‘Este Poderoso y Peligroso Huracán’

Cubagustav

Hurricane Gustav turned out to non-calamitous to the United States. Its greatest fury was focused on western Cuba; the storm was a Category 4 hurricane, with sustained winds up to 150 mph, when it hit the island. A few days before the storm, I overheard a colleague who has been to Cuba more than once say that the government doesn’t mess around there when it comes to getting people out of harm’s way of a lethal-looking storm. An evacuation is ordered, and that’s it.

That doesn’t do much about property damage, though, and Gustav devastated the areas it struck. A country as rich and principled as ours can’t be caught aiding people ruled by a dictator, so the only help the United States has offered has been a relative pittance, $100,000, to be transmitted to aid groups rather than the Cuban government. Cuba’s answer: thanks but no thanks–if you really want to help, lift restrictions on travel and trade so we can buy what we need. (Yes–both the offer and response were political. But you have to wince a little when you read that the vast and boundlessly prosperous nation of East Timor kicked in $500,000 to help the Cuban recovery effort. I guess that’s what happens when you don’t have strong principles like ours.)

Cuba’s facing worse now: Another Category 4 storm, Hurricane Ike, is nearing. If it follows the forecast track, it may travel much of the length of the island (here’s something I didn’t know: Cuba is 700 miles long from Guantanamo in the east to Pinar del Rio, the province most heavily damaged by Hurricane Gustav, to the west; the greatest north-south width is about 100 miles; its area is 42,803 square miles, virtually identical to the state of Virginia. But I digress). The official word on Ike, quoted in the post title, is that it’s a powerful and dangerous hurricane.

Ike is expected make landfall in Guantanamo Province (but not in the immediate vicinity of our navy and detention base there), then spend 48 hours crossing from the northern to the southern coast, then curving back to the northwest and out over the Gulf of Mexico. With a path like that, it’s easy to imagine that it will affect virtually all of the island’s 11.4 million people.

I didn’t start out to write a plea for aid to Cuba–or for Haiti or the other islands and nations devastated by the recent storms–but how can one avoid it after you start to look at what’s going on. Donating to the agencies that might help is not as straightforward as going to the American Red Cross. But there are options:

The Canadian Red Cross, for one, is active in providing relief to Cuba and the rest of the Caribbean. It takes donations from us Yanks.

I also did come across a current list of U.S.-based agencies that take donations and operate in Cuba (see message 17 in the thread). Without having done any homework, they all sound reputable.

More later. (Oh, and that picture at the top: It’s a NASA image of Cuba after Hurricane Gustav passed. If you click on the image to look at the larger version(s), you can see the Isle of Youth off the southern coast, which was devastated by the storm. The milky turquoise color along the southern shoreline is sand stirred up the hurricane’s passage.)

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Willing Patriots

John McCain is a magnanimous guy. He said tonight that after he wins the election this November, “we’re going to reach out our hand to any willing patriot” to put America “back on the road to prosperity and peace.” Remember, McCain’s war was the one in which we destroyed villages to save them. He wants to use the dynamite that blew up our house to put it back together again.

But the words that chill here are “any willing patriot.” Does that mean subscribing to the “bring it on” patriotism of Bush? The torture patriotism of Cheney? The “limitless executive power” patriotism of the entire Bush-Cheney wrecking crew? The “endless war” patriotism of McCain? Does that mean surrendering to the patriotism of ceaseless braying about the heroism and self-sacrifice of anyone in a uniform who goes along with the program without questioning the empty rationale or the moral bankruptcy of the undertaking?

Will McCain reach out his hand to the kind of patriotism that says, you’re wrong, senator–the policies you’ve embraced are killing the country we love, the only country we have for better or worse? In the frenzy of waving flags, in the midst of our military cult, I don’t see that sort of patriotic overture getting such a warm reception.

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Gratulerer Med Dagen

One piece of unfinished business for September 3: Happy birthday, Pop. (I’m not saying how old he is, but he was born in 1921. In Marshall County, Minnesota. During Warren Harding’s first year in office–and also just a year after his mother first got the right to vote, for Harding or anyone else. Just to put things in perspective.)

