Monthly Archives: September 2021

Morning blog readers.

The lure of news is almost as insidious as the lure of having opinions.  Both tend to sneak up and catch a person unawares.  A person can be going along fine, only picking up the occasional piece of news of the world overhearing conversations of others or a glance at a newspaper headline or two in a rack, then something happens to drag you in, and you’re back into the game.

It’s not just the particular thing you’re interested in, once you’re hooked.  Those newspapers are cunning in that way.  They throw in all this other matter that are none of a person’s business, but that tend to snag the mind like a treble hook.  (None of my business, I define as things I can do nothing about, can’t influence in any imaginable way, and aren’t happening to anyone I know personally.)

Then, there you are (me), suddenly knowing a lot of things about what’s going on in the world that I had no intention of knowing about, finding myself having opinions about them.

I see Biloxi was hit fairly hard.  Not much being said about it because it was lacking in the drama of the Super-dome anguish feeding frenzy.  Sorry for those Mississippians, sorry about Biloxi.  If Mississippians want to join the tribe of Native Americans that will almost inevitably be formed they’ll probably have to have a name and a Reservation of their own.  Maybe Fort Jackson, SC, can be vacated and given them.

It doesn’t work, putting different tribes on the same Rez.  The Navajo almost killed off all the Mescalero during those 15 years at Bosque Redondo.  It’s better the Mississippians have their own Rez.

I see where old Judge Rindquist died.  Whew.  Haven’t thought about that guy in a couple of decades.  I recall when Tricky Dixon appointed him, me, everyone so full of news and opinions, all of us young minds fairly certain it was the end of Life As We Knew It.  (I’ll point out for you king-lovers that he had to have the consent of Congress, Tricky Dixon, appointing Rindquist…. I know it must gall you, but the Constitution required it…. might still for all I know)

In some ways I suppose it was nearing the end of Life as We knew it, though that appointment hadn’t much to do with the matter.  A few decades of retrospect and the appointment was roughly a non-event, though it had our juices flowing at the time.  In those days everyone I knew was full of the opinion that what this country needed was a Supreme Court stacked with judges who could read popular opinion into the words of the Constitution, which it had been doing since Franklin Roosevelt.

What we didn’t know was that it wasn’t a good thing we wanted, but that the appointment of this one and a court full of judges who were ‘conservative’ by the post-WWII definition wasn’t going to save the Constitution.  Those new ones couldn’t read the words it said any better than the Douglas Court.  They just read it more to the flavor of Republicans, than Demos, which was considered an offense.

The framers of the Constitution wouldn’t have liked either of those courts much.  They’d have chided themselves for not anticipating descendants who didn’t want a hard-and-fast Constitutional document with things all nailed down with words that meant something, and maybe done something to prevent it.  But, of course, they’d chide themselves for not anticipating a lot of things they might have prevented, such as a series of presidents riding along on Emergency Powers for half a century fighting wars without declarations by Congress, getting the military and Federal cops into the business of kicking down the doors of Americans for various reasons, all that sort of thing.

Ah well.

I see a couple of 18 year old Albuquerquanisto youths got themselves in jail by going into a titty bar and having a series of ‘lap-dances’ they didn’t know the cost of on a per-dance basis…. ran up a bill for $2500 bucks and didn’t have the courtesy to pay.

That’s the sort of thing you don’t know unless you read newspapers.

Jack

An honest, workable solution with a future:

Those people are going to be a long time without homes, without jobs, without incomes.

What can we as a nation do to help?

You might think I’m being sarcastic, but I’m not. This can really be done:

1)  Vacate Fort Hood, Texas, Fort Sill Oklahoma, Fort Wachuka, AZ, Abilene Air Force Base, Abilene, Texas..

2)  Create a new tribe of Native Americans. Issue tribal census numbers to all the refugees and deed them each a residence and a few acres of land on the new Coonahss Reservations.

3)  Send them checks every month, let them have free health care from the US Public Health Service, same as other tribes.

4)  Assist them in building tribal casinos, but make it plain that THIS time the money has to go exclusively to the tribe, has to be used for the betterment of the individuals of the Coonahss tribe.

5)  Bring Bourbon Street, brick by brick to the new Reservation and allow them to use their own labors to rebuild it there as part of the new Coonahss Casino resort complex.

