i am trying to work out some stuff involving the government’s use of the media to manipulate language to help america swallow this tragedy in nice, bite size, 6pm news portions

in the interim, much thanks to nina for forwarding me this story that is just amazing
6-year-old becomes a hero to band of toddlers, rescuers

and, since i have to play major cynic with any and all media, here is a forward from jane lecroy that is chock full of more truth than any news report

Notes From Inside New Orleans by Jordan Flaherty

Friday, September 2, 2005

I just left New Orleans a couple hours ago. I traveled from the apartment I was staying in by boat to a helicopter to a refugee camp. If anyone wants to examine the attitude of federal and state officials towards the victims of hurricane Katrina, I advise you to visit one of the refugee camps.

In the refugee camp I just left, on the I-10 freeway near Causeway, thousands of people (at least 90% black and poor) stood and squatted in mud and trash behind metal barricades, under an unforgiving sun, with heavily armed soldiers standing guard over them. When a bus would come through, it would stop at a random spot, state police would open a gap in one of the barricades, and people would rush for the bus, with no information given about where the bus was going. Once inside (we were told) evacuees would be told where the bus was taking them – Baton Rouge, Houston, Arkansas, Dallas, or other locations. I was told that if you boarded a bus bound for Arkansas (for
example), even people with family and a place to stay in Baton Rouge would not be allowed to get out of the bus as it passed through Baton Rouge. You had no choice but to go to the shelter in Arkansas. If you had people willing to come to New Orleans to pick you up, they could not come within 17 miles of the camp.

I traveled throughout the camp and spoke to Red Cross workers, Salvation Army workers, National Guard, and state police, and although they were friendly, no one could give me any details on when buses would arrive, how many, where they would go to, or any other information. I spoke to the several teams of journalists nearby, and asked if any of them had been able to get any information from any federal or state officials on any of these questions, and all of them, from Australian tv to local Fox affiliates complained of an unorganized, non-communicative, mess. One
cameraman told me “as someone who’s been here in this camp for two days, the only information I can give you is this: get out by nightfall. You don’t want to be here at night.”

There was also no visible attempt by any of those running the camp to set up any sort of transparent and consistent system, for instance a line to get on buses, a way to
register contact information or find family members, special needs services for children and infirm, phone services, treatment for possible disease exposure, nor even a single trash can.

To understand the dimensions of this tragedy, its important to look at New Orleans itself.

For those who have not lived in New Orleans, you have missed a incredible, glorious, vital, city. A place with a culture and energy unlike anywhere else in the world. A 70% African-American city where resistance to white supremacy has supported a generous, subversive and unique culture of vivid beauty. From jazz, blues and hiphop, to secondlines, Mardi Gras Indians, Parades, Beads, Jazz Funerals, and red beans and rice on Monday nights, New Orleans is a place of art and music and
dance and sexuality and liberation unlike anywhere else in the world.

It is a city of kindness and hospitality, where walking down the block can take two hours because you stop and talk to someone on every porch, and where a community pulls together when someone is in need. It is a city of extended families and social networks filling the gaps left by city, state and federal governments that have abdicated their responsibility for the public welfare. It is a city where someone
you walk past on the street not only asks how you are, they wait for an answer.

It is also a city of exploitation and segregation and fear. The city of New Orleans has a population of just over 500,000 and was expecting 300 murders this year, most of them centered on just a few, overwhelmingly black, neighborhoods. Police have been quoted as saying that they don’t need to search out the perpetrators, because usually a few days after a shooting, the attacker is shot in revenge.

There is an atmosphere of intense hostility and distrust between much of Black New Orleans and the N.O. Police Department. In recent months, officers have been accused of everything from drug running to corruption to theft. In separate incidents, two New Orleans police officers were recently charged with rape (while in uniform), and there have been several high profile police killings of unarmed youth, including the murder of Jenard Thomas, which has inspired ongoing weekly protests for several months.

The city has a 40% illiteracy rate, and over 50% of black ninth graders will not graduate in four years. Louisiana spends on average $4,724 per child’s education and ranks 48th in the country for lowest teacher salaries. The equivalent of more than two classrooms of young people drop out of Louisiana schools every day and about 50,000 students are absent from school on any given day. Far too many young black men from New Orleans end up enslaved in Angola Prison, a former slave plantation where inmates still do manual farm labor, and over 90% of inmates eventually die in the prison. It is a city where industry has left, and most remaining jobs are
are low-paying, transient, insecure jobs in the service economy.

