Things I Learned From a Hurricane

Thirty-five dollars for a case of bottled water, one hundred, thirty seven to rent a small car, and five for a gallon of gas, Et cetera, etc., etc., etc. In the book “Jonatha’s Truth,“ Fidel Castro asks U.S. President William Jameson Clayton, “How is it that when a disaster occurs, all of the common people behave like socialists, only to return to capitalism as soon as the crisis is over? Of course, there are the same few, the kind who rule in your country, who always seize the opportunity offered by disaster and misery to profit immensely.” Johanna, the book’s heroine, adds, “¡Cierto! you are a fraud, señor presidente, and a fraud before the wide world. The world and the nearly forty millions of your people who live in poverty know it, we know it, and you know it. What you are, yanqui, thunders so loudly, we can’t hear what you say to the contrary.”

Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans have exposed the fraud, played the little boy in the Hans Christian Anderson tale, “The Emperor and His Wonderful Clothes. The naked truth behind the “Land of Opportunity,” the “Land of the Free,” the “Nation of Laws,” and the “Greatest Nation in History” rhetoric is there for all the world to see.

Now Rita, with a knowing giggle, it seems, has pointed HER finger. “The Emperor doesn’t have any clothes on!” We’ve never been so naked, matter of fact.

So it may be time to call a spade a spade elsewhere, too.

Isn’t Mexico the way it is because Mexicans live there? How about Africa? Didn’t Somebody apparently long forgotten once say, “By their fruits shall ye know them?”

Texans, the news reports this morning, are on the way back home. Fuel has finally reached the two and a half million people who bugged out of Houston and places in the path of Hurricane Rita, and they’re going home in the same sane and careful manner they left. Behind them is a veritable garbage dump of dirty diapers, bottles, cans, clothes (amazing the amount of women’s underwear that always shows up in the aftermath of these events), wrappers of every conceivable sort, and more et cetera. All of it left by someone else (all those foreigners in the country, you know).

“Fruits?”

It was another society, and nation, who left town without thought for the obvious, got trapped in an instant parking lot, and ran out of gas. Not us. We’re far too “advanced.”

(During Hurricane Brett, in ’99, I had a ball riding alongside the stalled cars - and brains, conducting all kinds of surveys and experiments. For instance, forty-one people gave me the middle finger salute as I rolled past them. Two carloads offered me twenty dollars each for my twelve ounce water bottles, one fifty. In the second instance, kids, I gave everybody a swig (the guy did pass the bottle to the two kids in the back before helping himself. An astonishingly obese woman prompted another mental game: first, I confirmed the recently published figures telling us that sixty percent of us are grossly overweight. Then, I computed the amount of extra fuel necessary to transport all that blubber. I don’t remember any more, but it was a hefty figure, that I can tell you. There were other things I surveyed – you can gauge the flow of illegal aliens by checking the used toilet paper stacked in the corner of the rest and truck stop bathrooms, you know – but that will do to make my point. After watching two fights at the first truck stop, I decided to get off the interstate - and away from the carbon monoxide – and used back roads to go over to Kerrville.)

In the apartment complex where I’m currently shacked up to write, the recent hurricane was felt, too. Just two (the apartment manager and I) of the residents of the literally dozens of apartments boarded up windows and made preparations. The rest – never mind the fact that had the storm bulls-eyed us, they would have had no time to do anything and would have lost everything they own – are now telling the prudent ones, “See, we were right?” For them, things are back to normal – brain-dead, that is. Dumpsters are still overflowing, trash scattered from hell to breakfast everywhere, largely due the fact that two new families have moved in and haven’t the “smarts” to know that a packing box occupies fifty times the space it would were it crushed or flattened (when I removed and flattened them, the several dumpsters were less than half full).

“Fruits,” huh?

“Elsewhere,” to borrow from the news “anchors,” the nation’s oil companies, slobbering in anticipation of $6.00 a gallon gasoline, and certain in the knowledge of their victims’ mindless addiction, stand over an apprehensive and cowering populace, kicking it contemptuously in its figurative derriere. On the highways, nevertheless, proud (“united we stand”) “Americans” – there are thirty-four other nations in the hemisphere, you know - go on driving at 90 mph, driving concomitantly the price – of gasoline and everything dependent upon it (which is nearly everything they consume) even higher. The world watches in stupefied amazement, and growing irritation (“they hate us for our freedom”). The fat man at the planetary table is becoming a real menace.

The world has to pay more at the pump, too, you know. “Fruits.”

Of course, it would subject me to the righteous fury of all the unco guid (Robert Burns' Scottish dialect – he was an eighteenth century Scottish poet), were I to mention that I made during the Hurricane Brett evacuation a survey of which racial, ethic, and cultural groups did what along the way. It’s right there for all the world to see, and I can’t help looking. There isn’t any doubt about it, either. Mexico is like Mexico because of Mexicans, Africa like . . . oh, never mind. I know. Racist.

You’ll have a hell of a time baking an apple pie with what you pick off a pomegranate tree, on the other hand. YOU celebrate diversity. I don’t like to take my walk through the f------ garbage. I have a hunch – my casual study of mankind being what it is – that the rest of our global neighbors feel the same, “hate us for our freedom,” or not. I shouldn’t imagine that the ad hominem and name calling is any different, either.

“Fruits,” you know.