6)  Ship in truckloads of farm surplus that’s going to waste in grain elevators, or being shipped to other countries, so they can cook for themselves.

This is a plan that will work, blog readers. It’s a means of providing income, health care, homes to all those refugees at a minimal cost in deficit tax dollars.

All Americans have to do to see this happen is move a lot of troops to other military compounds and open their minds and imaginations to look for innovation as a solution.

But make no mistake about it.

These people are natives to America, mostly. They were born here, their ancestors were born here. They are certainly as deserving of a chance at a new life, a new start and any Native American born since 1900. They deserve the same rights and privileges derived from having been the victims of misfortune.

Jack

Watching an old video tonight, Kiss Me Kate, Keenan Winn and James Whitmore doing the soft-shoe tap dancing scene and singing, ‘Brush Up Your Shakespeare’.  All the windows open, curtains pulled, when a coyote howled almost under the window, certainly in the front yard.  Threw the cats into a panic, them going to catnap to get-outta-downrange-of-that-booger faster than I can tell it.

Not sure whether the coyote was just commenting on Winn and Whitmore, or whether it was something more fundamental to the film.

Shortly afterward the largest coyote concert I’ve ever heard began up on the mesa to the west.  Lots of spring pups solidly into adulthood now.

I’m thinking bro coyote’s going to make a powerful nuisance of himself this winter.

Jack

Behavioral changes and coyotes

This morning a close friend of mine attended services at the San Antonio Mission Church (Catholic) in the village. I’m a bit incredulous what happened next.

The priest was discussing the issue of how Christians ought to point out the sins of their neighbors. Then he stuck his toe into different waters.

“A lot of you mightn’t have noticed,” I’ll paraphrase him, “that on the very day the hurricane hit New Orleans, a hundred thousand gays and lesbians arrived to have a celebration of their sexuality and an enormous parade.

“Now, this mightn’t have been the work of the Lord, hitting New Orleans the way he once destroyed Sodom and Gonorrhea (me smiling to meself), but I just want you to think about it.”

Hey blog readers.

I refer you to this blog entry Thursday, September 01, 2005, entitled,

“Who’d have thunk it?

“Seems a body of leading edge Christian thinkers has figured out what caused that hurricane to hit New Orleans and do so much damage.

“It ain’t a chaos butterfly at all.

“It’s the Wrath of the Good Lord done it.

“All that sinning and drinking and whoring down on Bourbon Streetfinally caught up with them, evidently. The Good Lord finally got a belly-full of Mardi Gras.

“But don’t be surprised if you begin hearing all those flood victims in New Orleansaren’t deserving of Christian pity and help in their sufferings. They just naturally brought it all on themselves, like Sodomand whatchallit, Gonorrhea.

Next thing down the pike is probably going to involve those homeless Louisianans bringing the wrath down on the rest of us, as well, with their Godless frivolity.”

I’m not a Mormon, but I’ve always appreciated Brigham Young’s response when he heard there was a Christian army headed for Utah to straighten things out.

“We’ve all experienced a lot of Christian Charity before we came here, them confiscating our property, burning our houses, killing, beating and raping our families, murdering Joseph Smith.

Now they want to send us some more Christian Charity. Arm yourselves, stock up food, clothing, blankets, guns and ammunition and hide in the hills if you hope to survive.”

Don’t get the idea I’m as good at predicting lottery numbers as I am at predicting the behaviors of Christians. I’m not.

Jack

Jack wrote this in September, 2005. He gave the disaster of Hurricane Katrina a lot of thought.

An October, 2004, synopsis in a national magazine.  (A post which I am not including was a very long article written the previous year by National Geographic-J.). A well-researched, widely publicized feature that reads like a news story from last week?

That story didn’t come out of a crystal ball.  It came out of the mouths of all the people in a position to know what to expect, who knew it would happen.  People who study hurricanes and what they do, people who study geography, hydrology, emergency managements and disaster.

They all agreed.

Those people who were interviewed for the feature didn’t keep the information hidden.  It wasn’t in a folder drawing dust in the file cabinet.

Every one of the agencies who were interviewed to create the story had been communicating the information to the State of Louisiana and the City of New Orleans for decades, where evidently it DID sit in file drawers drawing dust.

I know for a fact this is true from personal observation.