Race has always been the undercurrent of Louisiana politics. This disaster is one that was constructed out of racism, neglect and incompetence. Hurricane Katrina was
the inevitable spark igniting the gasoline of cruelty and corruption. From the neighborhoods left most at risk, to the treatment of the refugees to the the media portrayal of the victims, this disaster is shaped by race.

Louisiana politics is famously corrupt, but with the tragedies of this week our political leaders have defined a new level of incompetence. As hurricane Katrina approached, our Governor urged us to “Pray the hurricane down” to a level two. Trapped in a building two days after the hurricane, we tuned our battery-operated radio into local radio and tv stations, hoping for vital news, and were told that our governor had called for a day of prayer. As rumors and panic began to rule, they was no source of solid dependable information. Tuesday night, politicians and reporters said the water level would rise another 12 feet – instead it stabilized. Rumors spread like wildfire, and the politicians and media only made it worse.

While the rich escaped New Orleans, those with nowhere to go and no way to get there were left behind. Adding salt to the wound, the local and national media have spent
the last week demonizing those left behind. As someone that loves New Orleans and the people in it, this is the part of this tragedy that hurts me the most, and it hurts me deeply.

No sane person should classify someone who takes food from indefinitely closed stores in a desperate, starving city as a “looter,” but that’s just what the media did
over and over again. Sheriffs and politicians talked of having troops protect stores instead of perform rescue operations.

Images of New Orleans’ hurricane-ravaged population were transformed into black, out-of-control, criminals. As if taking a stereo from a store that will clearly be insured against loss is a greater crime than the governmental neglect and incompetence that did billions of dollars of damage and destroyed a city. This media focus is a tactic, just as the eighties focus on “welfare queens” and “super-predators” obscured the simultaneous and much larger crimes of the Savings and Loan scams and mass layoffs, the hyper-exploited people of New Orleans are being used as a scapegoat to cover up much larger crimes.

City, state and national politicians are the real criminals here. Since at least the mid-1800s, its been widely known the danger faced by flooding to New Orleans. The flood of 1927, which, like this week’s events, was more about politics and racism than any kind of natural disaster, illustrated exactly the danger faced. Yet government officials have consistently refused to spend the money to protect this poor, overwhelmingly black, city. While FEMA and others warned of the urgent impending danger to New Orleans and put forward proposals for funding to reinforce and protect the city, the Bush administration, in every year since 2001, has cut or refused to fund New Orleans flood control, and ignored scientists warnings of increased hurricanes as a result of global warming. And, as the dangers rose with the floodlines, the lack of coordinated response dramatized vividly the callous
disregard of our elected leaders.

The aftermath from the 1927 flood helped shape the elections of both a US President and a Governor, and ushered in the southern populist politics of Huey Long.

In the coming months, billions of dollars will likely flood into New Orleans. This money can either be spent to usher in a “New Deal” for the city, with public investment, creation of stable union jobs, new schools, cultural programs and housing restoration, or the city can be “rebuilt and revitalized” to a shell of its former self, with newer hotels, more casinos, and with chain stores and theme parks replacing the former neighborhoods, cultural centers and corner jazz clubs.

Long before Katrina, New Orleans was hit by a hurricane of poverty, racism, disinvestment, deindustrialization and corruption. Simply the damage from this pre-Katrina hurricane will take billions to repair.

Now that the money is flowing in, and the world’s eyes are focused on Katrina, its vital that progressive-minded people take this opportunity to fight for a rebuilding
with justice. New Orleans is a special place, and we need to fight for its rebirth.

———————————————–
Jordan Flaherty is a union organizer and an editor of Left Turn Magazine (www.leftturn.org). He is not planning on moving out of New Orleans.

———————————————–

Below are some small, grassroots and New Orleans-based resources,
organizations and institutions
that will need your support in the coming months.

