September 08, 2005
In the streets of Evangeline
Hardy's admonishment that "if you blind yourself to the deeper issues of a tragedy you see a farce" is harsh medicine in the face of true devastation. One might need to wait for the aftermath. It won't just be the spectacle of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, a crucial cog in the intricate machinery of the New World Order, reduced to putting on a showto defend the indefensible. (Although revelations that the head of FEMA was apparently let go due to incompetence from his previous job as head of a Arabian horse association may be the punchline in the dark comedy that we'll see about this ten or fifteen years from now, when the dead are buried and college students from across the nation again have a place to drink themselves senseless on the public streets every February.) It's not just the carrion birds, big and small, that follow any disaster (those of a certain mindset might suggest that they represent a continuum). Desperate people and reconstruction money draw con artists like moths to a flame; even though the people who most lose out are going to be the dispossessed of Louisiana and Mississippi (with the American taxpayer in a distant, distant third place, if Congress has its way), if everything is kept in soft focus, maybe it will serve as a comedic backdrop.
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