Pharoah's Tribe

It's Saturday morning, and Houston, Galveston, and most of the refineries are all still in one piece. New Orleans is a bit wetter, a bit more destroyed.

I'm glad for all of us in this country that Rita didn't destroy as much as the media had so gleefully anticipated--I feel badly for the people directly in its path, but at least it's fewer people than it could have been. But I'm also glad because--how cynical I am--George Bush is going to miss the opportunity to appear "Presidential."

He's desperate for some opportunity to repair the damaged caused by stealing two elections, by ignoring warnings of imminent terrorist strikes in the summer of 2001, by creating the Iraq mess, and by ruining FEMA to the point that Wal-Mart did a better job of responding to Katrina than anyone from the US government did (Wal-Mart did indeed show up and start helping people in the disaster zones before FEMA or even the Red Cross--check out the new issue of Fortune). Not that I've become a fan of the Evil Empire, of course.

Yesterday Bushie scrapped a planned pre-landfall trip to Texas. His handlers, smarter than the First Boy himself, realized that a presidential visit to a place gearing up for disaster could backfire--could cause more harm than good, and further damage his low stature in the eyes of an awakening American public. After all, what could he have done? Told the Texas National Guard how to do their job better? He has such great experience in that area, of course.

Instead, he played it safe, coming to Colorado to hang out with the kindly folks at Northern Command, or whatever it's called--the command center set up at Peterson AFB after 9/11 to manage disasters, whether human or natural. Of course, he may just log on to the wrong computer, and instead of a nice game of chess we'll be faced with Global Thermonuclear War (for those of you who weren't, as I was, smitten by Matthew Broderick in the summer of 1983, that's a reference to his film War Games). If you're still alive this evening, after he's left Colorado Springs, you can bet his keepers kept him from touching anything.

The title of this posting may just seem a bit cryptic, given what I've said so far. It's from a Bob Dylan song (this is Bob Dylan Month, apparently--two new archive albums, and the Scorcese film on young Bob on PBS Monday and Tuesday night--on Monday it's opposite EastEnders--what will I do?) called "When the Ship Comes In." I was listening to this the other day--there's a version of it on the soundtrack album to the Scorcese film--and it struck me. Here's part of the song:

Oh the time will come up
When the winds will stop
And the breeze will cease to be breathin'.
Like the stillness in the wind
'Fore the hurricane begins,
The hour when the ship comes in.

Oh the seas will split
And the ship will hit
And the sands on the shoreline will be shaking.
Then the tide will sound
And the wind will pound
And the morning will be breaking.

It's going to be Morning in America, folks. I'm sensing a shift. My cousin Ken told me last night that in the month that he's been away from this country (he and his partner Ken just spent a month in Russia) people in his town (Las Cruces) have scraped off the "W" bumper stickers from their cars. He used to see them all the time, and he's only seen one this week. I've noticed the same, even in the red-state suburb where I work. People have kept their Kerry Edwards stickers--I even know of a yard sign still standing in my neighborhood--but having "Bush Cheney" on your SUV is becoming a mark of shame. There's also a yard sign in my neighborhood that says "IMPEACH BUSH."

Continuing Mr. Dylan's song, skipping several verses:

Then the sands will roll
Out a carpet of gold
For your weary toes to be a-touchin'.
And the ship's wise men
Will remind you once again
That the whole wide world is watchin'.

Oh the foes will rise
With the sleep still in their eyes
And they'll jerk from their beds and think they're dreamin'.
But they'll pinch themselves and squeal
And know that it's for real,
The hour when the ship comes in.

Then they'll raise their hands,
Sayin' we'll meet all your demands,
But we'll shout from the bow your days are numbered.
And like Pharaoh's tribe,
They'll be drownded in the tide,
And like Goliath, they'll be conquered.

