The Problem with Anarchy

I’m not a person who loves cops. Don’t get me wrong: one of my favorite cousins spent 30 years on the New Orleans police force, and a friend of mine was a cop for many years. So I know some cops are good, compassionate people. Unfortunately, other cops are not. Power can bring out the worst in people, and some cops are insufferable assholes on power trips with the ethical standards of a mob hit man. Which is a bad combination with a badge and a gun.

Why, you might ask, is she writing about cops? Because I’m tired of the lack of cops on our streets. Just as power brings out the worst in some cops, I have come to realize that a lack of cops brings out the worst in some drivers. And they seem to be degenerating as the months go by. Blatantly running red lights and stop signs. Going 20-30 miles over the speed limit in residential neighborhoods. Tailgating. Yes, some of these drivers are lost in a post-Katrina, stress-induced fog. But most are just louts.

It would be nice to think that people can police themselves. Nice to think that even when no one’s watching, people still do the right thing. Some do. Some don’t. Hand a bunch of GIs guns and turn them loose in Iraq, and some will rape and murder and steal when no one is watching. Turn a bunch of New Orleans drivers loose on the streets with no cops, and they start killing people, too—with their cars. Which I suppose is why anarchism is attractive as a political theory, but deadly in practice.

End of rant.

What I’m reading… BUDDHA, by Karen Armstrong. I enjoyed her book on Islam so much, I decided to give this one a try. It’s even better.

The Bottom Shelf Phobia

Books: delight of my life, bane of my existence. I’ve spent the past week sorting my books, organizing them into subject groupings, and trying to get them to fit logically on my new shelves. I promised myself I’d weed through my books as I emptied the boxes, and I have. I must have set aside at least…oh, half a dozen volumes to give away.

I lost so many books in the flood you’d think I’d be having an easy time of it. Except that I’ve also bought a lot of books in the past ten months. And I find I can’t seem to bring myself to put anything on the bottom shelves. I look at those shelves and remember the books that used to go there, books I’ll never be able to replace. That’s part of it. But I suspect there’s another part of it, a subconscious belief that anything I put on those shelves will be in danger. I know it’s silly; next time—if there is a next time—we could get enough water to submerge my entire library. Nothing in this house is really safe. And yet the bottom shelves still stand there, empty.

Progress, with a Painful Twist

(Above: with my cousins in 1980)

This year, my cousin Robert and his wife hosted the family’s Fourth of July picnic at their new home on the outskirts of Ticfaw, a small town about an hour to the northwest of New Orleans. Robert, his Aunt Rosie, and Robert’s father, my Uncle Bob, all used to live on one block in Old Metairie. When that part of the city was finally drained and reopened last fall, I drove by their houses. Then I covered my face with my hands and wept.

When I saw Robert and Darlene last Christmas, they were still in a state of shock, still living in a rented house, still angry and struggling with the insanity of bureaucracy that is paralyzing the area. Now they have been happily settled in their new house for three months. The setting is beyond lovely, and the house is both new and large (it needs to be large; at the moment Robert has his homeless daughter, a homeless son and daughter-in-law, and his Aunt Rosie still living with him). Today, they talk calmly about how all three Old Metairie houses have been “plowed under.” Robert has gone on a diet, lost 50 pounds, and looks better than he has in years. Yes, Virginia, there is light at the end of the tunnel.

At Christmas, family talk was of how many inches—or feet—of water we each had in our houses. We talked about the many, bizarre manifestations of mold, about the heartbreak of water sodden family photos, a beloved aunt’s china that smashed when the furniture holding it disintegrated. On Tuesday, we talked about how hard it is to get a plumber, about the hours wasted trying to track down the simplest of building materials. Progress.

And yet… And yet, missing from the gathering were those like my cousin Jimmy, who has moved to North Carolina. Another cousin, Chris, drove in from his new home in Mississippi. And of the nine brothers and sisters who once formed the linchpin of these family reunions, there were now only four: two brothers, two sisters.

Slowly, we are rebuilding our lives. But different lives. And too many of the loved ones who once formed a part of those lives are gone.

When Skies Turn Dark

I don’t like storms anymore. There was a time I found the crash of thunder, the pounding of heavy rain, the rush of a wild wind exhilarating. No longer.

We had a thunderstorm today. Nothing serious, and God knows we needed the rain. Yet I still felt my anxiety level rising, found it difficult to settle down to work.

I’d been through hurricanes before Katrina and Rita. One memorable fall after I bought my house here, we had two storms hit in a week. My yard had grade problems I hadn’t gotten around to fixing, and as I watched the water build up against the wall outside my office window, I realized I needed to do something. So I pulled on my gumboots, grabbed a shovel, and went outside to dig a ditch and drain the water away from the house. Danielle was yelling, “Mama! You’re crazy!  It's 1:00 in the morning. In the middle of a hurricane!" But it needed to be done, and it was only a Category One hurricane, after all.

I’m not sure which of our two recent hurricanes, Katrina or Rita, was responsible for this shift in my reaction to storms. Katrina was the more devastating storm, but as I listened to Rita lash Sam’s Baton Rouge apartment, I knew my home was going into that second hurricane with half its roof gone. Would the blue tarps Steve had nailed down hold? Would Rita destroy what Katrina had left?

Of course, that drama had a happy ending: Steve’s tarps kept the house safe (although I did walk out of the apartment at the end of the storm to find my VW sitting in the middle of a veritable lake of floodwaters). But an unexpected legacy of those two dark, anxiety-ridden events is this, this twist of irrational fear when the skies turn ugly and thunder rumbles.

Will I ever get over it? Perhaps, in time, the anxiety will lessen. But I don’t think I’ll ever enjoy storms again.

Bending Reality to the Breaking Point

I’ve been limping my way through you-know-who's ANGELS AND DEMONS, and it’s led me to give more thought to a point I touched upon here the other day: authors who twist or ignore facts for the convenience of their plots, or simply fail to invest the time to check their facts before they sit down to write.

Now, I don’t have a problem with bending reality a bit; we are talking fiction here. And everyone, no matter how careful, makes mistakes; God knows I’ve done it myself. But I quickly lose interest in a book—and respect for an author—when someone who’s supposed to be writing a suspense, romance, thriller, or mystery acts like he’s writing science fiction and can just make stuff up as he goes along. Big, important stuff.

Thus we have thrillers in which Saddam Hussein—a dedicated secularist—is hobnobbing with Islamic fundamentalists, medieval romances where the heroine acts and talks like a Valley Girl, and mysteries where a hurricane is about to hit New Orleans during Mardi Gras. In my current read, for example, our author would have us believe that the world is watching, breathless, as the Catholic church prepares to elect a new pope, yet the BBC has only sent one journalist—and a newly-hired one at that. Is Dan Brown that naive, or does he simply assume most of his readers are? Better yet, consider the central premise of the plot: a bunch of loonies are about to blow up the middle of Rome, yet four incredibly inexperienced people—one a priest, one a scientist, another a Harvard scholar—take it upon themselves not to tell anyone? A plot device, obviously; calling in the Italian army and every expert from across Europe would have left our heroine and hero with precious little to do. Yet the situation is so silly, and so obviously not what would happen, that I would expect most people to groan and throw the book across the room. From looking at the book’s sales record, however, that obviously isn’t happening. And don’t get me started on all the historical mistakes in the Da Vinci Code.

So am I unusual in finding my pleasure destroyed by this kind of gross inaccuracy?