The Furious Spinner

Casualties of War: Camp Casey and New Orleans

By Starhawk

When Katrina hit, I was at Camp Casey in Crawford, Texas, where I had gone to support Cindy Sheehan, the Gold Star mother who encamped outside of Bush’s ranch to demand a meeting so she could ask him one simple question, “What noble cause did my son die for?” Cindy is a formidable woman, a fearless woman because she has already lost what she most loved.

Loss and grief are powerful forces. Camp Casey was full of those who had suffered the real losses of the Bush administrations’ war on Iraq, the families of soldiers, returning veterans, Gold Star Mothers who had lost a child in Iraq.’ Along the roadside stood a vast field of crosses to represent the dead. Across the road, a small encampment of pro-war counter-demonstrators would gather each day. They didn’t stay overnight. On our side, we camped in a ditch, in the hundred and five degree heat, itching from sweat and chigger bites. The counter-protestors shouted slogans and drove up and down the road in cars decorated with signs proclaiming their love for Bush, honking. David, my partner, a veteran of the civil rights movement and a draft resistor in Vietnam, thought they needed some lessons in taunting. He’s been taunted by better in his time—the outfront racists, the fanatic anti-communists. The worst our counter demonstrators mustered was a sign saying, “The Sixties are over—why don’t you go home!” “Someone on our side countered with a sign reading, “The Fifties are over—why don’t YOU go home?”

Bush and his allies are experts at manufacturing emotion, whipping up fear, exploiting the dead. But here the air was permeated by real and personal loss. “You have to understand,” the woman said to me. “My mother does not go out. She doesn’t leave the house.” Her mother, standing next to her, nodded in agreement. We were outside the big tent where the rally was being held, at Camp Casey Two, up the road from our campsite. “But I told her, you have to come. You have to see this.”

The woman was blond, late thirties, conservatively dressed, in a big sunhat . She spoke with a Texas accent, and she and her mother looked like archetypal Republicans. “Nothing looks prettier than a young man in a uniform,” she said, smiling sadly “but when you look at what’s underneath, it’s not so pretty.” Her brother had come back from the first Gulf War, mentally and emotionally shattered, and had never recovered. And that’s what drew her mother out, to gather with others who had also lost real children, real lives.

I told her about Billy, the son of my best friend from junior high school. Mary and I played with paper dolls and screamed for the Beatles and went wild together in the Sixties. She was the first of my friends to get pregnant, when we were nineteen, and I helped her through the stress of telling her ultraconservative family, her hasty marriage and messy divorce. Then we lost touch for many years. I remember Billy as a sweet two-year-old with angelic curls. He grew up to be the second soldier across the line in the first Gulf War. I reconnected with Mary shortly after he took a gun to the beach and shot himself, one of the thousands of uncounted casualties, suicides, chronically ill, lefovers from that adventure.

The homeless shelters and the cold streets are still filled with men of my own generation, the living ghosts of Vietnam. Meanwhile veterans’ services are being cut back, hospitals closed. My aunt and uncle from the communist side of the family worked all their lives for the VA, proudly, because as my aunt said it was the closest thing to socialism in this country. They enjoyed providing free treatment for people. Perhaps that is why the same warmongers, so eager to create new casualties, refuse to adequately fund their ongoing care.

The people at Camp Casey talked about ‘being on someone else’s mission,’ about ‘chains of command’ and ‘getting orders from above”, which they agreeably followed. “This place is run like the military,” one of my friends remarked. “We are the military,” was the answer. They were indeed the military, the people in this country most directly affected by the reality of war, Gold Star Mothers who had lost a child in Iraq, returning veterans, Veterans for Peace, military families. They wore cowboy hats and spoke in real Texas accents: Bush’s natural base, in rebellion not at the concept of authority but at his misuse and abuse of the authority entrusted to him.

Most people there were from Texas, many of them surprised and delighted to meet other Texans who opposed the war. A whole contingent was from Louisiana, and New Orleans.