Social Justice:
www.jjpl.org
www.iftheycanlearn.org
www.nolaps.org
www.thepeoplesinstitute.org/
www.criticalresistance.org/index.php?name=crno_home

Cultural Resources:
www.backstreetculturalmuseum.com
www.ashecac.org/
http://198.66.50.128/gallery/
www.nolahumanrights.org
http://www.freewebs.com/ironrail/
http://www.girlgangproductions.com/

Current Info and Resources:
http://neworleans.craigslist.org/about/help/katrina_cl.html

once again, i greeted the dawn but was not alone as crown heights was chock loaded full o’ people at 6am and they wasnt playin. the urge for food was biting at me for a minute but the sounds of fireworks (more like m80s) and random breaking glass alongside the constant sirens made me take pause. when i did get outside, dawn was taking form as the sky was the color of faded jeans, the clouds a veil and the reflection of the rising sun took the shade of orange conch shells and what appeared to be a flock of albatross was flying directly down my street.

let me say again- an albatross flyin down crown hizzy. not a pigeon, as there were plenty of those around and they were darker & smaller, but a full grown albatross. have they always been here and i am jus noticin or was this some random fluck of nature. i dont know but i did take it as a sign but if what, i aint sure.

some french toast, turkey bacon & coffee latah, i am still greetin the dawn and feel like the “ben franklin” of insomnia (thank ya, jeff mcadaniel) as i have apparently come up with a substitute for sleep.

today was the carribean parade along eastern parkway which would kick my crowd phobia into full gear so i traded loud music, outrageous costumes, folks dancin in all kinds of weird rhythms and tons of food for a family wedding (ding! the irony bell!)

got there jus in time to see mah boy take the plunge as an albatross(!) flew directly above him while he was droppin his vows. thank you, universe, for not letting me be crazy.

mah brah from another mah, jose, was in the house with his lovely wife of three years but, sadly, no 14 month old baby.

we all got down on some freestyle even though i was barely mobile as i STUFFED myself with breast of capon and grilled salmon. i’ve actually been eatin really good as of late with smaller portions five times thru the day and this new regiment left me ill prepared for the glory of a wedding buffet but i still got mah groove on to such classics as SILENT MORNING, THE MEXICAN, THERES NO REASON FOR YOU TO CRY, LET’S DANCE TO THE DRUMMER’S BEAT, MARIA, SHOW ME and DANCING ON THE FIRE
(robert bly voice- on) you just dont hear this kind of goodness in urban dance music these days (elder snob mode- off)

and with all that said, mah lil personal vacation has come to an end and i return to work tomorrow which has me a bit mixed but the show must go on and all that jazz but before i go, let me leave you with one of the first poems that gave the feeling like some poet was actually listening in on mah thoughts, an occurence that seems to be the norm these days

love ya like K7 loves cab calloway

Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle
by Black Elk

Everything the Power of the World does
is done in a circle. The sky is round,
and I have heard that the earth is round
like a ball, and so are all the stars.
The wind, in its greatest power, whirls.

Birds make their nests in circles,
for theirs is the same religion as ours.

The sun comes forth and goes down again
in a circle. The moon does the same,
and both are round. Even the seasons
form a great circle in their changing,
and always come back again to where they were.

The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood,
and so it in everything where power moves.

Black Elk

it is 655 am and fuk what ya heard, it is officially dawn. well, at least for me, as the sun has made it over the roof tops and tree line and is now hitting me dead in mah face washing me with warmth.

by my side are what remains of a french toast & coffee breakfast, adrian castro’s latest book “wise fish”& my moleskine. both the breakfast and castro’s poems were excellent while my early morning attempts at a poem are not. no worries. i have never been an early morning writer anyways.

since you are probable thinking it, i will come out and say it- ob, what da hell are ya doin up at this hour?

last night i greeted the dawn for the first time in a long time – actually, a lil over a week – but still, with the turns my life has been taking as of late, a week can be a very long time. this ‘greeting of the dawn’ has become very important to me as of late. i look at the sky from my window and assign a color to the blanket of the sky and shape to the clouds that may inhabit it. i look to the moon for a friendly face while searching for a star i have claimed as my own. this star resides in the interior obtuse angle that forms from the ladder and base of the fire escape outside my window.

all these things are important to me now. all the little things have a weight and gravity all their own. and this is good. i travelled for too long free of the pull of this world. nothing had a hold of me and i was wandering flotsam in ether.

but in greeting the dawn last night i realized how much i love the chaos which is my city. a claim i put on it early in my poetry. if you look past the ever present noise and filthy streets you will find people who wake every morning to this dawn. they go out and live extraordinary lives. not extraordinary in accomplishment but extraordinary in perseverence which, i guess, is an accomplishment. this city is unwielding and any spine that can brave it deserves praise or at least a spot in a good poem.

