Take Me to the Mardi Gras

This article from the New Orleans Times-Picayune about the first post-Katrina Carnival actually brought tears to my eyes.

Now, I know there are people who question the propriety of having a Mardi Gras celebration after so much death and destruction, with the city still in so much pain.

Screw those people.

This quote about New Orleans resident Louise Maloney sums it up best:

When the parade season launched last weekend, with the bawdy, biting satire of Krewe du Vieux, Maloney wept as she watched the parade move past throngs of locals.

"This is what we do," she thought to herself. "We take tragedy and make it into beauty and hilarity. And we're also showing pride in being New Orleanians and expressing ourselves like never before."

People's ability to stand up, laugh defiance in the Reaper's face, and spit in his eye is one of the things that makes me proud to be human.

Laissez les bontemps roulez.

Surprise, Surprise, Surprise

Latest Newspaper Column:

This will be a column of surprises.

The first surprise is that I’m not going to write about Dick Cheney shooting a guy in the face. For one thing, this column runs on Sunday, and there’s not a joke I can think up that won’t already have been done, and done better, by Jon Stewart, Jay Leno, David Letterman, Conan O’Brien, etc. etc.

For another, the condition of the guy he shot took a turn for the worse as this column was being written, and the whole story may get really unfunny by the time you read this. So, this story’s about a guy named Eddie Rebrook.

The Charleston (W.Va.) Gazette tells the story of 1st Lt. Rebrook, a Charleston native and West Point graduate serving his country in Iraq. When he was wounded by a roadside bomb, corpsmen cut away his Kevlar body armor so that they could treat his badly wounded arm. After months of surgery and rehab, his arm was still not back to 100 percent, so the Army gave him a “medical separation” discharge.

They also charged him $700 for the lost body armor.

At first, Lt. Rebrook couldn’t believe it. But the Army was serious. Since nobody on the battlefield had apparently taken the time to fill out the requisite paperwork to have the armor declared a “combat loss,” the Army said he had to pay for it before he mustered out after eight months of recuperation back home at Fort Hood, Texas.

Rebrook said he tried to get a battalion commander to sign a waiver on the armor, but the officer declined. Rebrook was told he’d have to supply statements from witnesses to verify that the body armor was taken from him and burned to keep it out of the hands of the enemy. Of course, all those witnesses were back in Iraq, and he probably didn’t think to take their names down, since he was too busy bleeding. But the Army was adamant. No check, no ticket home. So he scrounged up the money by borrowing from his buddies, paid off the armor, and went home.

This is the second surprise, at least who like to think the worst of me: I’m not going to use this as an example of the uncaring Bush administration and its disregard for the troops. This, I’ll wager, is the sort of bureaucratic snafu that’s happened in armies for thousands of years, probably since the time of the Roman legions:

“Sorry, Maximus, this gladius has a nick in the blade.”

“That’s where I buried it in the head of a Gaul who was trying to run my centurion through with a spear.”

“Well, we can’t take it back in this condition. You owe us 700 denarii.”

“Potes meos suaviari clunes, felator!”

But the story does have a happy ending. AmericaBlog, a Web site run by a fellow named John Aravosis, found out about this story. Aravosis got, to put it mildly, hopping mad. He set up a special online fund-raiser to solicit donations to reimburse Rebrook. The fund raised over $5,400 in two hours. Aravosis sent a check to Rebrook.

Then Rebrook’s home-state senators got into the act. They fired off angry letters to the Pentagon and demanded explanations from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the Army chief of staff, Gen. Peter Schoomaker, at Defense Department budget hearings. So the Army finally relented. They said that, not only would they pay Rebrook back, but they’d also investigate why he was charged for losing his body armor after getting blown up.

Rebrook, according to an article in Editor & Publisher magazine, said he wasn’t going to keep the donations. He’s paying back the people he borrowed from to take care of the $700 bill, and also passing along the money to charity and a Louisiana woman who lost her home in Hurricane Katrina. The woman’s son helped save his life in Iraq, he said. So all’s well that ends well.

So who are these patriots who gave of their own hard-earned money to help a wounded veteran wronged by an unfeeling and insane bureaucracy? Who were the senators who put pressure on the Army to right this wrong? That’s the third surprise, at least it’ll be to some of you.

AmericaBlog and its contributors were once described as “a bunch of wackos” by admitted drug abuser Rush Limbaugh. Aravosis is “a particularly angry activist,” says the Family Research Council. Aravosis is a staunch proponent of gay rights, which makes sense since he’s gay.

And the senators who put their own pressure on the Army? — Jay Rockefeller and Robert Byrd, both among the many Senate Democrats the right wing loves to hate.

Yes, the people who came to help a wounded vet when no one else would, the people who held the online equivalent of a bake sale to help out a soldier getting screwed by the system ... were liberals.

And now, as ol’ Paul Harvey likes to say, you know … the rest of the story.

Good day!

AgentQuery

I've recommended this site to so many people via e-mail in the past few days that I figured it would be a good idea to blog it. I wish I'd had something like the site's "agent search database" when I was looking for an agent. It would have saved me a bunch of time. You can search by genre and, most importantly, by which agents are seeking new clients. There are also some helpful articles with tips and such.

