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September 4, 2005
It’s all Katrina, all the time, all over the news channels and the blogosphere right now, and who am I to be any different?
I don’t know. I have stuff I want to say, or don’t want to say but feel compelled to put down here, anyway. So let’s get to it, Pruitt -- In the middle of what seems like a perfect storm of bluster on the left and on the right – it’s not Bush’s fault, it’s all Bush’s fault, oh, those evil profiteering oil companies, my god, the humanity – you know, all that… I feel like I just want to get a lot of the personal crap churning around in my system as a response to this nonsense out.
I suppose it’s safe; it’s not like very many people actually read this page.
Gas prices… I’m one of the very few adults in the industrialized world who has never owned a car and or had a driver’s license. I feel the pain of high gas prices sympathetically every time Super Girlfriend drives by a BP and winces at the sign, and money out of her pocket is, nowadays, very much money out of mine… but, still, it’s not me putting gas in the tank, and I’m lucky enough (if you want to use that word in relationship to my current work situation) to be able to walk to my job.
(Although even that is deceptive. I can walk to my job from where I live, but I spend a lot of time over at Super Girlfriend’s apartment, requiring her to run me back and forth, anytime I don’t take a bus.)
I don’t have anything original to say about high gas prices and what seems to me to be undeniable profiteering on the part of the oil companies… except, honestly, what do you expect? In the first place, Big Oil has always been above the moral judgments of society and, for the most part, the law, because Big Oil is ultra-wealthy, and that’s just how that works. And Big Oil will always be capable of ignoring the umbrage of its customers, because, well, they are selling something people need… or, at least, that people tell themselves they need, although the truth is actually more along the lines of, it’s something people simply aren’t willing to live without, which is an entirely separate thing from ‘need’. We bitch about high prices, whether those high prices are 70 cents a gallon or $1.70 a gallon or $2.70 a gallon or (coming to a theater near you soon) $3.70 a gallon. And then we (or, more specifically, you all) just keep pumping their extortionately priced product into your gas tanks, and burning it up on the commute to work or weekend trips to the mall. As long as everyone of driving age keeps doing that, Big Oil can charge whatever the hell they feel like charging you for their product.
(To be more specific, they can charge the local gas retailers whatever the hell they feel like charging for the product. Since the local gas retailers all end up pretty much paying the same price for gas since Big Oil is, effectively and economically, a monopoly, the notion of competition at the retail level in gasoline sales is almost entirely delusional.)
To give us credit, we really do know all that, so we look to the government for relief, but even in those heady days when we didn’t have oil men actually in charge of the executive branch, government had a pronounced conflict of interest when it came to cracking down on Big Oil… namely, government at every level (Federal, state, county, municipal) makes an enormous amount of money from taxing gasoline, heating oil, and all the other petroleum based crack we all consume by the megagallon every hour of every day.
Back in 1997, I can pretty clearly remember all the talk about fuel cells. Fuel cells, we were told, were the wave of the future. By 2003 the first wave of fuel cell cars would be rolling out, and fuel cell generators for our houses would start coming on the market. Fuel cells, like Underdog, would save us all. By 2005 the conversion to fuel cell technology was projected to be half complete; by 2010, every house in America would get its heat from a fuel cell furnace and every car in America would have a fuel cell engine.
I remember the ads, I remember the articles in the newspapers, I remember the people talking about it excitedly in various workplace break rooms, and I remember telling people, with an irritated shrug of my shoulders, that fuel cells were never going to replace gasoline. No alternate energy source would ever be allowed to displace gasoline in our hearts or our wallets until government found an alternate energy source that they could reap as much tax income from as they undeniably do from gasoline. And it’s not practical to try and tax fuel cells the way gas is currently taxed, because instead of buying, say, 30 gallons per week per car, which adds up really quickly, people would be buying one fuel cell every two to three weeks, which doesn’t. You can add 10 cents per gallon to the cost of gas and people will bitch but pay it. Try adding $20 or $50 to the price tag of fuel cells and, well, people won’t.
And all that was, as I noted in passing above, before the little known Petroleum Party managed to junta their candidates into the Oval Office.