And so on Sunday night when the news reports were tracking Katrina’s progress and predicting the disaster of New Orleans, the mood at the camp was grim. I was over at Camp Casey Two, where a big tent was set up for meetings and rallies. I was trying to be helpful by making a list of all the stuff needed for the caravans which would be setting out when the camp closed on a speaking tour, mobilizing people for the September 24 march on Washington. On the screen a video was playing detailing the effects of depleted uranium, showing pictures of the deformed babies born in Iraq, cyclops babies with only one eye in the center of the forhead, babies with heads like tumors, babies that are nothing but undifferentiated lumps of flesh. And at my feet, a man from New Orleans was crying and raging. The bridges were closed, and no one could get out any longer. The news was predicting that thousands might die.

The petrochemical industry and the developers have long ruled in the Gulf, with free reign to destroy the wetlands that are nature’s buffer against storms. A huge proportion of the Louisiana National Guard, which is supposed to take charge during natural disasters, was in Iraq. The rest were apparently in Florida, moving military equipment out of the path of the storm. The funds for flood control and reinforcing the levees had been systematically cut by the Bush administration in order to fund our attacks on Baghdad and Fallujah.
Hurricanes are fueled by the warmth of the ocean, and the Gulf is abnormally hot due to global warming, which Bush and his allies will not admit is happening. Global warming may not have caused Hurrican Katrina, but it undoubtedly amplified it’s power and fury.

New Orleans, like Casey Sheehan, is a casualty of war.

And I imagine Cindy joined in her vigil by a mother from New Orleans, perhaps one whose baby died in her arms of dehydration at the Superdome, to ask,“Why did my child die?”

And Bush, if he were honest would have to say to her, “Your child died of incompetence and callousness justified by a set of false assumptions:”

That the current economy and technology, fueled by cheap oil and gas, can and should continue in its current form.

That the profits of those who benefit from the current system are of paramount importance, and should be protected at all costs.

That war is good for business.

That environmental impacts don’t need to be counted as part of the cost of doing business and so don’t count.

That technology has transcended nature.

That global warming has no real consequences.

That government owes nothing in the way of care and support to its citizens.

That the lives of the poor aren’t worth much, anyway, especially if they happen to be black.

That the way to respond to uncomfortable questions is to sneer at and smear the questioner.

That a good media spin can redefine and outweigh reality.

But reality has a way of being, well, real, and catching up with you. Real loss, real grief are the real results of the Bush administration’s policies. His neocon friends maintain their power by manufacturing fear, exploiting the dead. But now the real dead are coming back to haunt them.

And so I imagine Cindy and the mother from New Orleans joined by a legion of mothers from Iraq. I envision the roads of Crawford lined with the corpses of Baghdad and Fallujah, with the one-eyed monstrous stillbirths, the children blown to pieces, caked with flesh, soaked with blood. I hear a chorus of voices asking, “Why? What noble cause? What great gift are you bringing us? What is this democracy that abandons the poor to drown?”

I see them laying the bodies at the gates of power. I see us joining them, to turn the to a wind of justice, a wind of change. Hurricane season has just begun.

* * *

Some places to send aid:

Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children are doing intense work among the shelters and prisons with displaced youth, mostly African American. Believe me, the Red Cross and the Christian charities won’t be pouring out relief to this group! They can also use some volunteers (especially African American) and many gifts in kind.

Send a check to the “FFLIC Hurricane Relief Fund” to 920 Platt Street, Sulphur, Louisiana, 70663.
awakenprogress@yahoo.com
kd.higgs@yahoo.com


The Veterans for Peace bus that was at Camp Casey in Crawford, TX has now gone down to Covington, Louisiana to do relief work. They also need donations of money and computer equipment.

Make a donation to Veterans For Peace Chapter 116 http://www.vfproadtrips.org

Tax deductible cash donations can be send to:
Contact:

Veterans For Peace Chapter 116
28500 Sherwood Rd
Willits CA 95490
pjtate@sonic.net
Cell PH 707-536-3001

Food Not Bombs will be providing food for refugees. They can use volunteers to prepare and serve food, and, of course, donations.

www.foodnotbombs.net. You can make a financial donation on line or mail checks to Food Not Bombs, P.O. Box 744, Tucson, AZ 85702. Please call (1-800-884-1136) or email (katrina@foodnotbombs.net ) us if you can join them on the bus or help with gas money.


