Eight Feet Deep

Workers apply blue plastic, or a “blue roof,” to a Port Arthur, Texas, home a month after Hurricane Rita in 2005. Photo by Ed Edahl/FEMA

My electricity was restored only a few days after Hurricane Ike hit the Southeast Texas coast slightly more than a month ago. The aftermath provided minimal hassle — no dodging debris, waiting for debris trucks to pick up brush, not many intersections without power thus traffic lights were working, not too long before many businesses were once again open — for me at least. All of this, I have to point out, is relative to Hurricane Rita which I experienced almost exactly three years before.

Last weekend I traveled down to Sabine Pass, in my same county but on the Gulf, where those folks who had been hammered by Rita were hit hard as well by Ike mostly from the devastating storm surge. Sabine Pass looked almost as bad after being hit by Rita in some respects and worse in others.

Unlike Rita, this storm provided more of a human toll in damage. Some of the folks who decided to stay on beautiful Bolivar Peninsula or Galveston Island have yet to be found. Unlike Rita, when several thousand were still missing three months after the storm due to snafus in keeping track of evacuees, some but fortunately not a staggering number of people who went missing from Hurricane Ike in our area will not be found alive.

Ike damage, if anything, was much more hidden than Rita. I know that sounds strange but the reason is that unlike during Rita, it took a lot longer for people to get the characteristic “blue roofs” on their house.

The Blue Roof program was started in 1992 by the federal government in response to Hurricane Andrew. FEMA got the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to administer the program after Hurricane Katrina, which hit just a month before Rita.

It didn’t seem very long after Rita hit that every other house in town, here in Beaumont, Texas, where I live, had a blue roof. Perhaps that is exaggerating. A ballpark figure would be more like 1-in-3-to-4 roofs at least in my neighborhood. But the bright blue plastic roofs, which the federal agencies somehow want to make the point are “blue plastic roofs” and not “tarps” have just recently begun to show up on the top of area homes.

That has caused some controversy, that it has taken so long for the blue roofs to appear.

Homeowners whose roofs were bashed in like I noticed today, covered by blue roofs, weren’t the only ones who have been heavily affected by the wait in getting material or the program or whatever to Ike Land. Many contractors have traveled long miles to this area to put those blue roofs on and have not had the material, nor have they had the work to apply those plastic roofs.

I can’t, nor would I, place blame at this point on anyone for the delay. This is because, A) I don’t know all the reasons why it has taken so long for the blue roofs to get here and made available for contractors to put on roofs, and 2)There have been other hurricanes before Ike, mainly Gustav which was just an overcast day here but pretty nasty just a hair east of us.

Driving on Interstate 10 today on some of the elevated overpasses, I saw a lot more blue roofs. And I began to notice them more and more in neighborhoods. This was true even in my own neighborhood where I walk each day. Then, I saw one roof with a clear, plastic “roof” over its real roof.

Recalling that night when the wind was deafening and rain was blowing into my window, which I left open because the power went off early, I didn’t know Ike did as much damage as it did right here where I live. I kind of suspected it did. I wonder why Southeast Texas is becoming the new South Florida for hurricanes. And I hope folks can get this behind them and get their lives back to as normal as possible.

Beyond that, there isn’t much I can do for the moment except to sit back, try to put all the damage from both Ike and Rita (and Humberto and TS Eduardo) and say: “Wow.”

Here are just a few random thoughts to ease you into the weekend:

Bank and insurance group ING is expecting to lose $670 million for the third quarter. One wonders if they might make more money if their company name didn’t sound like a suffix?

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

Joe the Plumber gets caught saying something to a presidential candidate on TV. Then the candidates volley his name like a tennis ball during the final debate. Now Joe is everywhere and people wondering why the media is scrutinizing him like an asshole at a proctologists’ convention?

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Looking back to the days when I smoked cigarettes, I wonder how in the hell I managed to choke down a Lucky Strike. Lucky Strike my ass!

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I wonder if anyone could ever get rich writing a book which contained only the punchlines to jokes? Examples:

“Twenty Bucks, Father, just like downtown.”

“That’s how this all got started.”

“Halt, boy-foot bear with teaks of Chan!”

and of course we can’t forget:

“The beer that made Mil Famey walk us.”

As the ever omnipresent “they” say in “these” parts, it’s time to p**s on the fire and call in the dogs.

The McCain-Obama debate last night was the last chance for McCain to get the wallop he needs for a win. And last night he was only able to summons a tap.

McCain did better than he had in the two previous debates but one couldn’t help but notice he appeared tense and looked on a number of occasions like he wanted to jump across the table and flail his distinguished “friend” from Illinois.

Obama, whom some of the Republican pundits this morning called “flat” (imagine that!), seemed calm, cool, and collected. He could have made an anti-perspirant commercial.

I think public opinion will show that McCain lost all three debates. Whether or not that translates into anything at the ballot box, well, we just have to see. But despite public opinion, presidential elections aren’t over until they are over. (They’re over when I say they’re over! — just kidding). If I were a guessing man … hey, wait, I am. My guess is Obama will win in a fairly close race. I don’t think it will be a landslide and I don’t believe it will be one of the squeakers or strangleholds as we’ve seen in recent times. But as “they” like to say: “What do I know.”

