct. 5 of Ladder 118 racing across the empty Brooklyn Bridge with the two towers burning in the background. Someone in a high rise had taken it by chance. It is a haunting image, like so many from that day.
It is a day that haunts all of us still; and will perhaps forever. The day is gone, but what it wrought has sent us hurtling in a direction perhaps none of us could have imagined. War. More death. Fiscal hardship. Censorship. Government encroachment upon civil rights and personal liberties. Fear.
Ah yes, The Fear. In lighter moments, the Indignant Citizen tells people Sept. 11 is proof that the sun will shine even on a dog’s ass some days. His personal opinion: the terrorists succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, and will never again be able to pull of a similar stunt. The odds are against it. One wind shift here or a solar flare there and Sept. 11 never happens at all. But it doesn’t matter if Al Qaeda or some other group ever attacks the U.S. again. They’ve already sown The Fear, and that Fear is causing us to do strange things.
At this point, the Indignant Citizen fears The Fear more than he does the terrorists.
Friday, September 09, 2005
Sold Down the River
With each day that passes under the persistent cloud cover that Hurricane Katrina has left over the United States, it has become increasingly clear to the Indignant Citizen that life as we have known it here in this country is over. Gone. Never to return.
When the Indignant Citizen says this, he is not employing hyperbole. Quite simply, the delicate house of cards that passes for our economy is falling in on itself, a few cards at a time. The reason: The card house is built on cheap energy. In case you hadn’t noticed, energy is suddenly quite expensive in relative terms.
A few cards started to collapse when crude oil hit $70 per barrel. That means down the road, everything made from crude oil—gasoline, motor oil, plastics, jet fuel—will be more expensive. That’s down the road.
Presently, however, gasoline futures spiked in late August at more than $2.60 per gallon because Katrina clobbered the Gulf Coast oil refineries. Gasoline futures prices on the New York Mercantile Exchange had been climbing steadily since late May/early June, when they were around $1.40 per gallon. Now, gas stations near the Indignant Citizen’s home consistently post prices above $3 per gallon for regular unleaded, and in some cases it’s around $3.50 per gallon. That means to fill up a Ford Explorer, currently the best selling SUV, with its 22.5-gallon tank a driver could conceivably have to fork over about $60, assuming that driver filled up when the tank got down to about a one-quarter full.
That’s not an insignificant amount of money, particularly if one is paying it out several times a month, or more, depending on how much suburban running around one has to do with kids and shopping and jobs. Ford says its Explorer averages 16 miles per gallon in the city and 21 on the highway. So let’s figure a mix of two-thirds city and one-third highway driving. That should average out to about 19.5 miles per gallon. Assuming, again, the typical driver fills up when the tank gets down to about a quarter, that gives an Explorer driver 16.9 gallons to work with, roughly 330 miles. If that seems like a lot, keep in mind the average American drove 29 miles per day according to the 2001-2002 National Household Travel Survey, conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics. Surely that number is higher now, but even at the old figure that’s about 11 days worth of gas, if a driver is average, or about $180 in gas each month.
That’s money spent just on gasoline, and just for one car. Most families have more than one car, and more than one daily commuter. It translates to less money to spend on groceries, less on clothes, less on cheap plastic crap at Wal-Mart, less to spend on home entertainment systems … you get the picture. Remove a few more cards from the economic house.
Now just this morning (Thursday), the Indignant Citizen learned via the morning news on the radio that his natural gas home heating bill is set to increase by 70% this winter. Seventy percent! People, that’s nearly double. You know what that means? Last winter, after enjoying for years the free heat that often comes with renting, the Indignant Citizen experienced severe sticker shock when he opened his Nicor gas bill and found that, with the thermostat set at 68 degrees and new energy efficient windows throughout the house, his gas bill topped $200. Immediately the Indignant Citizen cut the thermostat to 65, began wearing layers in the house and cuddled with the missus for warmth. The direct and pleasant benefits of cuddling aside, the gas bills dropped to the $160-per-month range, which was tolerable.
But a 70% cost increase this winter means the Indignant Citizen will be paying in the neighborhood of $275 a month to shiver in his own home.
Upon hearing this, the Indignant Citizen immediately slashed his daily coffee budget by 80%. That means no Starbucks four days a week. Now just think if everyone reacted the same way. Suddenly we see something we’ve never seen before: Starbucks stores closing.
Flick a few more cards out.
