Yukon Ho!

For once, I don’t have to spend a few minutes pondering an excuse for not blogging. I have a job, and a real one this time. I actually wake up early, go somewhere for most of the day, and then come home. I got on as a tech writer for a really American company. We sell drugs and guns. We also make the technology for people to buy those guns and drugs, which is where I come in. I work with a team of programmers—code ninjas—as they are often nicknamed. In short, they build software and I build web authoring (the stuff that flies open when you hit the Help button), or at least that’s what I’m attempting to do.

I’ve always thought of myself as pretty techno-geeky, but I’m clanking through the Nordic Bronze Age compared to the know-how of some of these guys. I enjoy it, though. My love for minimalism may very well pay off.

Some shots from the hip.

Jean was in Canada the last few days (and as good timing works, Maggie gets bit on the eyelid by a mosquito in the night, and wakes with it swollen shut. Got some nice looks from the folks in town when I was out and about with her). I then got a voicemail from Jean mentioning that she had called her mother about “the storm,” and they had made plans to leave New Orleans, if need be. My reaction: What storm? I pulled up the radar and found Gustav, the loose tropical depression, at best, hanging over Cuba. For a second I thought maybe it was a message that was lost in the air some years ago before Katrina. This couldn’t have been the storm I was looking at on the radar. I called Jean back and she confirmed that she was speaking of Gustav. To her credit, she was in the boondocks of Canada and the only information that made it that way was some micowaved media mush. Hours later I was at the drive through buying chicken fingers at Cane’s. It was taking forever and the drive-up window person apologizes, claiming that the system was running slow because of the “storm.”

I said, “It stopped raining hours ago. It’s crystal clear out here.”

She said, “No, the big storm, Gustav.”

I said, “That’s still way, way down there.”

“I know. Our computers run off our main office down in Baton Rouge,” she said. (I won’t even go into how many other things are wrong about that answer besides basic physics.)

Maybe there is another Baton Rouge in the Haiti, I think to myself. There was a pretty strong French influence there at one time.

I mutter something to Maggie about the human race, and whip on home only to find a flier taped to my door from the apartment manager. It’s an evacuation plan. A fucking evacuation plan for us living in Shreveport roughly 300 miles from the coast.

What kind of culture of fear have we become? I read a headline on Google: New Orleans Plans Mass Evacuation, Braces for Catastrophic Hurricane. Jeeez, maybe this is serious I think. Then on about the 4^th line of the “news” article it reads that experts say the storm could hit from the inner panhandle of Florida to southern Texas, and could be anywhere from a Cat 2-5 hurricane. WTF? So they are saying that the storm (that’s already in the gulf) will hit somewhere else in the gulf? And then the storm could be just about any size or shape that hurricanes can be? This is news? I feel so embarrassed when I read things like this.

It’s bad enough hearing them speak with an air of disappointment when a storm misses someone, but this is a new low by ramping up weather possibilities in the same sensationalists manners of all other journalisms. What’s next? Pollen levels? Maybe plain old oxygen, since it is the chemical that causes cell aging and destruction. We’ll soon be on oxygen alerts and conservation. Breath shallow and less often, Timmy, we are Code Blue right now. Lots of air out there today.

I remember my beginner courses in journalism and propaganda in grade school. Some of the first things taught were tools of bad journalism, bad tactics, and using them was merely the benthic feeding ways of tabloid magazines. I’m not naïve enough to believe that our respected sources of information haven’t drawn upon those tactics in the past, but we seem to be in a Golden Age of them now. What was once unethical and unprofessional has become the preferred and only viable tactics. Red herrings and false analogies are probably still taught in those beginning courses, but aren’t taught as cheap, discrediting devices to be avoided.

Then I stumbled over another great article to end my night. I know, I know, I shouldn’t be reading TIME news to start with, but today I came across a gem. It seems the FBI nabbed their bionutcase for the anthrax incident, an incident that had fallen from my radar. I couldn’t make it through the first paragraph when the writer exposed what she thought was the overwhelming evidence in the case:

“there were electronic records documenting Ivins' late-night sojourns in the lab, e-mails revealing a mind wracked by paranoia and an inventory of a November 2007 FBI search of his home, which turned up a paperback copy of Albert Camus's novel The Plague.”

The Plague. Our new Catcher in the Rye, I guess. I have both books on my shelf so Bradbury’s library police should come busting through any minute now. This is one of the lamest attempts at taking a kidney punch at literature readers and the constant American paranoia towards the intellectual. The irony of this jab. The Plague is essentially about pervading the preoccupation with dread, suffering, anxieties, about the need to act instead of wallowing in rat feces and hopelessness—unless I totally misread the thing—the old cliché of living on your feet instead of dying on your knees. In fact, I felt the book may have been a little too optimistic at times, a little heavy handed for my taste. And it wouldn’t be that far of a stretch to transplant the plague with something like terrorism if a modern reader chooses to do so. It’s a sort of call-to-arms, but in the opposite direction this reporter, Laura Fitzpatrick, clumsily tried to insinuate. In short, we have a work of literature that maps ideas on how a culture can surmount, or should at least try to surmount, mass hysteria and paranoia, but, in turn, Fitzpatrick name-tosses it out there as linked to the support of terrorism. Thus, adding more lubrication for the fear machine, propagating more paranoia, and spreading more media plague. Abracadabra, Presto!

Around 9pm, Jean finally gets in from Canada (apparently there was no delay from the storm). I can’t help but think maybe Maggie and I should have just met her up there. Yukon Ho!