Wet Bank Guide

Author's Note: When I found that this piece was the second thing to appear on Google under my name, I considered taking it down. Of all of the tens of thousands of words I've published on Wet Bank Guide in the past year, I did not really want to be most remember for an angry rant. I also considered the impact it might have on anyone who was Googling me up for a pre-employment or other screening. On further consideration, I republished the piece.

If you are here as part of some pre-employment or other screening, let me tell you this: anyone from New Orleans who doesn't generally share these views is either mentally deficient, or is as crooked as a snake and raking in lots of recovery money under the table. Basically, if you require any discernable intelligence and honesty and you find this post abhorent, I strongly recommend you look outside New Orleans for any future employees.


Bush at Jackson Square

I'm sorry. I have to apologize for that language. It is an insult to every sack of shit currently lying the side yard of a garden center waiting to bring life to a garden. A sack of shit has its uses. I've spread my share of manure, including the bags I picked up once very cheaply only to discover that most garden center manure is "denatured" or some such process to make it less, um, fragrant. When I cracked that first bag of the really cheap stuff, I knew exactly what I was about.

A sack of shit properly applied helps bring life to the soil, to make a place bloom with flowers and tomatoes and all of the joys of a garden. The particular sack of shit above brings something, a particular version of bull shit that is denatured to the point of infertility. You can spread it around as much as you like, George, but from it nothing will grow.

You came and gave us the same damned speech you gave last November in Jackson Sqaure. Perhaps most of America, lulled into catatonic fear by lurking child murderers and burning airplanes, is fooled. We know you for what you are, a sack of shit that comes complete with the full smell, but not a bit of the stuff of life, the things we need to rebuild.

Virtually all of the money spent so far has gone to FEMA contractors, on lavish cost-plus, no-bid contracts to out of state companies close to your friends, the sort handed out by your friend the governor of Mississippi. Most people have received the couple of thousand in immediate assistance last September, which quickly went to replace the clothes on their backs and feed themselves.

Several thousand are still getting their rent covered, encouraging them not to pick themselves up and get back home and get to work. It seems, George, that the only thing the government did well is the same sort of War on Poverty stuff that you and your party have railed against for two generations. Conveniently, it keeps away from the city and state a lot of people who don't much like you to begin with, and never vote for you. As for the rest of us: as of last week, the grand total of Louisianians who have received direct compensation for their losses caused by the federal government: two. Show us the money.

You came down here and told us the same lies you told last September, the same ones you've been mouthing for a year while you prayed for a Red Alert to change the subject, so you could jump into your Eisenhower jacket and swagger around with your crop and boots. And you insulted us by suggesting to the over 200,000 people who've come back at their own expense and by the mold-stained sweat of their own brows that its their own fault they haven't gotten more money.

George, we had a plan. It was called the Baker Plan, and it would have done the difficult things we are asked to do: clean up not just individual homes but entire neighborhoods; tell some of our friends and neighbors that their areas might not come back. The only real problem with the plan was that you scuttled it and said, no, we won't do that. You said, go back to the drawing board and try again and try to figure out a way to do it that doesn't put the federal government on the hook for all the damage it caused. Fine, George. Whatever.

I guess it is our own fault, if the President says so. We're not like those industrious Mississippians who smartly elected a Republican governor, one who knows how to shake dollars out of the system even if most of those dollars go to his out of state consulting clients. We should have been sharp enough to realize that the country is run by racketeers, and bought our protection with our loyal votes, to make sure we'd get our share of the crumbs that fall out to the little guys like us. The trouble is, George, we're pretty simple down here. Not only do we lap up the foolishness of folks like Uncle Earl Long and Edwin Edwards, we even take all of that nonsense they teach us in Civics and Free Enterprise seriously. I mean, how gullible can you get.

Too bad you didn't share some of your real world experience of civics and free enterprise with the students at Warren Easton High School. It's good you picked a school for your little speech, somewhere where the students are required to sit respectfully and quietly while you shovel it up. I know you didn't want to venture out where my daughter's friend and her mother were caught in a traffic jam for your motorcade, an instant mob in which people of every race, creed, income and age stood out of their cars or leaned out their windows and unleashed a torrent of insult and profanity and interesting gestures as you went by. If you had stopped there to shake hands, as your predecessor might have, I wonder if you could find one not balled into a fist.

I have a bit of advice for you, George. I believe its what the guys people in your line of business call "enforcers" say when bets aren't covered or the protection money is overdue. Save us the sob speech and the bullshit, they say. Next time, don't show up without the money.

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