the blog quebecois

i'm going to need two pair of shoes
when I get through walkin' to you
when I get back to new orleans

fats domino

New readers (one or two must trickle in occasionally -- I can dream, can't I?) might be wondering about my silence on the most important story of the last few days. Nothing to worry about. I routinely neglect big stories, not out of lack of concern, but because I rarely have anything to say that hasn't been said by someone else, quicker and better.

Having no specific knowledge of New Orleans or its environs; nor of hurricanes, rescue operations; nor of . . . much, really, now that I think about it -- I'm reduced to offering platitudes that however genuinely intended, always sound at least to me banal and trite.

So at least post links to charities and government pages and NGOs? I could do that. It's a mechanical process that I don't enjoy much, though, and in the time I could cobble together some half-assed list, the real pros like Glenn Reynolds and Michelle Malkin would have slapped up twice the information, with the usual extensive commentary to boot.

Also, I am supported in this by a Higher Authority: James Lileks:

So if I don't put up a big long list of charities, it's because I figure you can find them yourself - the Red Cross isn't exactly hiding in a shack in Utah waving a shotgun at anyone who comes up the road, and the Salvation Army can probably be summoned if you stand on a street corner with a Bible and a tuba and start belting out "Bringing in the Sheaves." I have nothing to recommend, but I donated here, because if it's good enough for Hugh Hewitt, then it works for me. As a brain-dead Rovebot automaton, that is.

If anything put me off reading the internets today, it was the two themes of perfidy and nuance. The former being the Bush-is-evil sites that can't wait for the President to show up at a tent city to do a photo-op in the breadline so they can drag out plastic turkey jokes, and the latter being sites that obsessed over the President's remarks today. I heard them. I was very underwhelmed. I suppose a bitten lip or a moist eye would have helped to part the waters of Canal St. like the Red Sea, but I don't expect moving rhetoric from him anymore. I think the White House has a tin ear these days � I heard another speech the other day about how They Hate Our Freedoms, and true though it may be it�s as fresh as a Pink Floyd tune on a classic FM station. I know; impressions are everything, appearances count. But as I get older I care less about the political value of a particular address and more about what actually happens, and I would prefer the 1950s sci-fi movie Authority Figure as the societal default, i.e., someone who bluntly states the facts and says "that"s all, boys - before leaving through a pebbled-glass door to do something, leaving the reporters shouting questions. Sometimes you just tire of spin, the endless carping, the incessant pissy miserabilism, to quote the Pet Shop Boys. It's as if there's a superior breed of humanity, uncorrupt and all-knowing, waiting in the wings to solve all our problems if only we'd let them have the reins of power and speak the honeyed words. Listen to them and human failings will be erased, nature turned aside like a man who enters a French restaurant in tennis shoes.

Which leads to the second and perhaps larger part of my malaise, and it is why I find writing about politics less and less appealing each day.

I was going to write something about New Orleans last night, but made the mistake of looking around to see what other people were saying, and it was at best disheartening.

This, written a few days ago (and he continues much in the same vein through today, if you can stand to read it) by someone calling himself The Canadian Cynic:

Oh, yawn. Apparently, fellow progressive blogger Joe is all up in arms over my apparent lack of compassion for the good folks of the Gulf coast, given that Hurricane Katrina seems about ready to redesign their landscape big time. To which I can, with a perfectly clear conscience, say, when it comes to things American, I've pretty much run out of said sympathy, natural disasters or otherwise.

I remind you of Oscar Wilde's aphorism: "A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing."

That was mild compared to this sewer of a thread at the Daily Kos.

Others have noted the trend. The Commissar at The Politburo Diktat published a handy chart with representative posts from the Left and Right. See if you can spot the difference.

I'm sick of it. Sick of people who preach on a platform of corpses; who compulsively comb through tragedy in search of that perfect political angle.

That doesn't mean that the cretins at Daily Kos and elsewhere shouldn't be challenged and called to account for their blind hatred. But it'll have to be done by people with more energy and stomach for the battle than me.

I'll continue to do what I do best -- celebrate what is true, and beautiful, and timeless.

And booger jokes.

We'll always have our booger jokes.