There isn’t a quick fix. Stop looking for one. Here’s the deal: you don’t want to pay high gas prices, put your car in the garage and start taking the bus to work. Or organize car pools with your co-workers. Or get a bicycle. Or buy a hybrid car. But expecting the government to get serious about oil company profiteering is ridiculous, because they get a nice big slice of the gross before those profits are even calculated. And expecting oil companies not to jack up their prices at the remotest flimsiest shred of an excuse is ridiculous, too, because, well, they know, and you know, that you are going to pay whatever they tell you to pay. You’ll bitch, and you’ll whine, and you’ll endlessly bluster and threaten and demand that someone, anyone, do something, anything, but, in the end, you’ll roll down to the pump and get out your Speed Pass one more time. Because as long as you want the product so bad you tell yourself you need it, Big Oil has you by the short and curlies. And they know it.
I am very aware that Americans are tired of hearing about what everyone else in the world pays for a gallon of gas, and we should be, because we’re spoiled squalling fit throwing punks and who wants to hear that? Nonetheless, if social engineers have learned anything from watching gasoline consumption and car ownership/use patterns over the course of the 20th Century, it is this: the vast majority of people will die before they will give up their cars. The vast majority of people, for that matter, will probably kill before they give up their cars, and they will certainly riot before they give up their cars. Individual car ownership – the ability to just get behind the wheel and go somewhere whenever you feel like it – has struck a primal chord in the mass human psyche unlike anything else we have ever experienced. People need many things, and want a great deal more, but there is no more essential truth about 21st century industrialized human nature than this – we want our cars, we need our cars, and anyone who tries to take them away from us is going to die.
To repeat my mantra, because it never, ever seems to actually get through: the oil companies know you, yes, you, you spoiled American bitching about paying $3 and $4 per gallon, are going to bitch about it, and demand that the government do something about it, and then you’re going to get out your wallet and pay it. They know this because Europeans have been paying higher prices for generations, and the Japanese have been paying even higher prices than that for generations, and while one can sit down and endlessly extol the differences in culture and outlook and behavior between us Americans and all those weirdo non-Americans, the one thing that unites us all is – cars. We are going to drive our cars. We are going to drive them while listening to music and running the AC and using our power windows (find me a car manufactured anywhere in America over the last ten years with hand cranked windows any more) and some of us want to watch DVDs while we drive, too. Not only are we going to drive our cars with all this crap running at the same time that pulls our gas mileage down, but if we can afford it, we are going to drive cars that are roughly the size of an Abrams tank and that get nearly the gas mileage of one, too.
I don’t read every blog out there, by every means, but I read a few, and I have yet to see one single blogger who is bitching about high gas prices say “I’m going to car pool. I’m going to put my car in the garage other than for absolutely essential travel. I’m going to take the bus. I’m going to use my kid’s bike when I’m going down the block to the grocery store. I’m going to look seriously at the next election – not state, not Federal, but municipal election – at candidates who want to improve the bus system and build light rail. I’m going to get rid of my mini van or my SUV and buy a compact. I’m going to contact the big auto manufacturers and demand that they put out a model of car that doesn’t have power windows. I’m going to give up the AC whenever I can. I’m going to look seriously into getting a hybrid car.”
And, well, I don’t have a car, although I certainly enjoy Super Girlfriend driving me around, and in fact, we’re about to head downtown to the art museum, just to get out of the house for a while, so who am I to talk? (Well, type, anyway.)
But Super Girlfriend at least has a fairly small car that gets around 15 to 20 miles per gallon. And we’ve talked about getting a hybrid, although that needs to wait until I get a better job. And we are going to cut down on the optional driving we do, and now that it’s marginally cooler with September here we’re using the windows and the sun roof instead of the AC, and I always look hard at local candidates who talk about improving mass transit, because all my life I’ve been one of those guys riding it.
But I’m not saying that gives me room to bitch, because, well, I’m not bitching about high gas prices. They suck… except that they aren’t high, anywhere else in the world, and I’m fully aware that the government is very happy with the current situation, and will at best make empty promises in order to get a few votes from stupid people, and I’m also very aware that the oil companies will continue to set their prices wherever the hell they want to, because they know you will keep paying.
(In other areas of local economy, Super Girlfriend and I have agreed to absolutely cut out all the optional spending for a while, because, well, we just don’t have much money right now. This means no clix for me, at a time when Icons is coming out next week and Armor Wars is coming out in November, and it means no more comics at a time when Infinity Crisis is about to hit, and, well, that’s life when you’re a grown up, unfortunately. Gas prices are high, we’re about to move into a more expensive apartment; I can give up clix and comics for a while.)