The ripple effects of higher energy prices do not stop at Starbucks, though. Higher oil and natural gas prices mean it costs more to move goods from place to place, and to keep the lights on in stores. Retailers aren’t going to just absorb those costs; they’re going to pass them on to consumers. For the Freedom Fries-loving crowd out there, “consumers” means you and the Indignant Citizen, in other words, people who buy shit.
Higher prices might cause people to put off purchases, which means inventory piles up, which means factory orders decline, which means factory workers (the few still employed here) get laid off, which means less spending, which means more layoffs. Can you say “Depression?”
Oh, the Indignant Citizen can hear you snickering out there. “Depression. HAH! He’s lost his fucking mind. I’m clicking over to MLB.com. I want to see what the Yankees magic number is.” Well fuck you. The Yankees magic number is a big, fat, sweaty Z-E-R-O, because they’re not going to do shit in the playoffs, if they even make the playoffs. That team is on a hundred-mile-a-hour bus ride down a dead-end road, and the crash at the end will not be pretty. All that will be left will be 206 million one dollar bills slowly blowing away in the breeze of a swinging third strike. Fucking Yankees fans. . . .
But we were talking about the Depression. Think about this, people. Don’t you see the connections? The lines between the dots are thick and black. When energy becomes expensive, everything becomes more expensive. When everything suddenly costs more, but salaries do not increase at a rate sufficient to cover the additional expense, people cut back on spending. When that happens, the economy slows down.
We’ve been sold down the river by morally bankrupt politicians and their appointed policy makers. They told us the future was bright and full of promise. But they squandered tomorrow on yesterday’s votes. The Indignant Citizen fears, and with good reason, that the days of hopping in the car and driving to, say, Madison, Wis., for a long weekend on a whim are near an end. So, too, is getting on an airplane and flying coast-to-coast-to-coast (that’s “round trip” for you Operation Iraqi Freedom believers) for less than the cost of two courtside seats at a Bulls game.
Can we live with that? Sure. But it wasn’t part of the contract. They promised us our way of life was “not negotiable.” In a way, they were right. Turns out no negotiation was necessary, or even offered.
When the Indignant Citizen says this, he is not employing hyperbole. Quite simply, the delicate house of cards that passes for our economy is falling in on itself, a few cards at a time. The reason: The card house is built on cheap energy. In case you hadn’t noticed, energy is suddenly quite expensive in relative terms.
A few cards started to collapse when crude oil hit $70 per barrel. That means down the road, everything made from crude oil—gasoline, motor oil, plastics, jet fuel—will be more expensive. That’s down the road.
Presently, however, gasoline futures spiked in late August at more than $2.60 per gallon because Katrina clobbered the Gulf Coast oil refineries. Gasoline futures prices on the New York Mercantile Exchange had been climbing steadily since late May/early June, when they were around $1.40 per gallon. Now, gas stations near the Indignant Citizen’s home consistently post prices above $3 per gallon for regular unleaded, and in some cases it’s around $3.50 per gallon. That means to fill up a Ford Explorer, currently the best selling SUV, with its 22.5-gallon tank a driver could conceivably have to fork over about $60, assuming that driver filled up when the tank got down to about a one-quarter full.
That’s not an insignificant amount of money, particularly if one is paying it out several times a month, or more, depending on how much suburban running around one has to do with kids and shopping and jobs. Ford says its Explorer averages 16 miles per gallon in the city and 21 on the highway. So let’s figure a mix of two-thirds city and one-third highway driving. That should average out to about 19.5 miles per gallon. Assuming, again, the typical driver fills up when the tank gets down to about a quarter, that gives an Explorer driver 16.9 gallons to work with, roughly 330 miles. If that seems like a lot, keep in mind the average American drove 29 miles per day according to the 2001-2002 National Household Travel Survey, conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics. Surely that number is higher now, but even at the old figure that’s about 11 days worth of gas, if a driver is average, or about $180 in gas each month.
That’s money spent just on gasoline, and just for one car. Most families have more than one car, and more than one daily commuter. It translates to less money to spend on groceries, less on clothes, less on cheap plastic crap at Wal-Mart, less to spend on home entertainment systems … you get the picture. Remove a few more cards from the economic house.
Now just this morning (Thursday), the Indignant Citizen learned via the morning news on the radio that his natural gas home heating bill is set to increase by 70% this winter. Seventy percent! People, that’s nearly double. You know what that means? Last winter, after enjoying for years the free heat that often comes with renting, the Indignant Citizen experienced severe sticker shock when he opened his Nicor gas bill and found that, with the thermostat set at 68 degrees and new energy efficient windows throughout the house, his gas bill topped $200. Immediately the Indignant Citizen cut the thermostat to 65, began wearing layers in the house and cuddled with the missus for warmth. The direct and pleasant benefits of cuddling aside, the gas bills dropped to the $160-per-month range, which was tolerable.
