You ever noticed (FEMA)?

You ever notice that all those rednecks and meth-heads (often inhabiting the same body!) who are yammering about "We're all going to be dragged kicking and screaming to FEMA camps man, any day now!" are all white? Did you ever notice that none of them gave a shit about all those African-Americans languishing in FEMA trailers for roughly two years except when they thought they were getting a "free ride"? Yeah, me too, but really: where was the outrage over many of these same people having to inhale formaldehyde for months? No conspiracy there, agreed, just not for the same reason they might unthink it was so.

Imagine had these refugees been white, middle-class. Imagine that they had been taken there, sometimes against their wills like in 1927 when another storm ravaged the place, to be held for a a very long time with few rights to speak of in toxic surroundings. The Libertarians, the rednecks, the red-headed stepchildren of the American Left who have smoked too much dope for decades with predictable results, have an erection (nipples too) over FEMA this, FEMA that, but the slant is always the same: an anti-government agenda that's arch-conservative, almost certainly baseless in the terms their putting them in and basically racist at heart.

Seriously, where was the alarm over these poor black families being forcibly relocated, permanently in many cases, away from New Orleans? Wasn't this your legendary FEMA camp theory based on your own criteria? No, these were only a gaggle of dirty niggers (to you), so it didn't matter. It didn't matter when a naturalized Middle Eastern businessman was detained by private security in a bus station...that was OK and then repainted by assholes on the right like Alex Jones as a purely government move. The message must always be that it's the big, bad Boogeyman "gubmint," never the most serious threat to liberty across the globe, multinational corporations.

This shit is a ploy, conscious or not, it is code. We know you have an agenda. We know you're afraid of black people, of minorities. We know you're ignorant, that you're the boring crank at a party that everyone ignores for good reason. Now shut up about FEMA camps you racist, yammering retards.

"Stuff White People Like"

WWW--Nope, it's not "Black people love us!" it's a site called "Stuff White People Like." Hilarious, controversial, and painfully true. Check it @ http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/

My Dream Job: Pulling a Rickshaw

The thing is, don't they have motors now? That really ruins it for me, honestly (I don't know how to be anything else). What better example of human absurdity does one need than this job? It would be like pulling a full-sized crucifix around so people can be reminded of their indifference.

Naw, people adapt to inhumanity, it's well-known.

And I'll tell you, it would be pretty exotic here in Michiana--you'd need that motor for the winters. But wouldn't it be romantic to pull a real rickshaw, not one of those "auto rickshaws" in Asia? "Auto rickshaw"?! That's not a real rickshaw, there's no element of human suffering to it, creepin' Christ. Maybe I could get tips too, and I don't mean about the stock market or gardening. You never know, someone might give me a ball of rice too, they're easier to chew with just a few blackened-teeth (I'm thinking ahead here).

Yes, NYC and London have the auto and peddled rickshaws (sundry "pedicabs") now, but that's just not brutal and ugly enough. If we're going to have so much economic inequality again, why hide it? I want to pull the John Jacob Astors of today, the Rockefellers, and other modern Mandarins. I want that bamboo hat, the black pajamas, the sandals without socks, and the blackened-teeth. I want it all. Most sources say the rickshaw was invented in the USA anyway, later adopted by Asia and other regions of the globe. But give me a rickshaw, put me in Shanghai, and you tell me that's not exotic.

An American pulling Asian elites; I'd have that goddamn retirement money in just a few years, by gum.

It wouldn't be a problem to smile pulling one of these things, knowing America has made a bold, new step towards honesty, and they'd have to bring them here. The only step left nowadays is having some rich person riding piggyback on your shoulders (coming soon!). You can hide our homeless, but you cannot hide the rickshaw pulling human horsey. Occasionally, I get invited by a reader to come live in their nation. "Do they have rickshaws?" I often ask myself.

I mean, they don't offer me any lodging or jobs, so a rickshaw life for me it is. I can already feel those contractions leaving my speech and writing. Rickshaw-rickshaw-rickshaw! Rudyard Kipling--that scion of British imperial literature--wrote of rickshaws in one of his earliest stories, 'The Phantom Rickshaw' in 1885, around the time Twain was seeing the publication of 'Huck Finn' and three years before Jack the Ripper saved the poor of Whitechapel from further neglect. Ah, the good old days when the poor knew their place.

Toronto (http://www.rickshawservices.com/Franchises.html) even has them, I found out to my dismay. I would have ridden (or pulled) one when I was there last July. Surely the Philippines, China, and Japan still have them, but I'd wager that they're motorized, damned-and-blast! Even Ireland has them. White man's burden, I tell ya,' white man's burden. Since America's slipping into being a second and third world nation, we may as well accept the return of all things rickshaw.

I'm feeling the spirit of Criswell in me right now: human-powered rickshaws in Moscow, Berlin, Vienna, Rome, Beijing, Seattle, London, Paris, Detroit, Kuwait City, Riyadh, and places like Warsaw, Poland. But India's (keep delivering the laughs) not ashamed. They still have rickshaws everywhere in Calcutta, you betcha! You just gotta love those human caste systems, crushing the little guys for no logical reason whatsoever.

The number three: that's odd...just not as odd as us primates. I'll learn Chinese just to be able to pull one, you watch.