High Gear Scrambling and Death to The Weird

The Crescent City Sinks like Atlantis ... Wingnuts Run Amok Declaring that God Sent Katrina because of Interior Decorators in the Big Easy ... Oops, Did Someone Really Brief the White House? ... FEMA is More Chinese Fire Drill Than a Helping Hand and Homeland Security is a Mirage ... Fat Timmy Tightens the Vice Grips ... A Retarded Nero Speaks and a Shroud of Insanity has been Lifted, My Friends

"The good news is - and it's hard for some to see it now - that out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast, like it was before. Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house - he's lost his entire house - there's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch."
- Dubya pep talks the residents of the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast with a heavy dose of denial tossed in for good measure, Mobile, Alabama, September 2, 2005

"Steps we're taking will help address the problem of availability, but it's not going to solve it. Americans should be prudent in their use of energy during the course of the next few weeks. Don't buy gas if you don't need it."
- Dubya proposes that Americans don't buy gas at $3-$4/gallon just because he says so, Washington, D.C., September 1, 2005

"Today's enemies do not mass armies on borders, or navies on high seas. They blend in with the civilian population. They emerge to strike, and then they retreat back into the shadows. And that's why there are thousands of our fellow citizens running down every single piece of intelligence we can find, doing everything we can to disrupt folks that might be here in America trying to hurt you."
- Kinda like the level of disregard shown the American people by FEMA, Nampa, Idaho, August 24, 2005

There is desperation and exasperation in the air tonight. Not even Wolf Blitzer could handle it. Levees belched toxic waste in the streets of New Orleans and the entire Gulf Coast slipped another mile toward Venezuela. Dubya was struck about the face and neck with the dope stick yet again, the U.S. Government failed to act when it knew that its own people would be massacred by a raging storm, and young children and elderly people died in the heat and humidity without so much as a drink of water.

If Dubya had a personal delivery half as articulate as Crazy Horse, he would have been able to get past this one - instead of being labelled a closet racist while he races around the country looking all perplexed and destined for another $1000.00 chicken dinner fundraiser. But words always seem to confuse Our Child Preznut - and the very homespun diatribes that had once served him well inside red state revival tents and redneck bake-offs with Mable and Bess and Clara now make him seem like he's rolling in a trench filled with shit. Little Big Horn was settled about 130 years ago, but the ferocious warrior - also known as Tashunca-uitco - earned his reputation among the Lakota not only by his skill and daring in battle but also by his fiery determination to preserve his people's traditional way of life. The horrid fallout from this disaster in the Gulf has been building for years before the first gusts ripped into the shoreline, right about that time when Dubya and his party pimps first hijacked the vote count in Florida - and the only difference today, with Cable TV news broadcasting the catastrophe 24-hours a day, is that we finally seem to be on the verge of looking at the scoreboard for once while wondering how much of our traditions have been eroded away like the old Bayou itself.

Crazy Horse made no distinctions when it cames to his people - they could have been Democrats or Republicans for all he knew, not that it mattered much in 1876, or in any other year, when the skies became terminal and the land succumbed to Mother Nature - but it's also very true that Crazy Horse never understood the concept of American Government, Inc. beyond its threat to the people it was built to protect, nor would he have appreciated the vile pleasure of dealing with our current administration; he would have missed the venemous wonder known as Karl Rove, Dubya's prince of bile, and he never would have met little Scottie McClellan, who can turn ignorance into an artform, but he would have had much to discuss with Michael D. Brown, Under Secretary of Homeland Security for Emergency Preparedness and Response, whose only qualification for the post is that he knew a thing or two about Arabian horses.

If the legendary Lakota warrior was alive today, I sense - given his fierce contempt for the U.S. Government and every thing it stood for - he'd have looted a WalMart gun rack himself and taken matters into his own hands. For Crazy Horse it was about survival ... for his people, for his land, for his way of life.

* * *

Today, the Warriors of the Plains have been replaced by the Lunatic Fringe of the Religious Right. Instead of horses and bows and arrows, they have taken to the Internet to file complaints with the FCC or write threatening emails to yours truly, and I have seen my share of these in these past two months. They are almost always from places where the hurricanes first meet the beaches, from the wingnuts and Jesus freaks and closet Nazis - and on some days they all seem eerily connected to Fred Phelps or the Westboro Baptist Church or even Crazy Pat Robertson himself, a dedicated Gulf Coast weather junkie who once warned Orlando that they were "right in the way of some serious hurricanes and I don't think I'd be waving those [Gay Pride] flags in God's face," about 15 years before he called for the head of Hugo Chavez during an August broadcast.

Once awarded with the Christian Broadcaster of the Year by an organization called the National Religious Broadcasters, Crazy Pat and his prime-time berserk commentaries on the hidden agendas of God's natural disasters have been the best thing to hit the Bible Belt since Orson Welles took to the airwaves with War of The Worlds, just one short year before Hitler unleashed the blitzkrieg on Poland. Welles drove people batshit and crazy, to verge of a Jim Jones-like mass suicide, even without access to mescaline or blotter acid or poison Kool Aid.

Robertson is also - according to a malcontent named Scooter, from Jacksonville - a religious visionary of some kind whose evangelical work only rivals the work of Jesus himself. This kind of commentary may be indicative of Robertson's maniacal following in the Florida panhandle, where his rapture-like admonitions about coming hurricanes "with the destructive force of two or three Hiroshimas" has elevated his television network to a spiritual version of the Weather Channel, a true and literal Messenger of God who can quote scripture as fast as he analyzes meterology and low pressure systems. More Jesus freaks have evacuated their trailers and shacks and scurried fast to the hills on the Good Word of the Reverend than ever marched through the Red Sea with Moses.

When you get right down to it, all Pat Robertson ever does is scare people half to death by telling them to escape God's Wrath by making a love offering to his network. But the actual truth is that any ignorant hillbilly with a basic working knowledge of a barometer and enough sense with a teleprompter and his own broadcasting center could do what the crazy Reverend does, and the same panic-striken morons would happily oblige.

A very angry married couple who go by the name of I.M and Fredericka Kaput of Huntsville, Alabama countered - in a very short email response - "You are a heathen bastard who doesn't deserve the right to criticize Pat Robertson with your liberal and elitist and demonic ways. We pray for you."

"Only God can forgive your sins now, if only you ask him seriously," said another message from an email account with the alias aroused@great.length.com, which Team Gonzography traced to the outskirts of Tupelo. "No sin will go unpunished by the Lord, except if you turn your back on Jesus and don't accept him as your personal savior. May the Lord have mercy on your soul."

Then another person named Claude Balls from the Christian Debt Guidance Service of Tampa called me a hyena with the brain of pea soup, then added that I was just jealous of Pat Robertson. "Jump back into that cave where they found you," he wrote. "Your kind, we christian people can do without."

But then again, at last recollection, every one of these states voted for Dubya during the last election cycle. And if Our Child Preznut was God's candidate, as the argument went back then, why has he forsaken them?