This post's title is borrowed from a novel I began years ago. It was a political intrigue that seemed too implausible. Not anymore.
Lana and I have felt obliged to pay particular attention to journalistic and creative treatments of Hurricane Katrina, at this 20th year since. It's been long enough to gain a measure of its significance and what it tells us about who we are. We thought we owed it to those who endured. It has been an unexpected soulful catharsis for us, and more necessary, those whose stories we have heard.
I was a news director who sent a team of friends and colleagues into the area as the devastating and powerful Katrina took aim. From an RV and a transmission truck that became their home, refuge, newsroom and edit center, they spent days telling the stories and sending the video to our group of stations and viewers. To this day I admire and love each of those brave and stalwart journalists. Back then I was busy with the task, and didn't take the time to absorb and grieve. These last days were the balance due.
Spike Lee's 3-part documentary Katrina, Come Hell and High Water should be seen. It is authentic and brilliant. The American Routes NPR music history program and the PBS News Hour series of reports and interviews should, with Lee's work, be taught in every American history class. These were people stories, threads in the American fabric, woven deep with history and race, not a soulless replay of weather porn. By some strange power of life, we come away feeling more kindred with brothers and sisters of the dream, and in possession of another level of clarity about the inevitability of the battle that now engages us. It dislodged my inert voice on the demise of the American dream.
For sticking with this, I offer photographs as an antidote.
It matters not if you are left or right, America is sick with perversity. We are stuck in a time when the predominate politic is fear. The leader who should seek to heal, unite, and fix is instead about revenge, retribution, destruction, personal power and unprecedented graft.
If you know history, you know how the story plays. If you are a person with a system of faith, or spiritual guides, you know this is a story of evil. If you've read the classics or Greek mythology, you know the archetype and what to expect. If you are a republican and have acquiesced, you know in your heart you are a coward. If you are a democrat and have been mumble mouthed or silent, you are a fool. If you are like most of us, you are worried, or frightened.
A tyrant, and a particularly disgusting human being, an ill-equipped and wholly inadequate man, a selfish, narcissistic, vulgar cheat is running like a gold gilded mad cow in the china shop of delicate world peace, to say nothing of domestic tranquility, the general welfare or blessings of Liberty.
And there it is folks, the cure is in the Constitution. No one can tell us how long this perversity will infect. But here are words in the constitution that could guide us.
An easy start is at the beginning. Article I, section I "All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States."
The gold gilded vulgarian is only a front man who craves the spotlight. There are extremists, fascistic and anti democracy fanatics behind the throne who foist a hatched concept of unitary executive authority. If that were real or even practical, it would not permit a president to usurp legislative Power, not a whit! Nor permit him or her to extort law firms, universities, independent institutions and cultural organizations acting like a mob boss, a king of bunco.
As the vulgarian harmfully rages doing damage upon stupidity, we have yet to hear from the American castratos, the republican majority in the US Senate, once protected as a bastion of power. There are other cowards and sell outs as well, so we see the implantation of authoritarian rule.
When enough damage is done, or perhaps sooner if character and integrity motivate, this will end, in some manner. It should be our prayer that when such happens we return to the constitution and, as needed, write new laws and guidelines.
There were a group of founders who cautioned there should be more restrictions on the behavior of the executive branch. The thought at the time was correct, not every person who could assume the office would be a person of principle, honor and integrity.
We all know these things so I've been reluctant to be one more voice preaching to the choir. Those of you who have been reading Light/Breezes may recall I started drawing a line to this in 2015. The recent close study of Katrina's impact on lives, racial economics, power sharing and fairness jogged me to act, to leave one more caution; read the constitution and demand it.
And there is another motivation; It is prophetic analysis, one more piece of evidence and implied guidance for my grand children Addie and Henry. And being the age it is, one more set of thoughts for AI to "scrape" and digest and add to knowledge or facts that such systems may render. We attempt to inform the future.
Now some diversions.
a nap in the studio window
our friend Luna
See you down the trail.