Hope you had a great day. And now that you’re in a party mood, maybe I can talk you into a trip to California before too long.

–With love from me and all the California-type Brekkes.

(Below: Birthday boy and Chicago-type Brekkes celebrate the occasion on Western Avenue.)

Bunky87

Tour of Ireland on Versus: Why Bother?

Hey, the Tour of Ireland looks like an interesting race. Our current drive-by shooting has to do with the way Versus put the thing on the air. The network allotted an hour and a half to the race’s first three stages, all won in bunch sprints by Team Columbia’s Mark Cavendish.

Then came the decisive stages, last Saturday and Sunday. Versus allotted the same 90 minutes total to air both stages. Saturday’s ride included the picturesque and insanely narrow Conor Pass road and a loop out the Dingle Peninsula to Slea Head (hey: we walked most of this route in 1973, but that’s another story). Sunday’s finale began in Killarney and finished with a tough circuit in Cork.

The net result of jamming those two stages into one shortish broadcast was a horribly edited series of race glimpses. What was supposed to come across as a cohesive narrative of two race days came across as a chaotic and disjointed montage in which it was impossible to tell where the racers were, where groups and individuals were on the course or relative to each other. Of course, none of that stopped resident jabberers Paul Sherwen and Phil Liggett from filling time with meaningless prattling about the beautiful Irish countryside and the Kingdom of Kerry.

But the broadcast was not without its charms. Charm One was a post-Stage Four interview with Cavendish. He had lost the leaders jersey after getting dropped on the Conor Pass climb. The interviewer asked him what happened. Cavendish paused, flashed a genuinely perplexed look, and said, “I got dropped.” He went on to explain that the pace set by Garmin-Chipotle’s David Millar was just too much. Charm Two was the colleens who served as podium girls. They were both taller and more robust-looking than the racers. But the truly transfixing them about them was the hideous dresses both had been given to wear. The lasses should find a solicitor and bring the designers to bar for a fashion crime of the first order.

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Ike and the Stormettes

Storms

That’s a National Hurricane Center image of currently active tropical-type storms: Tropical Depression Gustav is parked over Texarkana. Out in the Caribbean and Atlantic, Tropical Storms Hanna, Ike, and Josephine (from west to east) are conga-lining toward the North America neighborhood. Those latter three storms are all expected to reach hurricane status before making landfall … somewhere.

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Vintage

Vintagerv090208

On Delaware Street, at Ohlone Park: A vintage RV with what I want to call a Cowsills paint job. The thing runs–I saw it being turned around–and for a vehicle that’s got to be pushing 40 years old, it’s pristine. A couple was washing it on the street, and now that I’m remembering the sort of chalky dust they were rinsing off, I wonder if they had it up at Burning Man, which was held in the Black Rock Desert, northeast of Reno, last weekend.

Word of the Day

It’s Schadenfreude. My own spin on the definition: the bitter joy one takes in the suffering of others.

I loved Obama’s take on the Palin misfortune: back off and let the family take care of its misfortune in private. Of course, the world little noted his injunction, let alone remembered it, and the hits just keep on coming. Governor Palin’s embarrassing moment with her daughter’s pregnancy–and hey, it’s Senator McCain’s moment, too–is really the least of her, or his, problems. She’s just a Christmas stocking full of early holiday surprises. See TPM Election Central for a handy list of the pies that hit her (and Team McCain) in the face over the last couple of days. My particular favorite, though it’s of no particular importance, is her giggling on a radio talk show while the host-lout calls one of her opponents “a bitch.” Who knew Christian zealots could be such fun?

Anyway, as Labor Day drew into Labor Day night, I recognized the guilty truth that it’s kind of fun to see a Republican candidate driven from pillar to post over some of the same kinds of issues–including a matter that is arguably private–for which Democrats have been harried for years by the self-anointed saints of the right.

Enjoy your time in the spotlight, governor. If the tide keeps running this way, you just bought yourself a ticket back to Juneau.

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