But a 70% cost increase this winter means the Indignant Citizen will be paying in the neighborhood of $275 a month to shiver in his own home.
Upon hearing this, the Indignant Citizen immediately slashed his daily coffee budget by 80%. That means no Starbucks four days a week. Now just think if everyone reacted the same way. Suddenly we see something we’ve never seen before: Starbucks stores closing.
Flick a few more cards out.
The ripple effects of higher energy prices do not stop at Starbucks, though. Higher oil and natural gas prices mean it costs more to move goods from place to place, and to keep the lights on in stores. Retailers aren’t going to just absorb those costs; they’re going to pass them on to consumers. For the Freedom Fries-loving crowd out there, “consumers” means you and the Indignant Citizen, in other words, people who buy shit.
Higher prices might cause people to put off purchases, which means inventory piles up, which means factory orders decline, which means factory workers (the few still employed here) get laid off, which means less spending, which means more layoffs. Can you say “Depression?”
Oh, the Indignant Citizen can hear you snickering out there. “Depression. HAH! He’s lost his fucking mind. I’m clicking over to MLB.com. I want to see what the Yankees magic number is.” Well fuck you. The Yankees magic number is a big, fat, sweaty Z-E-R-O, because they’re not going to do shit in the playoffs, if they even make the playoffs. That team is on a hundred-mile-a-hour bus ride down a dead-end road, and the crash at the end will not be pretty. All that will be left will be 206 million one dollar bills slowly blowing away in the breeze of a swinging third strike. Fucking Yankees fans. . . .
But we were talking about the Depression. Think about this, people. Don’t you see the connections? The lines between the dots are thick and black. When energy becomes expensive, everything becomes more expensive. When everything suddenly costs more, but salaries do not increase at a rate sufficient to cover the additional expense, people cut back on spending. When that happens, the economy slows down.
We’ve been sold down the river by morally bankrupt politicians and their appointed policy makers. They told us the future was bright and full of promise. But they squandered tomorrow on yesterday’s votes. The Indignant Citizen fears, and with good reason, that the days of hopping in the car and driving to, say, Madison, Wis., for a long weekend on a whim are near an end. So, too, is getting on an airplane and flying coast-to-coast-to-coast (that’s “round trip” for you Operation Iraqi Freedom believers) for less than the cost of two courtside seats at a Bulls game.
Can we live with that? Sure. But it wasn’t part of the contract. They promised us our way of life was “not negotiable.” In a way, they were right. Turns out no negotiation was necessary, or even offered.
Wednesday, September 07, 2005
Katrina Exposes The Great Divide
For a week, now, the Indignant Citizen has struggled to find words to describe what occurred on the U.S. Gulf Coast.
“Cataclysm.” Check.
“Catastrophe.” Double check.
“Clusterfuck.” Triple check.
And that’s just the C’s. Other words that have been tossed around in the same careless manner with which the storm, Katrina, tossed boats and houses and lives include “racist,” “incompetent,” “heroic,” “lawless,” “squalor,” and let’s not forget “toxic.”
And certainly all of those words have applied in one way or another following the costliest (likely in terms of both money and lives) natural disaster ever to strike the United States of Petroleum … oops, I mean America: Hurricane Katrina.
But after so much searching for the right words to tap a theme here, to put this monumental tragedy into perspective—to offer some goddamn clarity—in the end perhaps our goofy child president’s mother, the Other Barbara Bush, said it best. Here she is quoted in an Associated Press story picked up by the New York Times: “What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality,” she said during a radio interview with the American Public Media program “Marketplace.” “And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.”
Yes, it must be of great comfort to the tens of thousands of former New Orleans residents currently living on cots on the floor of the Astrodome in Houston that the former First Lady of the United States can relate so closely to their situation. Why, she seems to be the first to grasp the notion that that ol’ hurricane, Katrina, was a blessing in disguise, freeing these people from their underprivileged lives in the Bayou as well as, you know, their homes, their families and all their worldly possessions.
And right there, ladies and gentlemen, in the words uttered by the gentle “Bar” as she gazed over the sea of downtrodden Negros bused into Houston from another city, there lies the fault line neatly splitting this … this event neatly in half for this country of haves and, increasingly, have-nots.