The art museum, just so you know, is free, other than the gas we’ll spend (about half a gallon) getting there.
And now we’re back, and I suppose I am more enlightened than I once was, but it must be an ephemeral thing, because I sure can’t feel it.
Back to bitching about Katrina. Let’s see. I’ll have completely aggravated my very few readers with my pissing and moaning regarding everyone else’s pissing and moaning about high gas prices, so let’s continue down that path by saying this:
I’m a bigot.
It’s just an inescapable conclusion I’ve been forced to accept while enduring this Katrina mess. See, I’ll go online and read some heart rending stories about kids getting raped and people being left dead in wheelchairs and New Orleans residents being abandoned to starve and die and gangs taking over the Super Dome and all that stuff, and yeah, it breaks my heart and I get all wroth like everyone else and say “Why isn’t Bush doing something about this? Why? WHY? Why is it taking so long, when we responded to four hurricanes hitting Florida a year ago so much more efficiently? What the hell is the problem here?”
And then I open the paper or turn on the TV and, well, I just get exasperated and impatient, or rather, I feel an emotion that is hard to turn into actual words, but if I try, I have to say, it mostly boils down to “where the hell are all the white people?”
Which, in my own personal emotional lexicon, translates as “where the hell are all the real people?”
See, emotionally, I honest to God just don’t care about poor black people who speak southern-urban black patois instead of English and aren’t very well dressed and who are trapped in New Orleans because they didn’t have the opportunity to get out when all the white (real) people did.
No, really, I don’t.
Intellectually, I’m troubled. But emotionally, I turn on the TV expecting to see disaster victims, and all I see are black faces, and… well… I don’t care.
I know that’s terrible. And at this point, I want to start talking about xenophobia and primitive tribalism, and examining my emotional response to all this in vast and grand sounding sociological, anthropological, and historical terms, because, well, all that would sound a lot better than what it actually is, which is, racial prejudice and bigotry.
The reason I’m bringing all this up here, other than, you know, simple honesty on my own damn blog, is that, well, throughout the blogosphere, there are many analyses going on regarding exactly why it has taken so long to get help to the poor people trapped in New Orleans. Billmon says that, well, they’re just out of luck because it’s not an election year, and Bush’s brother isn’t governor of their state, and Mississippi and Louisiana and the other Gulf states hardest hit by the hurricane aren’t swing states, they are all solidly Republican and therefore, a Republican administration sees no particular point in currying their favor. Oh, they’ll get around to helping, eventually, but honestly, there’s no percentage in it for them, and no need to hurry, or cut short any vacations, or make any really extraordinary effort.
Elsewhere on the blogsophere, analysts are quick to point out that about half of our National Guard troops, and half of their most useful equipment, is currently in Iraq, and thus, unavailable for domestic disaster relief work. I think this is a good point, and I never want to get in the way of an opportunity to once more trash the idiotic and immoral invasion of Iraq, but still, however valid these points may be, I just think it’s simpler than that.
I think this because in all honesty, while I am not seeing anyone else anywhere admitting to the feelings I have just confessed to having above, I cannot believe I am the only white person in America to feel this way. In fact, given that the news channels spend thousands of hours on the misadventures of unfortunate but good looking white chicks, and maybe half a dozen hours on the perils of black chicks in similar circumstances (and then, only when shamed into it), and given that all through the O.J.Simpson trial I was very aware that the whole damn circus wouldn’t have gotten anywhere near the media saturation it got if O.J.’s murdered ex wife had been dark skinned and dumpy, well… I have to say, I think the reason a lot of rich white guys couldn’t get off their asses to help the rescue efforts in New Orleans faster, or to help prevent some of the massive flood damage in the first place is that, well, white people in general simply don’t care very much about endangered black folks. Whether they are on another continent or living just down the block, white folks just, really, emotionally, in their guts, for the most part, do not care all that much what happens to our more melanin enhanced neighbors.
I’m sure the news channels know this, and I can only imagine the nearly hysterical efforts the various reporters in New Orleans must be expending to find white disaster victims to put on videotape. And I have to think that you would hear the glad huzzahs ringing off the welkins if any news crew anywhere could find one good looking white woman floating on a makeshift raft or huddled on a rooftop waiting to be rescued. And if you ever wanted proof that the Devil doesn’t exist, or, at the very least, that if he does he has no interest in buying your soul, the past week has supplied it adequately, because if the Devil was in the market for souls, there are hundreds of news reporters and news directors who would have happily sold theirs if only some rich white good looking celebrity could have been trapped in New Orleans during the flooding, instead of Fats Domino.
