----- Original Message -----
From: "Stephen Vincent" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, September 02, 2005 11:55 AM
Subject: Re: He's okay
> Re the recovery of Fats D
> Ironic to re-hear replaying constantly in my head,
> "I found my thrill
> On Blueberry hill"
>
> When I was 13 I had no clue what it meant
> (Whether an actual place in the rural south or a form of male self-care,
> I still don't know.)
>
> But it is already something - as is the history of African-Americans - to
> imagine the music/song that will emerge from this tragedy. Always a weird
> white American luxury to listen to after the fact.
> "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" Indeed. (No, don't put an image of Bush's
> plane
> doing a New Orleans flyover into the song). Let it be a real rescue. And
> definitely not that refrain, "Let it be...."
> But, heah, do we have a government manufactured New Orleans holocaust
> going
> on? Out of sheer negligence - in spite of all the warnings about the
> levees,
> the need for protective marshlands, etc.
> A monumental open wound is going to be with us - USA - for a long time
> coming.
>
> Stephen V
>
In a way we would be fortunate if all this became a "monumental open wound."
But the function of the lapdog media, and of public ideology generally, is
prematurely to close wounds; it's OK if they fester as long as they do it
unseen. Homelessness. Decaying infrastructure. Illiteracy.
Impoverishment. Foreign debt. Neoimperialism. All the rest. There are
few words as hateful as "healing," the way it is generally used, and will be
used now.
Occasional exceptions to lapdogness in the media - yesterday Anderson Cooper
of CNN, who has been on the ground in Louisiana for four days, blew up at a
clueless (female, blue-dog Democrat) Senator who was congratulating other
politicians for their "concern." "It's hard with corpses floating by to
hear politicians pat each other on the back."
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