Illinois Sen. Barack Obama put it this way in the Sun-Times: “I think there were a set of assumptions made by federal officials that people would hop in their SUVs, and top off with a $100 tank of gas and [get some] Poland Spring water” and flee the storm.
But we can extend the attribution of those assumptions beyond “federal officials.” The Indignant Citizen overheard a conversation among coworkers last Wednesday that made his skin crawl and his blood boil. Partaking in this discussion were three “haves,” which is to say three white, middle-management males. It went something like this:
White Male #1: “Can you believe this shit on TV? These people are like wild animals.”
White Male #2: “I know. You didn’t see looting and that shit in New York after 9/11.”
White Male #3: “Who’s going to want to send donations to help those people after watching them go crazy in the streets on TV? I’m not. I’m not sending them anything.”
Revisionist history is always so nice. So perfect. In Revisionist History Land, the Indignant Citizen scored the winning goal in the state championship game for his high school soccer team. Of course the reality of an own goal in the last game of a 3-9 season was much different. And in New York cops and firefighters, the same heroes who saved thousands and were rightly lauded in the press, looted the stores underneath the collapsed Twin Towers even as the dust settled.
The Indignant Citizen also spoke with a former Red Cross employee who said, with conviction, that the media was overhyping stories about refugees trapped amid child rapes, shootings, feces-smeared walls and suicides at the squalid Superdome and Convention Center. “They’re poor, and they have a certain victim mentality to begin with,” the former Red Cross employee said. “Stressful situations just tend to exacerbate it, and you get stories like the ones you’re seeing on TV.”
As the water in New Orleans rose, the Indignant Citizen’s heart sank. This storm, which so ruthlessly and completely stripped the physical landscape, laid open New Orleans’—and the nation’s—social fabric, exposing us to one another for what we are: Haves and have-nots. It has illuminated the gulf between those two that has been hidden by the darkness of denial, and it has shown, clearly and decisively, that there are many more people on the have-nots side of the equation than on the haves side.
There is plenty of blame to be shared for the humanitarian disaster that followed the hurricane itself. Local government, at least in New Orleans’ case, was shown to be corrupt and inept at protecting its own citizens. Why didn’t the city evacuate those who could not evacuate themselves, using school buses, public transportation and any other means available? Why did it fail to protect its telecommunications system and why did it not have enough food and water at the Superdome to handle the flood of refugees?
How could local, state and federal officials all have so badly underestimated the damage Katrina would cause? How could they not have understood the limits of the levee system built to keep the Mississippi River and Lake Ponchartrain at bay? Why did the Homeland Security Department, via the Federal Emergency Management Agency, wait three days to request airplanes from the airlines to evacuate flood victims? Why weren’t there enough helicopters stationed near the Gulf to deal with rescue and relief efforts?
As the media post mortem continues, papers are delivering disturbing revelations. The Wall Street Journal, for example, published a story on Sept. 6 that said FEMA, after being subsumed into Homeland Security in 2003, lost control of $800 million in disaster preparedness grants in the intervening years. The agency could give grants to local governments to buy chemical suits, but not to upgrade telecom infrastructure or to buy equipment to deal with the aftermath of natural disasters.
Additionally, FEMA apparently had to abide by Homeland Security rules when it came to chartering airliners to get victims out of the city. Those rules mandated that each flight have an air marshall and that passengers undergo full security screenings complete with metal detectors and X-ray machines. But it took days to arrange for enough air marshals and there was no electricity to power the screening machines.
When Louisiana National Guardsmen deployed to Iraq, they took special equipment that could have been used in New Orleans with them, including high-water vehicles, refueling tankers and generators. The assumption was that if Louisiana was hit by a major storm, National Guard units from Mississippi and Alabama could deploy to help. Katrina caused damage from Texas to Florida, tying up those adjacent Guard units in their home states.
U.S. Army troops at Fort Polk, near New Orleans, weren’t deployed by the Pentagon because a key unit there is preparing to ship out for Afghanistan this winter. Meanwhile it took the 82nd Airborne three days to arrive in Louisiana. It’s designed to be anywhere in the world in 18 hours.
The list goes on. As bad as the storm was, the pathetic post-storm response was a clusterfuck of monumental proportions that in the end may wind up killing as many people as the wind and rain.
