Home Grown

Well, we are done with August, finally. It seemed to stand still at the end of it. Almost done with the summer, one last fling at the season coming up, two days of decent commutes downtown.

Summer almost gone, but it did not leave without making it the most memorable in a century.

The destruction of the Gulf Coast is described as a nuclear strike in every dimension except the radiation. It is a home-grown horror.

I did not need any additional information when I rose this morning, I felt as saturated as the Louisiana soil. But the cascade of information continued.

The Super Dome refugees are being transferred to the Astrodome, in Houston . They say it was a horror-show there, no air conditioning, toilets overflowing, dark. I’m not sure we will be able to look at the place the same way again, all lit up for sports. The image of the eerie daytime darkness pierced by a trinity of sun-beams from the holes in the roof is powerful.

I thought of the fetid air, the awful smell. Screaming in the darkness….and now, everyone that stayed is to be expelled from the city. A people expelled across the waist-deep water, leaving a once-promised land for the unknown.

It was a relief when the alarm went off, and to hear Don Quixote read on the BBC. They bring the written word to life in fifteen minute blocks in the impossible early morning. I marveled that Cervante’ work seems as fresh today as it was four centuries ago. Then the Morning Update came on, and the litany of the disaster began again.

This is a great tragedy, I reminded myself, and felt awful that I was becoming irritated with some of the victims.

There was a sense of entitlement that I found quite remarkable. One woman was indignant that the military had not helped her. “Rescued by Civilians!” she said again and again. “Rescued by civilians! No one cares!”

I marveled at the two incongruous thoughts jammed so close together. Of course someone cares, I thought, or she would not be able to sputter in front of the microphone. But I would not be quite so indignant if, I had stayed against the recommendations of everyone in authority.

Her anger was completely American, though, expecting the impossible, with her right down front, even as a storm more powerful than a nuclear bomb went off around her.

And it is thoroughly American to rail against those in charge. But who is authority, anyway? I watched videotape of two cops strolling through a looted Wal-Mart, picking up goods, checking sizea, shopping for free in the destruction.

It grated on me, the looting, and the beginning of the finger-pointing. Someone has to be to blame, after all. I reclined on my bed to rest my eyes and then the kaleidoscope of misery switched to Iraq , and the hundreds dead there, and then the recollection of evil only a year old, at the Russian School in Beslan, North Ossetia .

Evil, evil, evil. I had that languorous feeling and slumped back. The coffee was on, I could smell it, but I must have lost it for a half hour or so, drifting in the cost of oil. Somehow Katrina was going to break the upward spiral, though I could not understand how, and there is news of a domestic terror cell in Los Angeles , busted before they could begin a string of attacks.

Home-grown monsters, of a kind with whackos like Tim McVey.

They planned to hit National Guard facilities, the Israeli Consulate and other Los Angeles-area targets. According to the authorities, they intended to kill armed service members and foreign officials.

Levar Haley Washington was named as the leader of four other angry young men. Washington is a prison concert to Islam, as is Gregory Vernon Patterson and Kevin James. Hammad Riaz Samana apparently came to the Faith in his native Pakistan .

Prosecutors say that the three robbed gas stations to finance their surveillance missions against synagogues and the National Guard in Los Angeles and Orange counties. I got a cup of coffee. This is how it happened in Britain , alienated young men with wild notions of how to gain respect and honor in something called martyrdom.

I think our home-grown jihadists might have missed a couple of the finer points in their new religion.

I certainly hope so. Otherwise, even if the storm season is over, we are likely to have a lively Fall.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

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