Rage against the dying of the light

[WilliamPitt]

It's 5:51am here in Boston, and I can't sleep. There's no ocean of polluted water outside my building, no fires, no bodies left to rot, no police handing in their badges so they can find their families, no anarchy. I am right now the warm little center the light of this world crowds around. I am all set. But I can't sleep.

I have in the last several days gone from incredulity to fear to sadness to anger to rage to despair. I'm past all that, and am left, simply, in awe. Awe. It's the only word to describe how I feel watching this unfold from a thousand miles away.

At the beginning of the month, I was in Camp Casey with Cindy Sheehan when the thing was just getting started. It felt like something real, something true, something that was not just another anonymous act of protest and courage to be subsumed by an indifferent media and a populace seemingly robbed of its ability to be shocked.

At the end of the month, I am watching a major metropolitan area of America transform into the kind of nightmare that would make a citizen of Fallujah appreciate their fate. The guys who made their bones hating the federal government now run the thing, and their utter and abject failure to fund the city's defenses, their deliberate annihilation of FEMAs capabilities, their desire for conquest 7,000 miles away, their simple ineptitude, have laid us low.

Some names for you: Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, Johnny and Baby Dodds, Bunk Johnson, George Lewis, Sidney Bechet, Kid Ory, Jimmie Noone, Jelly Roll Morton, Charles "Buddy" Bolden, Wynton Marsalis, Mahalia Jackson. Some more: Stephen Ambrose, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, William Faulkner.

All of these people made New Orleans their home at one time, all of them plied their craft there, and their magnificence lifted us all. How much of what they did there came from the bones of the city itself, from the air and the earth and the sunshine and the streets and the ordinary people?

What is left of that now? Echoes, recordings, pages in a book? History, no longer the present, gone? Yes, if Mr. Hastert has his way.

A guy named Grover Norquist once said he wanted to shrink the federal government to a size where it could be drowned in a bathtub. He got his wish, and here we are. A city is drowning. I am in awe. Dry, safe, perfectly well, and in awe.

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

- Dylan Thomas

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all around it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

- William Butler Yeats

[fasttense]

1. Well said....

[LibertyorDeath]

2. Very well said

:kick:

[Hekate]

3. Thanks for calling in the spirits of the poets

and thanks for your words too

I'm exhausted; I haven't been to bed yet; but I can't let go of this yet. Soon though.

As I have said so many times since November 2000: I thought we were better than that. I'm always heartsick when that phrase comes to me -- as now -- how could this nightmare be happening here in my country? I thought we were better than that.

Hekate

#Why won't the Chickenhawk cross the road?#

[punpirate]

4. Not to mention others...

... whose skills were honed in that city or shaped by its culture... Fats Waller, Robert Stone, Walker Percy. Langston Hughes, Jackson Pollock. More recent artists, like Dr. John, Marc Broussard and short-timer Ani DeFranco.

I never had a bad time in New Orleans, even when I was just about dead broke. In 1982, I was in Florida, hadn't found a job in about nine months, my mother sent me ten bucks. So I put three dollars' worth of gas in the VW bus and went to New Orleans, because someone told me that was where to find a job on the offshore rigs. I got to town, hungry, thought I'd try to find a cheap place to eat. Found a diner, crowded, thought I might be able to afford it with what I had left. Got a plate of shrimp and peas, with not much of either and a cup of coffee. The old, wrinkled waiter at the counter looked at the plate, looked at me and said, "`sho don't get much o' nuthin' these days fo' fo' bucks, dis y'?" I said, no, I guess not. He said, "but don' you worry, N'awlins a kind place, it'll treat you good."

I got lost trying to find the offices of a headhunter for the rigs. Turned a corner in the Quarter, and there was a French restaurant, the sort that only served the old money business crowd for lunch. Small, with a floor-to-ceiling glass front. Understated elegance. Perfect linen on the tables, a clientele in six-hundred dollar suits that had earned their money well and saw it well-spent. I felt like Jean Valjean, staring at the place through the window. I told myself if I ever got back there again, I'd be sitting there inside, having lunch.

Of course, when I did get back there again, I'd forgotten all about that. I was too busy going through bowls of etouffee, drinking wine and sucking the heads of crawdads and stomping around the fairgrounds at the Jazz & Heritage Festival and living pretty high on the hog without my ever having to put on a suit.

New Orleans did end up being a kind place, and it treated me really well. Right now, I wish the Bushies had treated it--and its people--a good deal better than they have.