That song was written 42 years ago, and he probably had the foes of civil rights, the commie-paranoid former McCarthy-ites, and what Nixon would later call "The Silent Majority" in mind when he wrote it. Those people haven't gone away--they've simply bred new generations of fearful twits who mindlessly vote for whomever their pastors and televangelists tell them is the right protector of the faith. They are Pharoah's tribe, and their days are indeed numbered. I won't quote from Mr. Dylan's far more well-known song on the same subject, because it would be trite to say that the times they are a-changin'--especially since that song is now being used in a TV commercial--oops, I've just said it. Well, you get the picture. Now: move away from the computer, get off your ass and start interacting with humans. It's up to us to change the times.

Dylan lyrics: Copyright © 1963; renewed 1991 Special Rider Music

Bushvilles

Today I rode my bike on South Platte River trail. Starting at my house in West Highlands, I zoomed down the hill to the river at 20th Street, and road northward to where the trail currently ends, at 104th Avenue (at approximately Quebec Street if it went through, which it doesn't). It's September, and I love this month like no other--the sky was a brilliant blue, and (before noon at least) the temperature was just right. The lower angle of the sun we're getting now meant that much of the trail was shaded by the still-green trees, and the contrast between shade and light is especially wonderful right now.

On the way, not long after I started, I came across a community of people living on the banks of the river. This is nothing new, of course. In the 1930s, as my former professor Thomas J. Noel (Dr. Denver in the Rocky Mountain News) is fond of pointing out, the "Platte River Bottoms" were home to thriving shantytowns--Hoovervilles. Every major city had them. More recently, in the early 1990s, the administration of Wellington E. Webb forced the people living near the river between 16th and 20th Streets to move--the city was going to build a park (Commons), and they'd have to find somewhere else to call "home." The new townhomes recently built along Little Raven facing the new park have some of the highest per-square-foot values of any residential property in Denver, and penthouse lofts at 16th and Little Raven sell in the seven-figures. They're elegant examples of late-Modernist architecture, occupied by wealthy empty nesters or credit card-maxed trust fund babies.

What's not so elegant are the campsites further downstream. These are past Commons and City of Cuernavaca Parks, close to where the river skirts Brighton Boulevard on its way to the Pepsi Cola bottling plant and the Coliseum. The people living here can fill a Kmart cart with all of their possessions. They use the river for bathing, and spend their days sitting on benches along the bike trail; these benches were installed in the 1970s when the trail was first built, and the city still maintains them.

But what the city does not do is house them--although His Honor the Brewmeister has some sort of elaborate plan.

Instead, Denver (the greater Denver area, that is) houses the residents of the poorer neighborhoods of New Orleans. There was an empty barracks or dormitory at the former Lowry Air Force Base--a dorm that local homeless service agencies have not been able to get their hands on--and on Monday night they came on a Frontier jet and got housed.

The victims of Katrina need to be housed, of course. To do anything else would not be humanitarian--it would make those who don't like America or Americans right. And while I don't begrudge their presence at Lowry at all, I have to wonder, like Matt wonders, why it is that we can do this for those people while ignoring the needs of others who, just like Katrina victims, are homeless through no fault of their own (I don't mean just the river people; there are many officially homeless people living in temporary housing--motels along East and West Colfax, etc.)

The answer, as far as I'm concerned: we're housing Katrina victims not only out of the goodness of our hearts (there is some of that, to be sure), but because their sudden un-housing was so violent and dramatic. It was all over all media since the 29th of August, and becuase it was so ubiquitous a story, people acted. They don't act to house the residents of the South Platte River Trail (I should mention that I saw more people on my way home, living on the Clear Creek Trail near where it passes under York Street), because that's not sexy.

But beyond the drama of Katrina, there's yet another, more important reason. People have poured out their hearts and their wallets over the past 12 days because it makes us feel good about ourselves. To put it into a tiny little word: it's ego. This is not about them--the poor, under-educated Black people of what is, after all, mostly just another vacation destination for most people--it's about us.

Am I being unfair on upstanding, upscale white Americans? Maybe, but think about this the next time you give a dollar to a cardboard sign-holding person on the corner of Speer Blvd. and Auraria Parkway. Who are you really helping--him or you?