Bob Schieffer could have one of the most enviable jobs this evening or one of the most horrid. The venerable — call me “venerable” in a few years to be kind to a geezer — CBS newsman Schieffer will sit at the same table and between Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain as the last presidential debate wraps tonight.

Moderating the final debate in perhaps one of the most historical elections during our times will allow to the moderator to see the eyes (or to paraphrase Shrub McBush “into the soul”) of the two presidential candidates. But that will only happen if both McCain and Obama have anything left in their soul after an extremely long, drawn-out and brutal campaign.

Schieffer, who has said this meeting will be more along the lines of a traditional debate, also could be caught in the middle of a real stinker. I have enough faith in the wise, old Yoda Schieffer that he won’t let it get out of control unless it just becomes a matter of something akin to a verbal battle using chemical warfare. I am talking about an old-fashioned farting contest where enough hot air can’t escape through extreme bloviation so everything that is left of each candidate’s best arguments could end up coming out of their ass.

So what else is new, one might ask?

Well, what is different this time is that the answers are for all the marbles if I might air out my mixed metaphors with perhaps a farting pun, or maybe some parting fun, if only it was that easy to stop.

Should the candidates tonight really “cut one” and as the doughboys might have said during the “War to End all Wars”: “Kiss the Kaiser,” there will be no turning back. No SBD, “Silent But Deadly,” farts will suffice for important political discourse to spin (clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and counterclockwise in the Southern Hemisphere) down a veritable Toilet of Potential Governance. It reminds me of the story of the two boys and the great toothpaste sale.

It seems these two boys got jobs selling a new toothpaste door-to-door.

Little Timmy was an eager beaver and he envisioned selling his entire stock by noon. His successful sales would ensure that not only Timmy would be recipient of a handsome commission but would most certainly be a shoo-in for the company’s prize of a 3-D poster of the perfect set of teeth made perfect by the very toothpaste they were selling.

Little Johnny was known to be a very unscrupulous child who, had he not been of such a lazy nature, he would have majored in corner-cutting in college. But lo and behold, by mid-morning Little Johnny ran into Little Timmy in the street and Johnny was heading home after selling all of his toothpaste. Timmy, of course, was incredulous and asked Little Johnny how he could accomplish such a feat while Timmy had sold but one tube of toothpaste during his first three hours of door-knocking.

“Oh it was easy,” Little Johnny said. “I would walk up to a door and knock. A person would come to the door and I’d say: ‘Good day sir or madam. I am giving away candy. Would you like a piece?’ Of course, the occupant would say, then take the candy, put it in their mouth and say: ‘Why, this tastes like s**t.’ To which I would say: ‘It is. You wanna buy a toothbrush?'”

Yes, it could be a real stinker tonight. Hopefully it won’t. But if it does, just be grateful we don’t have “Smell-A-Vision,” or, that we don’t have Bob Schieffer’s job.

A friend sent me something the other day that had been passed around on the Internet regarding one guy’s idea about how to use the $85 billion the federal government intended to use for bailing out AIG.

He suggested that the money be given to each U.S. citizen over 18 as a national dividend. His math came out with $425,000 each. Whether his math was correct or not doesn’t concern me. I have always liked such an idea. I think it would be a great social experiment for the United States. Other nations have giveaways of one type or the other. We got the $600 or more earlier this year although I wouldn’t call it a giveaway. The government has been getting the better of us for years. Well, at least most of us.

I doubt any type of big dividend such as the Internet guy proposed could ever happen here. Our society has some type of aversion to mass gifts for its own people. That is true sometimes even if these gifts are in order to help those either with misfortune or dwindling fortune.

While it is true large philanthropists such as Bill Gates do great things for his own at times, especially when it comes to giving out technological hardware (hmm, I bet he doesn’t have any of that lying around anywhere), Gates is one of the American celebrities who feels compelled to send as much of his money to Africa as possible. There is no doubt the terrible hardships and tragedy that citizens of some African nations have endured.
(oops premature eblogulation there — I published before I finished).

But smart people like Gates and others can’t deny that we have our own poor, weary, malnourished, hurting, homeless, whatever in our own country. And it isn’t just those people you see everyday, the street people. Some of those people are poor and some are just bums. I know because, as some of you may recall, I was living in my pickup truck only last year. Then, there are many, many people who aren’t seen who are in all different manners of being poor or broke. The likelihood of there being many more now because of the economic crisis is a pretty good bet.

I don’t know if our Puritan background had anything to do with that way of thinking or not. I’d like to think not, mainly because even though I am of Scotch-Irish-English heritage, I consider myself a Texan with our state being more rooted in the Spanish Catholic ways. In other words, I don’t really know why Americans only give to our own when the bottom has already fallen out of their lives. Why not try to do something before economic catastrophes — in the personal sense — occur rather than after?

Not that anyone will listen to me, other than folks such as the guy who thinks the government should have given everyone $425,000. If that didn’t stimulate the economy, or overstimulate the economy (which I have no idea what circumstances good or bad that might bring) I don’t know what will.