"Who the hell is JonBenet Ramsey?"

Title taken from one of the best commentaries on this entire fucking travesty of a media I've seen in awhile.

As usual, I've got a lot to say but not the time to say it. But the great thing about blogging is that there's usually someone who's already said it, and said it better:

• georgia10 tells us about some people who aren't John Mark Karr. If ever a thing needed to be said...
• And there's this diary, which I've had bookmarked for almost a month now, that just so perfectly captures how I feel, and have felt for so many years now that I've forgotten what it was like before. Before I screamed as Americans were left to die in a city that was drowning. Before I faced a future of losing my rights as a citizen and a woman. Before I learned how broken our voting system is. Before I saw the picture of a young Iraqi girl, covered in the blood of her family. Before I read about everything, every front, every issue I ever cared about, under a brutal and sustained assault by the most evil agenda imaginable. Before I watched two shining towers of gleaming steel and glass crumble to the ground and before my country lost its collective fucking mind.

Kung Fu Monkey puts things in perspective

How can you not want to read a post that says this?

FDR: Oh, I'm sorry, was wiping out our entire Pacific fleet supposed to intimidate us? We have nothing to fear but fear itself, and right now we're coming to kick your ass with brand new destroyers riveted by waitresses. How's that going to feel?

CHURCHILL: Yeah, you keep bombing us. We'll be in the pub, flipping you off. I'm slapping Rolls-Royce engines into untested flying coffins to knock you out of the skies, and then I'm sending angry Welshmen to burn your country from the Rhine to the Polish border.

US. NOW: BE AFRAID!! Oh God, the Brown Bad people could strike any moment! They could strike ... NOW!! AHHHH. Okay, how about .. NOW!! AAGAGAHAHAHHAG! Quick, do whatever we tell you, and believe whatever we tell you, or YOU WILL BE KILLED BY BROWN PEOPLE!! PUT DOWN THAT SIPPY CUP!!

So about that hurricane...

A little less than a year ago, I began the blog post that would eventually kick my ass. It's the Katrina post, the real-time post I was writing in a separate place on my computer while that horrible week -- all those horrible weeks -- happened and just...happened. It was a garbled mix of links and lists and lists of links and gut reactions and pictures and visceral horror on a page. It was garbled and impossible to follow, a stream of consciousness that made no sense to anyone but me.

That's writing. It's editing that turns it into something readable, but sometime during all of that, I lost my heart? nerve? energy? strength? courage? and I just couldn't finish it. I thought eventually I'd come back to it, edit it -- all 11 pages of it -- down into something readable, but I don't think that's going to happen. I kept it just in case, but I don't think it's going to happen. It kicked my ass.

So read this instead. Please.

It's been nearly a year since a great American city and an entire region of a once-great country drowned. It didn't die, not exactly, but perhaps it's just going slowly, slowly, suffering the painfully awful spiral of a terminal illness. I hope that it's not dying. I really, truly hope that. But either way, what happened during Katrina will forever remain one of the darkest, most horrible and shameful events in the history of this country.

Read this please. Please.

They are not coming.