You can say some of the victims failed to take care of themselves. Certainly there are those who could have left did not. But many who stayed had no choice, or saw no choice, which is pretty much the same thing. They had no access to a car in which to flee, and even if they did they couldn’t fathom leaving behind their posessions. Doing so would have been tantamount to giving it away, and people’s desire to not lose what they have is often inversely correlated with how much they have to lose.
Then there were stories of those who left with less than they could have. One woman interviewed on TV said other guests at the hotel where she and her husband were staying before the storm packed up their cars and drove off, declining others’ pleas for rides despite the fact they had plenty of room. There is a special plane in Hell for people like that, and the Indignant Citizen will enjoy projecting molten piss into their screaming mouths in the next life.
Socially, we have arrived at a crossroads. Forget for now whether or not to rebuild New Orleans and the fact that the Cheap Oil era just ended with a thud. Those are subjects for another day.
Katrina has exposed the canyon that separates the two sides of our society. One side grows in number while the other grows in wealth. How will we address this? Will we address it at all? In the answers to those questions lies the future of this country.
One final thought: The casinos along the Gulf, businesses to which many have-nots were drawn because the wages were decent and offered a chance to join the haves, were completely destroyed. Those jobs are gone. However a number of the casino companies have promised to pay their workers for 90 days, through November. Wal-Mart, on the other hand, that engine of the New Economy to which so many haves point as a beacon for growth and to which many have-nots have struggled in vain to get ahead; Wal-Mart, the largest retailer in the U.S.; Wal-Mart has generously offered its newly unemployed workers a whole three days’ pay.
The Indignant Citizen wonders how Barbara Bush would spin that.
“Cataclysm.” Check.
“Catastrophe.” Double check.
“Clusterfuck.” Triple check.
And that’s just the C’s. Other words that have been tossed around in the same careless manner with which the storm, Katrina, tossed boats and houses and lives include “racist,” “incompetent,” “heroic,” “lawless,” “squalor,” and let’s not forget “toxic.”
And certainly all of those words have applied in one way or another following the costliest (likely in terms of both money and lives) natural disaster ever to strike the United States of Petroleum … oops, I mean America: Hurricane Katrina.
But after so much searching for the right words to tap a theme here, to put this monumental tragedy into perspective—to offer some goddamn clarity—in the end perhaps our goofy child president’s mother, the Other Barbara Bush, said it best. Here she is quoted in an Associated Press story picked up by the New York Times: “What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality,” she said during a radio interview with the American Public Media program “Marketplace.” “And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.”
Yes, it must be of great comfort to the tens of thousands of former New Orleans residents currently living on cots on the floor of the Astrodome in Houston that the former First Lady of the United States can relate so closely to their situation. Why, she seems to be the first to grasp the notion that that ol’ hurricane, Katrina, was a blessing in disguise, freeing these people from their underprivileged lives in the Bayou as well as, you know, their homes, their families and all their worldly possessions.
And right there, ladies and gentlemen, in the words uttered by the gentle “Bar” as she gazed over the sea of downtrodden Negros bused into Houston from another city, there lies the fault line neatly splitting this … this event neatly in half for this country of haves and, increasingly, have-nots.
Illinois Sen. Barack Obama put it this way in the Sun-Times: “I think there were a set of assumptions made by federal officials that people would hop in their SUVs, and top off with a $100 tank of gas and [get some] Poland Spring water” and flee the storm.
But we can extend the attribution of those assumptions beyond “federal officials.” The Indignant Citizen overheard a conversation among coworkers last Wednesday that made his skin crawl and his blood boil. Partaking in this discussion were three “haves,” which is to say three white, middle-management males. It went something like this:
White Male #1: “Can you believe this shit on TV? These people are like wild animals.”
White Male #2: “I know. You didn’t see looting and that shit in New York after 9/11.”
White Male #3: “Who’s going to want to send donations to help those people after watching them go crazy in the streets on TV? I’m not. I’m not sending them anything.”
Revisionist history is always so nice. So perfect. In Revisionist History Land, the Indignant Citizen scored the winning goal in the state championship game for his high school soccer team. Of course the reality of an own goal in the last game of a 3-9 season was much different. And in New York cops and firefighters, the same heroes who saved thousands and were rightly lauded in the press, looted the stores underneath the collapsed Twin Towers even as the dust settled.
The Indignant Citizen also spoke with a former Red Cross employee who said, with conviction, that the media was overhyping stories about refugees trapped amid child rapes, shootings, feces-smeared walls and suicides at the squalid Superdome and Convention Center. “They’re poor, and they have a certain victim mentality to begin with,” the former Red Cross employee said. “Stressful situations just tend to exacerbate it, and you get stories like the ones you’re seeing on TV.”