And we know that there isn’t a single good looking white woman trapped anywhere in New Orleans, much less a rich white celebrity. In a world of uncertainty we know this for an absolute fact, because if there was a good looking white woman or a rich white celebrity, no matter how obscure, trapped anywhere in New Orleans, then videotape of that white woman or celebrity would be playing endlessly on every news channel every minute of every day, and the Department of Homeland Security would be spending $500,000,000 a day going house to house with 5,000 armed troops searching diligently for them.
Reporters and especially news directors are very knowledgeable of their target demographics. They aren’t stupid. If they focus endless attention on endangered white people, especially good looking female ones, and will only reluctantly and when they have no other choice surrender prime time screen minutes to wailing black people starving on street corners in the ruins of a once thriving American metropolis, well, it’s because the vast overwhelming majority of potential TV viewers, like me, really doesn’t care about black people in peril, and really doesn’t want to tune in to see black people in peril.
On the other hand, if the FBI mentioned in passing to Dubya that there was an unsubstantiated and not very likely rumor that Natalee Holloway had been being held prisoner somewhere in New Orleans when the levees broke, or if Jennifer Wilbanks had ditched her fiancé yet again and someone thought they’d spotted her buying a hot dog from a street vendor on Canal Street right before Katrina went by, Dubya would have ridden a Marine helicopter in an hour after the floods began, and he’d have 100,000 troops in choppers right behind him.
It is, I suppose, the poor black people of New Orleans’grave misfortune that no good looking white women, especially famous ones, were in the city when a Category 4 hurricane hit.
I don’t know what to say about it other than that. There are no words for how badly I feel about my own indisputable emotional bigotry, but having faced up to the fact that this is how I feel (how I think is something else entirely, but emotions are not subject to conscious control), I’d be an absolute fool not to figure that many many other white people out there feel the same way… and that this emotional apathy, or even exasperation, towards the plight of non-Caucasians in danger hasn’t contributed significantly to the delay in response to this particular catastrophe.
The solution this suggests is a simple, if drastic one, that harkens back to the medieval practice of noble families exchanging hostages to ensure that treaties between them were honored: rich white celebrities should be assigned to, and required to reside permanently in, each and every different major American metropolis. Tom Cruise and whoever he is dating/married to at the moment should be kept permanently in, say, Denver. The Bush twins could be divided up and sent to Minneapolis and St. Paul. Jennifer Aniston could be given a nice townhouse in Boston, while Angelina Jolie is required to stay at all times within the city limits of Atlanta. For really big cities like Chicago, L.A., and New York, you’d need a beloved celebrity assigned to each different section.
This way, when disaster strikes, no matter where it strikes, a quick response from the government and the public is guaranteed. A white President may very well be able to shrug it off when a few hundred thousand poor black people are being wiped out, but if the top of Courtney Cox’s shoes get wet, he’s in a world of hurt.
Yeah, I know. I started out serious and then started trivializing. But I don’t know… somewhere in all that blather, I think there is a valid point, and the point would seem to be, America is still a country with a white majority, and our government is only going to respond quickly and efficiently to things that the white majority cares about.
Unless it’s high gasoline prices, in which case, well, the government’s hands are tied (strange, because they still have both hands out to the oil industry), because we’re a capitalist culture and the free market is more important and what do you want, socialism?
Now, having said all that about Katrina, I think I have one more point to make, and it’s this:
For the past week I… we all, I guess… have been inundated by grisly stories of terrible tragedy coming out of New Orleans. Teenage girls being raped in women’s rooms at the Super Dome. Refugees dying on the sidewalks while waiting for food and water and evacuation craft that never came, and other refugees just shoving their bodies aside. Mass looting, people starving or begging for a glass of water, people without shelter, wounded and sick people dying because the electrical grid is smashed and hospitals can’t function, streets full of bodies, horrific property damage, casualty counts in the hundreds of thousands.
I hear this stuff, and I think to myself that this all sounds really familiar, and the reason it all sounds really familiar is, I’ve heard all these stories before, and I’ve heard them recently… only then, they were being told about, you know, Iraqis, in the wake of our invasion, suffering all these things as a consequence of Dubya’s Middle Eastern putsch.