Starhawk
www.starhawk.org

Feel free to post, forward, and reprint this article for non-commercial purposes. All other rights reserved.

Donations to help support Starhawk’s trainings and work can be sent to:
ACT
1405 Hillmount St.
Austin, Texas
78704
U.S.A.

Posted by: Kim Antieau / 9/04/2005 03:50:00 PM

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"We have been abandoned..." 

I have been on this planet for many years. I was around a good portion of the century of holocausts—the 20th century. We have seen some really horrible things happen. Many of them are far worse than this unnatural disaster. I certainly don't want to say Katrina is the worst thing that has ever happened on this planet, because it's not. The tsunami was a far deadlier disaster, for one thing. And according to the climatologists, it's only going to get worse. But what is happening in New Orleans and what has happened this past week has exposed the rotten insides of this government for all the world to see. (I do think the local and state governments have plenty to answer for, too, by the way. But I'll talk about that later.) I was glad that after Bush FINALLY went to New Orleans things started to get better, but how many people died before the federal government got going? And they're still fucking up.

The president of Jefferson Parish says that FEMA keeps turning away supplies, among other things. He said today, "Yesterday — yesterday — FEMA comes in and cuts all of our emergency communication lines. They cut them without notice. Our sheriff, Harry Lee, goes back in, he reconnects the line. He posts armed guards and said no one is getting near these lines."

Broussard also said, "We have been abandoned by our own country. Hurricane Katrina will go down in history as one of the worst storms ever to hit an American coast. But the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina will go down as one of the worst abandonments of Americans on American soil ever in U.S. history. … Whoever is at the top of this totem pole, that totem pole needs to be chainsawed off and we’ve got to start with some new leadership. It’s not just Katrina that caused all these deaths in New Orleans here. Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area and bureaucracy has to stand trial before Congress now."

Read the whole exchange, especially the last part. I was sobbing as I listened to him and absolutely outraged. I looked for a clip, by the way, and couldn't find one. It was amazing. If you find it, let me know.

He complained about all the press conference, just as the mayor of New Orleans did. You'll notice they've continued to have press conferences, and they are continuing to say the same thing. This is the Karl Rove strategy that has always worked in the past. They just keep saying the same thing again and again: "No one could have anticipated this. There were three disasters, not just one." Despite the facts that MANY people had anticipated this, despite the fact that Bush gutted FEMA (plus it's no longer a cabinet position), despite all the ways that the federal government has fucked up, they continue to have these press conferences.

The Emperor sent Rumsfeld down there to pontificate. I was furious. Who on Earth has any confidence in Rumsfeld besides Bush? And he was so patronizing. He just talked about how great everyone in the leadership is. I dreamed last night that I was throwing up and all these women around me were throwing up, and I swear it was in anticipation of these blowhard assholes trying to indoctrinate us instead of saving these people. As I was watching today, I suddenly got the shivers: what if they are actually trying to destroy this city? (Not the rescue workers, but the federal government.) The right wing christians must hate a city like New Orleans. Bush Watch has a interesting (and chilling) roundup.

They may also be changing the historical documentation of when the governor asked for federal help. (They've done this before with the Emperor's speeches.) If I find out more, I'll post it.

I've got to go. More later.

Posted by: Kim Antieau / 9/04/2005 10:36:00 AM

1 comments

Saturday, September 03, 2005

RIP Roe v Wade 

Rehnquist has died. Let's hope I'm wrong about this being the end of Roe v Wade. I was wrong about Bush being reelected. I was wrong about hurricane Katrina. I've been wrong about many things. So I'm hoping I'll be wrong about this too.