You kids today with your newfangled technology...in my day, we had to find our agents the hard way. We crouched in doorways and alleyways, waiting for the elusive scent of latte on the morning breeze...when they came near, we pounced, waving our query letters and shrieking like banshees, "it's just like Ian Rankin, only with cats!" The agents would scatter in all directions, bounding away like gazelles. Most days we came home empty handed, stumbling back to our caves, our stomachs growling with hunger and our hearts heavy with disappointment.

Good times, those...

Another Great Tradition Dies

When I was a student and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, there were two things that were as constant as the sunrise: great basketball and jaywalking. It was pretty much a given that the crosswalks and walk/don't walk lights (with the little beepy things for the blind) were there more as suggestions than as absolute rules. People boldly stepped into traffic serene in the knowledge that hey, we're students, this is the shortest path between me and beer, so you can just slow down and enjoy the day, mmm'kay?

Those days are no more. According to this article at newsobserver.com , Chapel Hill Police have started cracking down on jaywalkers. They're issuing tickets with fines of 110 bucks plus $25.00 court costs, which seems awful steep for students. "It's a crackerjack cop giving me a crackerjack ticket for a crackerjack offense," one student fumed as he was ticketed in front of reporters. (Someone really needs to tell that kid the colloquial meaning of "crackerjack". I blame No Child Left Behind for this lapse in education).

The erosion of our civil liberties continues....

I'm So Glad We Have These People to Protect Us

Vice President Cheney Accidentally Shoots Fellow Hunter

In other news, Jon Stewart, Jay Leno, David Letterman and Conan O'Brian have been seen dancing with joy.

Just In Case You Haven't Heard Enough About The Damn Cartoon Controversy

Latest Newspaper Column:

Back in September, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published a series of cartoons with caricatures that were supposed to represent the Prophet Muhammad.

The cartoons were the winners in a contest the paper ran in which people were invited to “draw the Prophet.” Sort of like those art-school ads you see in the backs of magazines, I guess. One of the winning cartoons showed Muhammad with his black turban shaped like a bomb, complete with fuse coming out of the top. Another showed him with two veiled women behind him, grimacing as he brandishes a sword.

Maybe it’s that I don’t understand Danish humor, but I’ve seen the cartoons, and they’re no great shakes as satire. Doonesbury this ain’t.

It wasn’t disdain for the artistic merits of the drawings, however, that has sent Arab mobs into the streets a few months later. It seems that some sects of Islam find any pictorial portrayal of the Prophet to be offensive, let alone one that makes fun of him.

A mob in Syria burned down the Danish embassy. Another in Afghanistan tangled with NATO troops, who fired on the crowd, killing three. In Iran, crowds armed with Molotov cocktails attacked the Norwegian and Austrian embassies, possibly because those countries’ papers supported the Danish one, or possibly because mobs in the Middle East tend to have a shaky grasp of European geography.

Now, as a connoisseur of irony, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out some of the ironies in this situation and in people’s reactions to it.

For example: A few months ago, American newspapers and magazines published pictures of prisoner abuse at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison and reported that some prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility had seen what they described as “defacement” of the Koran. The pictures and the reports led to widespread riots in Afghanistan and the Arab world.

Right-wingers, however, concentrated their ire, not on the acts reported, but on the publication of the inflammatory photos. Some even went so far as to call for the prosecution of the publishers for treason, since they had “put Americans in jeopardy” by inflaming Muslim opinion.

Now, however, some of the very same people have suddenly become champions of free speech on behalf of the Danish paper.

I suppose it would be ungracious of me to suggest that these folks treasure free speech and a free press only when they’re being used to insult Muslims. So I won’t do that. Instead, I’ll say: welcome to the side of freedom. I hope you’ll stay a while.

Of course, there’s a heavy load of irony on the Muslim side of the scale as well, in that the rioters are expressing their outrage over their Prophet being portrayed as brutal and violent by acting brutally and violently.

A government-run newspaper in Iran has announced that it will hold a contest for cartoons about the Holocaust in reaction to the Muhammad caricatures. The move was immediately denounced by the Western press because it was offensive to the sensibilities of Jewish people.

Here’s what we here in America can do to help stop the violence.

We have a group in this country who make a career out of being offended, especially over religion. From lame sitcoms to off-the-wall art displays, to the use of the greeting “Happy Holidays,” these folks can summon a state of high religious dudgeon faster than you can say “Will and Grace.” We need to send some of these folks over to Muslim countries to teach the tactics that have brought American corporations and government regulators running to them like lapdogs: Letter writing campaigns. Threats of advertiser boycotts. Finger-wagging speeches on TV talk shows.

These are the techniques members of our own professionally insulted religious class have utilized with great effect to make mighty corporations and even our own FCC eager to appease the ever-smoldering anger of the disgruntled.

In one incident here, the FCC fined Fox 1.2 million bucks in response to a letter-writing campaign in which there were only 23 actual people complaining about the Fox show, “Married to America.” Twenty of those were photocopies or e-mails of the exact same letter. And those 23 people didn’t even need to leave the house, much less burn down an embassy. Now that’s power.

To their credit, it seems that a lot of Muslim leaders, especially in Europe, are using these peaceful means of protest. So we only need to send “Focus on the Family” and the Family Research Council and whatnot to the real hotspots, like Tehran and Damascus.

In short, let our religious loonies reach out to their religious loonies and show them how it’s done. At the very least, it’ll get them out of our hair for a while. Oh, and send Bill O’Reilly, too. He really needs to get out more.

As for me, I’m going to express my solidarity with the defenders of free speech and a free press. I’m going to go have a Danish. Maybe two.