something which did not happen today. sal’s restaurant, the tree resting on concrete, the mta worker restin on the sidewalk, the men playin backgammon & chess by dawn, the hoods clockin outside the bodega, the joggers by the park, the newspaper delivery, the flowers by the makeshift memoria, none of this made itself into a poem. not today.

i did however scribble some words of thanks to the star that lives above my fire escape, which is packed now with poets looking into my sleep and seeing how my dreams tangle themselves into my sternum.

and now i attack this day armed with a modicum of sleep but full of hope that my life can be just a little extraordinary.

love ya like mexican chocolate loves ice cream

____________________________________________________
Start your day with Yahoo! – make it your home page
http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs

a few weeks back, i was lucky enough to catch louis reyes rivera’s feature at cornelia street and was luckier still to have a pretty in-depth discourse with the man through the streets and rain. if i was with anyone else i would say that i had a conversation or discussion but louis (all 4’10” of him) is a living history/poetics/economics lesson all the time and his function is to educate through anecdote and analogy. while louis doesnt put the fear of poetry god in me like a very select few do, he does have a stare that says “when you’ve lived as much as i have, youngster – YES! i can call you youngster – then you can feel free to contribute to this conversation but otherwise you best stay shut, learn something and reflect on that” of course, i love this about the man.

having learned my lesson from previous meetings, we walked through bleeker st as the rain threatens to come down hard. if it was anyone else, it would be preferable to get out of the humidity and possible soaking in favor of some nice cafe but louis’s voice is as urban as it gets and hearing his words ring above the crowds is jus about as natural as pigeons descending on popcorn from trash bags.

our talk wrapped up with a reading recommendation, “find the poems of otto rene castillo” this came after my thanking louis for his time and insights while also offering a lil praise. sucking up? no. more like saying to people how you feel about them while you have the chance or as another mentor puts it “dont wait for the funeral/give me my flowers now/while i can enjoy them” werd

this all comes together into a pretty package with the hand knotted bow as i revisit carolyn forche’s “against forgetting” and come across señor castillo’s work. can ya say flabbergasted? i knew ya could.

castillo’s work cuts to the quick and brought the taste of separation from out of my gut and right to the roof of my mouth. ima have to take some time out to transcribe his EXCELLENT multi-layered work “Distances” but for now i leave you with this poem that (as far as i’m concerned) says YES! to the idea of poet/artist as a precursor to history versus the tabloid reporters & bombastic propagandists i continually encounter.

Before the Scales, Tomorrow by Otto Rene Castillo

When the enthusiasm
of our time is recounted
for those
yet to be born,
but who announce themselves
with a kinder face,
we will come out winners,
we who have suffered most.

To be ahead
of one's time
is to suffer much.

But it is beautiful to love the world
with the eyes
of those
          still
to be born.

And splendid
to know oneself already victorious
when everything around
is still so cold, so dark.

Otto Rene Castillo

ob.musing

Last night in conversation with a friend the subject of muses came up and I laid down some thoughts on invocation, offerings and conversations with the muse. My friend was amazed at the fact that these ideas were so concrete in my mind. * This is me smiling inside * This spilled into a few other areas which included the democratization of art, a concept which we both agreed is a farce at best and manipulation of wills at worst.

Democracy in art leads to telling people what they want to hear versus bringing messages that people need to hear.

I was also lucky enough to share some of my newer poems, got some good critique and dialogued on the Bible/mythology/poetry/storytelling. As such, today’s reading assignment is Genesis. No worries, though, I have not reverted to full Catholic dogma nor do I expect to.

I think the only chapter that I read fully on my own would be Revelations mostly due to the fact that it was the only part of the New Testament that we didn’t get to study during my seven years in the Catholic School system.

Actually, I don’t think I have read very much of the Old Testament at all. I have a good idea of the stories and the timelines thanks to one of the first books I ever received: The Children’s Bible (An Illustrated Version). My mom gave me this when I was about 5 and not only was it the first book I recall getting but it was also the first with a dedication, dated and all. * This is me reminiscing about my mom *

It’s not easy processing all this but late night conversations with La Musa filter out the extraneous ego, praise the necessary ego in writing, wonder on the role of the poet in history, marvel at voyeurism in art, laugh at the periphery, delight in the comfort of food and salt while letting me be as honest as possible amidst the static roar of oceans meeting.

Current music: U2’s Walk to the Water