Bemused Amusements

You know how we seem to be having trouble finding qualified Supreme Court justices? Well, I have the solution -- major league umpires!

After watching that home plate ump totally screw up the second White Sox-Angels game in the ALCS, he'd be perfect. He may not be good, but the way I see it is this: If your Federal government can't be effective, it can at least be entertaining.

So we'll test the players for steroids, and the umpires for beliefs on the abortion issue.

Well, the word is in. The Feds did a better job dealing with Hurricane Rita than with Katrina, and President Bush's approval ratings have bounced accordingly.
They can learn -- thank God! Like lab rats.
Now this has implications for our foreign policy as well. I would suggest that the reason why we didn't have a plausible excuse for invading Iraq, or any exit strategy, is that this is the first country that this Administration has invaded. (Afghanistan doesn't count -- we were helping native warlords on that one.) We should do much better the next time around.

How do I know this? According to a highly-placed Washington source (code name: Deep Ass), the Administration has assembled two new teams of top-level advisors.
The first team is composed of 10 nine-year-old boys. Their job is to devise a more plausible excuse for the next war. As everyone knows, no one can beat a nine-year old at coming up with excuses -- at any rate, they could certainly do better than citing non-existent WMD's. This team will be led by an unnamed former head of FEMA -- a proven expert at excuse composition.
The second team is focusing on exit strategies -- and is composed of 10 divorce lawyers. "Slip out the back, Jack" is their slogan.
Next time, we'll be ready.

Other thoughts:
With all these terrorists leaders that the U.S. is capturing/killing, Osama is going to be looking for people with leadership potential.
Why not Prince Charles? He's been training for a leadership role for his entire life, there are plenty of terrorists already in Britain, and his wife looks like a camel. Perfect!

They have these wildfires in California. Well, there's plenty of water in New Orleans -- just pump it out of the city, put it in oil tankers (after all, there's no gasoline or heating oil for them to transport, anyway) and send it to California.

Hey, this is too easy.

There's been a lot of talk about rebuilding and repopulating New Orleans, but concern about toxicity. I have the perfect solution:

We have all these prisoners at Guantanemo -- we can send them to New Orleans. We're not getting anything productive out of them now, and Cuba isn't that far away. And, if it's a trifle toxic in The Big Easy, or if there's another hurricane and the makeshift levees don't hold up, well. . . que sera, sera.

So if you rebuld the city in Louisiana, what do you call it? Not "New Orleans" -- the old city was named that. "Newer New Orleans"?

I have a better idea -- let's sell the naming rights. If a corporation will pay big bucks to have a stadium named after them, what would a major city be worth? It sounds like ExxonMobil has plenty of money these days -- how about "Rockefeller Center?" Well, I guess that name's been taken -- but you get the idea. We could even embed advertising into the sidewalks -- for a small fee. And The Big Easy could be The Big Microsoft.

Hell, somebody's gotta pay for rebuilding it.

The mayor of New Orleans blew it. If he had just told Bush that there were weapons of mass destruction in the SuperDome, he would have sent the troops lickedy-split.

There are a few lingering points to consider.

1) The worst kid on the team gets picked last and is stashed in right field. By the 3rd inning, he's counting the blades of grass in the outfield. In the 5th inning, someone hits a fly ball to him, but he's mentally checked out, he's a lousy player anyway, and he drops the ball. And everyone gives him a hard time for not staying alert.

That's how it is with disaster relief. We don't put any real money into it, there's no legitimate training (what are you going to do -- flood New Orleans for practice?) and nobody thinks about it until something goes wrong. Then we wonder why the execution is less than perfect.

2) Nobody really plans or thinks ahead. All the people who are bitching at Bush and FEMA -- they're no different. They all crammed for their exams and wrote their term papers the day before they were due. Even now, they're more worried about spending a couple of extra bucks at the pump than about the hundreds of extra dollars they're going to spend heating their homes this Winter -- only a few months away. Good planning requires foresight -- and that's in shorter supply than oil.

Now I live in New England, where babies and fire fighters will die this Winter in fires caused by the improper use of space heaters -- space heaters purchased because people won't be able to afford the gas or oil to heat their homes. Pipes will burst and old people will suffer from hypothermia. So tell me again about how expensive it is to fill the tank of your SUV.

3) In the beginning, it was one more case of poor people of color suffering on the tube. With the price of those big-ass screen TV's coming down, we'll all be able to see the suffering in these various Third World situations on the big screen. (Well, New Orleans is in the South -- it's kind of like Third World.) But it doesn't seem real -- we're jaded to the suffering after many years of looking at tsunami victims, famine victims, AIDS victims, black kids with bloated bellies and empty eyes and swarms of flies buzzing around their heads. "These people are up shit creek -- send money." Over and over again. We hear it, we see it, but it's like when you're a teenager and your mother tells you to do your homework. There's this little switch in the back of your head that goes "click" -- and you've tuned out.

But it was that guy -- the one who couldn't hold onto his wife's hand -- and she told him to take care of their children. He caught us by surprise -- at that moment, we all looked at him and saw ourselves -- and cared. Cared beyond the conventional "tsk, tsk." I pray for that guy and his kids.

So do we have a plan for Los Angeles when the Big One hits?

Of all the issues relating to the aftermath of Katrina in New Orleans, the incompetence of the Federal government is one of the most interesting. I suppose that the government is too complex to address simple logistical problems like providing food and water for its starving citizens. Actually, they would have been better off to subcontract the whole project to CNN -- they don't seem to be having any difficulties communicating from the site. In addition, their camera crews and reporters seem adept at operating under adverse conditions. At the very least, they seem to be competent and flexible -- no one has accused the Federal government of competency or flexibility in the last week.

Two lingering questions:

1) Hurricane season has almost 3 months left -- and it's been a very active season. What are they going to do when the next one hits?

2) The've talked about "The Big One" in New Orleans for years -- and it finally happened. Yet all of this mess will be dwarved by the earthquake that will inevitably hit Los Angeles. Is this a dress rehearsal?

I have to admit that I'm not a big cycling fan, and I'm annoyed by the sudden presence of yuppie guys with those tight little outfits on their pricey bikes getting in my way on the road. But the Lance Armstrong thing has me really amazed.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding of the situation is that Lance Armstrong was just another guy on a bike until he was stricken with cancer. Then he comes back -- well, he does more than come back -- he wins 7 straight Tour de France races against the world's top competition. And we fault the French for finding all this. . . shall we say. . . unlikely?

We all want to believe the story -- that a person can turn around an adverse situation and become invincible. And there's ample evidence supporting this possibility -- I saw a movie just last week in which Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie stood in the middle of a room and killed about 3 million professional assassins -- a feat unmatched by anything achieved by Jennifer Aniston over the course of several seasons on Friends.

Now I don't know if Armstrong doped. But if he could dope and escape detection for several years, you know that a lot of those other guys were doping too. As for the overcoming adversity theory, didn't any of those other guys have to overcome their own problems?

We'll probably never know -- we want to believe the story, but the best guess is that the cancer, or the chemo, or some other part of the treatment, physically changed something for Lance Armstrong. I know it sounds pretty lame, but 7 straight victories? This guy wasn't exactly Tiger Woods before he got cancer. Something changed.