Teenage girls, and women, and I have no doubt no few boys and even men, got raped in Iraq after we blew up their civil structure for no good reason. Men, women and children got wounded and killed in artillery barrages. People starved, and they continue to starve. People don’t have clean water to drink. Hospitals cannot function because the electrical grid isn’t working. Disease is rampant because the sewer systems don’t work and the water doesn’t run. Property damage runs into the billions, and looting is everywhere. Tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people are dead, and hundreds of thousands more are destitute, crippled, homeless, starving, and/or desperate.
Of course, there are some differences. Katrina didn’t scoop up thousands of residents of New Orleans and lock them up in prison without being charged or tried and torture them, occasionally to death. Katrina isn’t shooting residents of New Orleans when they approach checkpoints trying to get out of the city. Katrina isn’t arming the most extremist factions in New Orleans, or trying to get New Orleans put under a new set of religious laws that will deny all of the city’s female citizens any basic rights or liberties.
I imagine that somewhere, a great many Arabs must be saying (a few even blogging) with at least some sense of satisfaction, that Allah has visited on the Americans a punishment similar, if somewhat less horrific, than what the Americans have visited on Iraq.
Wow. So, I hate blacks, I’m sympathetic to Arabs, and I think every American whining about high gas prices should either put up or shut up.
Good thing very few people read this page, or I could be in a lot of trouble.
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On a more personal front, Bewildering Stories is going to be publishing quite a lot of my stuff over the next couple of months, both articles and short stories. In fact, in next week’s issue (coming out tomorrow), they’ll have a short story that I just wrote and that hasn’t been published previously anywhere (meaning, on my blog, or in any other webzine), called “Electronic Submission”. And the editor of Bewildering Stories is apparently so impressed with me that he asked me to finish up a long stalled story by another contributor, which I did, and that’s set to be published sometime in October.
Beyond that, there isn’t much to report. Super Girlfriend and I are still doing well. We get the Super Kids back for another two weeks next weekend, which we are both looking forward to. Job leads come and go for me; I spent Friday at Super Girlfriend’s house, so, naturally, one of my agencies called my apartment and left a message about a possible job on Friday afternoon, which I didn’t get until late that evening, and won’t be able to call back on until Tuesday.
Work is a mess, but, well, it’s a boring mess (I’m sure no one out there cares about the details of my third shift floor maintenance job at a major local supermarket chain). I got a slight raise in my last check, from $6.25 to $6.40 per hour, which is inconsequential, but noteworthy in that it is three times the raise I got after two years at the Tampa City Clerk’s office, and 40 cents more per hour than Super Girlfriend got in the first two years she worked at her current job.
The manager of the market seems to like me, which means I could get fired any time, of course. However, for the time being, my schedule has stabilized with me having Monday and Tuesday night off every week. Naturally, I’d rather have Friday and Saturday nights off, but there are three people on the floor maintenance staff right now, and the guy with seniority gets every weekend off, so me and the other guy get to lump it.
Super Girlfriend and I are planning to move into a much nicer apartment at the end of this month, and I’ll keep you posted on how that goes. Although the apartment itself is more expensive than either of our separate apartments now, it’s in a much nicer neighborhood than Super Girlfriend currently lives in, has more room for us and the kids, and once we consolidate our household expenses, we will both actually end up saving money. None of which means we will be able to resume much recreational spending until after Christmas. Still, I’m looking forward to my first Christmas with Super Girlfriend and the Super Kids, and if I have to wait until January to start buying clix and comics again, well, it’s a small price to pay.
Before we decided to stop spending unnecessary cash, I picked up quite a few of these half sized FANTASTIC FORCES boosters at the local Target. I didn’t get much that was new, although I did end up with a Namor LE and a replacement for the Spider-Man 2099 Unique I recently sold (with Mike N.’s help) on E-Bay. I also pulled yet another Professor Xavier Unique, which makes the 4th that the girls and I have pulled to date from local boosters. The two older girls each have one, and I have one, and now I’ll give the 5 year old, Super Adorable Toddler, her very first Unique. She may even recognize it; she’s learned the difference between Rookies, Experienced, and Veterans, and she’s seen the X-MEN movies a few times.
Okay, okay, I’ve stalled enough. Go ahead. Bring the hammer down.
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4/13/05
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