As the water in New Orleans rose, the Indignant Citizen’s heart sank. This storm, which so ruthlessly and completely stripped the physical landscape, laid open New Orleans’—and the nation’s—social fabric, exposing us to one another for what we are: Haves and have-nots. It has illuminated the gulf between those two that has been hidden by the darkness of denial, and it has shown, clearly and decisively, that there are many more people on the have-nots side of the equation than on the haves side.
There is plenty of blame to be shared for the humanitarian disaster that followed the hurricane itself. Local government, at least in New Orleans’ case, was shown to be corrupt and inept at protecting its own citizens. Why didn’t the city evacuate those who could not evacuate themselves, using school buses, public transportation and any other means available? Why did it fail to protect its telecommunications system and why did it not have enough food and water at the Superdome to handle the flood of refugees?
How could local, state and federal officials all have so badly underestimated the damage Katrina would cause? How could they not have understood the limits of the levee system built to keep the Mississippi River and Lake Ponchartrain at bay? Why did the Homeland Security Department, via the Federal Emergency Management Agency, wait three days to request airplanes from the airlines to evacuate flood victims? Why weren’t there enough helicopters stationed near the Gulf to deal with rescue and relief efforts?
As the media post mortem continues, papers are delivering disturbing revelations. The Wall Street Journal, for example, published a story on Sept. 6 that said FEMA, after being subsumed into Homeland Security in 2003, lost control of $800 million in disaster preparedness grants in the intervening years. The agency could give grants to local governments to buy chemical suits, but not to upgrade telecom infrastructure or to buy equipment to deal with the aftermath of natural disasters.
Additionally, FEMA apparently had to abide by Homeland Security rules when it came to chartering airliners to get victims out of the city. Those rules mandated that each flight have an air marshall and that passengers undergo full security screenings complete with metal detectors and X-ray machines. But it took days to arrange for enough air marshals and there was no electricity to power the screening machines.
When Louisiana National Guardsmen deployed to Iraq, they took special equipment that could have been used in New Orleans with them, including high-water vehicles, refueling tankers and generators. The assumption was that if Louisiana was hit by a major storm, National Guard units from Mississippi and Alabama could deploy to help. Katrina caused damage from Texas to Florida, tying up those adjacent Guard units in their home states.
U.S. Army troops at Fort Polk, near New Orleans, weren’t deployed by the Pentagon because a key unit there is preparing to ship out for Afghanistan this winter. Meanwhile it took the 82nd Airborne three days to arrive in Louisiana. It’s designed to be anywhere in the world in 18 hours.
The list goes on. As bad as the storm was, the pathetic post-storm response was a clusterfuck of monumental proportions that in the end may wind up killing as many people as the wind and rain.
You can say some of the victims failed to take care of themselves. Certainly there are those who could have left did not. But many who stayed had no choice, or saw no choice, which is pretty much the same thing. They had no access to a car in which to flee, and even if they did they couldn’t fathom leaving behind their posessions. Doing so would have been tantamount to giving it away, and people’s desire to not lose what they have is often inversely correlated with how much they have to lose.
Then there were stories of those who left with less than they could have. One woman interviewed on TV said other guests at the hotel where she and her husband were staying before the storm packed up their cars and drove off, declining others’ pleas for rides despite the fact they had plenty of room. There is a special plane in Hell for people like that, and the Indignant Citizen will enjoy projecting molten piss into their screaming mouths in the next life.
Socially, we have arrived at a crossroads. Forget for now whether or not to rebuild New Orleans and the fact that the Cheap Oil era just ended with a thud. Those are subjects for another day.
Katrina has exposed the canyon that separates the two sides of our society. One side grows in number while the other grows in wealth. How will we address this? Will we address it at all? In the answers to those questions lies the future of this country.
One final thought: The casinos along the Gulf, businesses to which many have-nots were drawn because the wages were decent and offered a chance to join the haves, were completely destroyed. Those jobs are gone. However a number of the casino companies have promised to pay their workers for 90 days, through November. Wal-Mart, on the other hand, that engine of the New Economy to which so many haves point as a beacon for growth and to which many have-nots have struggled in vain to get ahead; Wal-Mart, the largest retailer in the U.S.; Wal-Mart has generously offered its newly unemployed workers a whole three days’ pay.
The Indignant Citizen wonders how Barbara Bush would spin that.
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