And speaking of women's reproductive rights: It got lost in the hurricane news, but the
chief of women's health for the FDA, Dr. Susan Wood, resigned because the director wouldn't approve the so-called morning after pill for over-the-counter distribution. She said their decision was not based on science. The FDA said they were going to table the discussion until they could make certain only women seventeen and older could buy it

Wood said, "I have spent the last 15 years working to ensure that science informs good health-policy decisions. I can no longer serve as staff when scientific and clinical evidence, fully evaluated and recommended by the professional staff here, has been overruled."

According to the New York Times, she also said, "I feel very strongly that this shouldn't be about abortion politics. This is a way to prevent unwanted pregnancy and thereby prevent abortion. This should be something that we should all agree on."

Good for you, Dr. Wood.

Posted by: Kim Antieau / 9/03/2005 08:19:00 PM

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"Quit Your Whining" 

After seeing the video from the post before this one, I switched over to Faux News for a moment. Trent Lott was on the phone. He said that no matter what people were going through they needed to quit whining and just get on with it. Oh really? And how are they supposed to just get on with it, Mr. Compassionate Conservative, when they are trapped inside a city with no water and no food and no shelter and no medical care? People are still trapped inside their attics!

Posted by: Kim Antieau / 9/03/2005 09:15:00 AM

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Even the Liars Can't Spin This 

Mario found this video on Crooks and Liars.

Posted by: Kim Antieau / 9/03/2005 08:39:00 AM

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Friday, September 02, 2005

The Doublespeak Behind the Curtain 

Are they finally catching on? AP political writer Ron Fournier wrote, "The Iraqi insurgency is in its last throes. The economy is booming. Anybody who leaks a CIA agent's identity will be fired. Add another piece of White House rhetoric that doesn't match the public's view of reality: Help is on the way, Gulf Coast."

Posted by: Kim Antieau / 9/02/2005 08:48:00 PM

1 comments

Perspective 

This is what Mario said about the delay in getting help to New Orleans. And I'm paraphrasing. Homeland Security is supposed to be preparing for a terrorist attack. A terrorist attack would come without warning. They supposedly have been preparing to mobilize IMMEDIATELY after an attack. That's what Homeland Security is supposed to do. That's what we've been paying for. It has taken five days for the government to mobilize AFTER this catastrophe—and they actually had notice of a disaster. I just heard one of the reporters say that it's August and a lot of people are on vacation. Oh, okay. THAT'S a good excuse. I imagine the terrorists are taking note of that.

Posted by: Kim Antieau / 9/02/2005 12:59:00 PM

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Sadness 

I have never wanted the government to succeed more. I feel no satisfaction that they have failed. I feel no joy in how the rest of the world views us. But I don't care about any of that right now. Right this second, we all just want those people in Louisiana and Mississippi to be cared for, whatever that takes.

Posted by: Kim Antieau / 9/02/2005 09:18:00 AM

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Thursday, September 01, 2005

News Distortion Coming 

Okay. I'm not very good at predicting good outcomes, but I can sometimes predict bad outcomes. This is what I predict: very soon we will stop seeing true news coverage from New Orleans. Soon they are going to restrict the movement of reporters. Soon we are only going to see the relief efforts that are working. Already the administration has classified any criticism of the relief effort as "playing politics." And I saw the reporters back down when they were accused of this. This is what dictators do, by the way. When they fail, they accuse others. And as far as Congress goes: why aren't they back in session? Jack Cafferty pointed out that they returned to D.C. within hours to vote on the Schiavo case (which was none of their business). Now the Repulsicans are dragging their feet on coming back. (I'm sure that will change soon.)

And as you've no doubt noticed (and some of you have pointed this out to me), it appears that most of the people still in NO are Black. Does this have anything to do with how slow the relief efforts are? I hope not. But as you listen to these politicians (especially Bush), you can see that they have absolutely no freaking concept of what it is like to be poor. This was demonstrated yesterday (or the day before) when the Emperor relaxed the pollution standards and released the reserve oil. He's helping his oil buddies. Who cares that a couple hundred thousand poor people need FOOD, WATER, and SHELTER. And these people being so pissed off about the looting. I recognize that I may not understand the extent of what is happening, and I'm not for looting or lawlessness. I think if you have any respect for yourself, you'd be helping to rescue people rather than breaking into jewelry stores, etc. But if people need food, water, clothing, and medicine and they can't get it any other way during these times, I don't see the problem with them raiding flooded stores. Restoring "order" seems overrated right now (again, I could be very ignorant about the scope of the problem); people need rescuing.