During the early 1990s I toured those levies, the lower lying areas with FEMA officials, Red Cross officials, Emergency Management Coordinators from other States inthe FEMA Region VI, Corps of Engineers officials, and Louisiana State and local officials.  The precisely same information concerning what would happen if a major storm hit was communicated to and by everyone present.  It was obvious.  We even kicked around ideas involving specifics of needed emergency plans with City and State emergency managers.

A case can be made that when a tsunami hits and kills people it’s an accident.  When an earthquake hits in an earthquake prone area and lives are destroyed, it’s still an event that mightn’t have happened, had reason to catch residents by surprise.  A tornado in West Texas tornado alley is still a low probability at any give spot.

This is a disaster of another sort.

Responsibility lies with every human being to behave prudently in matters involving his own personal safety.  To look carefully at the traffic before venturing to cross a street with the knowledge that cars use that street.  To mosey over toward Metairie if there’s a hurricane stalking in the gulf.  But, before that, to elect officials of the sort who were responsible officials, who weren’t merely demigogues and rhetoriticians.

In this instance the secondary responsibility for the safety of the residents, making sure they had the information to allow them to make prudent choices, lay with the City and the Parrish.  An evacuation plan in place and tested.  Intergovernmental agreements with inland communities for shelters in the event of an evacuation.  Disaster plans in place and exercised.  Everyone educated on the possibilities, everyone knowing what would need to be done and when, where and how to do it.

The next level of responsibility lay with the State of Louisiana, and the Governor to absolutely drop a hammer on the heads on responsible local officials who weren’t doing their jobs.  To use every means available, legal, publicity, and volume to order, threaten, plead and cajole those City and Parrish officials to prepare for the inevitable.

This storm could have happened a decade from now and it would have been no different, maybe worse.  The City of New Orleans would have been no better prepared, and Louisiana would have been no better prepared.  The population would have been no better prepared.

The lazy, irresponsible, shirking attitude of the residents, the City and Parrish governments and the State of Louisiana would not have changed even though every year the inevitability of this event increased and they knew damned well it was doing it.

There are disasters, and there are disasters.

Jack

Edited in as an afterthought:

I did some drinking on Bourbon Street with the Louisiana State Flood Plain Administrator after that tour.  We talked about his problems implementing any kind of plan, even the minimums required by law in Louisiana.  He was a good guy, a solid, caring black man who’d really like to do his job.

“It’s politics, man.  The City doesn’t like exercising emergency plans.  It might upset the tourists.  Out in the parrishes it’s all cousins and nephews.  They don’t want to hear anything about anything but Federal grant money and new roads.”

This is Zuni Salt Lake.

It’s about forty miles south of the Zuni Rez, almost in AZ.

There’s a ghost town you can barely see in the pic…. used to be a considerable community down in there when it was private land, from the 1840s until the 1950s, evaporating salt from the huge concrete beds.  Most of the buildings are still intact, though they’re going away rapidly.

Today it belongs to the Zuni tribe, one section of land, but it’s not in the national trust as part of the Rez.  Tribes have been acquiring a lot of land from casino monies and other ways during the past decades, making the lands acquired ‘tribal’, but not Rez, which puts them into an interestingly ambiguous position insofar as road maintenance and county taxes.

Salt Lake was acquired as a piece of a lawsuit against the US government involving an airplane with a hydrogen bomb aboard that crashed on the Rez, with first responders being Zunis, but which the feds didn’t bother telling them about the bomb, leaving emergency workers exposed to hazardous materials without knowing it.  The tribe got a few million out of that, which they used to purchase 60k acres of land to the south of the Rez, but Salt Lake was thrown in as a bonus.

Salt Lake’s a sacred place for the Zunis, home of Salt Mother.  If you are willing to risk hopping the fence and wandering around down there ….. it’s a volcano crater with a hollow secondary plug you can climb, then a spiral trail leading back down inside … that’s where most of the rituals for Salt Mother are held… but all over that section you’ll pass over various religious items from recent times you’d be well advised to leave untouched.

Anyway, Salt Lake used to be the place all the tribes got their salt throughout history.  A place where a constant truce between warring tribes existed.

It’s also part of what the power companies would love to strip mine so El Paso and Phoenix can fire up their hair dryers every morning, and keep their homes refrigerated.

Which the Zunis believe would thoroughly piss off Salt Mother, with considerable resulting pain for the Zunis, and all the rest of us.

They might be right.

Jack