Posted by: Kim Antieau / 9/01/2005 02:20:00 PM

5 comments

New Orleans Street by Street (Updated 1:52 PST) 

Found this on CNN.com. It's a satellite map of the city. You can get very close and see the flooding. NOLA.com is still doing a stellar job of covering what's happening in their city. The Speaker of the House says it doesn't make sense to rebuild New Orleans. As much as I find his remarks repugnant, I do think that cities all along the coast need to reassess. They need to stop beach development and bring back the wetlands, it seems to me. Here's a good piece on why things have gone from bad to worse in the disaster relief. Here's a satellite gif of before and after flooding on the coast.

Posted by: Kim Antieau / 9/01/2005 01:02:00 PM

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S.O.S. 

I don't know about you, but I've spent most of the morning watching what's happening in New Orleans. I just heard that FEMA is suspending rescue operations because they're worried about the safety of rescue workers—people are getting so desperate they're swamping the rescue workers. If this report is true, it's outrageous. Remember the Titanic? So many of the boats were nearly empty, but they wouldn't get closer to those who needed rescue in the water because they were afraid of being swamped. They only went in when everyone was dead! I don't want this to happen in New Orleans.

I'm so frustrated. It's heartbreaking. Tens of thousands of people are stranded without food and water. Food they can go without for a bit, but they've got to have water. This is the responsibility of the federal government. I'm not Bush-bashing. I did not want him to fail in this endeavor, but they have failed miserably. The military can do this kind of rescue operation well. Where are they? I called my senators and said, "DO SOMETHING!" They said they can't—it's the responsibility of the federal government. I tried calling Hillary Clinton's office, but she's getting so many calls I was put on hold immediately. I want Bill Clinton. When we have a disaster, I want my president: BILL CLINTON. He wasn't perfect, but he knew what to do in an emergency. Remember one of the reasons Bush Sr. lost reelection is because he screwed up the disaster relief when Andrew happened. Clinton revamped FEMA and it did a good job under him. Bush gutted FEMA.

I'm listening to the White House press conference. Scottie Snotty is talking about the Emperor going to the area tomorrow to boost the spirits of the people. WHAT? Fuck that. They need food and water not a boost in their spirits. (Which reminds me, I heard the governor of Louisiana saying that she's praying for everyone. If my governor said something like that during a catastrophe of this magnitude, I would start a campaign the next day to get her out of office. She should have been talking about all the organizing they were doing. She could then add that she was praying, too, but give me a break! I danced a dance to Oya, but I didn't have the power to do anything else. These people had the power to organize things ahead of time.) Now Scottie Snotty is saying that criticism of what they're doing regarding the rescue operation is just politics. I'M NOT TALKING ABOUT POLITICS, YOU MORON. UNFORTUNATELY BUSH IS MY PRESIDENT, TOO. HELP THESE PEOPLE NOW.

People are dying, Bush, DO SOMETHING RIGHT NOW.

I'm hoarse again from ether screaming.

If you live in the Southeast and want to offer rooms to people, go here. Here's a place you can go online to donate.

Posted by: Kim Antieau / 9/01/2005 09:32:00 AM

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New Issue of Journal of Mythic Arts 

The summer issue of the Journal of Mythic Arts is up. I can't wait to read it all. It's one of my favorite reading pleasures. I especially enjoy Terri Windling's essays. This time she writes about "The Symbolism of Rabbits and Hares." My story "Briar Rose" has been reprinted there, along with a marvelous poem ("Mark") by Mario Milosevic. It looks full of literary and artistic goodies.

Posted by: Kim Antieau / 9/01/2005 03:32:00 AM

0 comments

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