'A Different Kind of Relocation'
The Sunday Night Reader for 11/6/22
As If the Chambana Sun Wasn’t Bad Enough
The News-Gazette covered the lying, fear-mongering Chambana Sun — which gathers stories by way of lies published on social media and anonymous tips from who knows who and then has people thousands of miles away write stories with made-up quotes under fake bylines.
Come for the background on the operation. Stay for state Senator Chapin Rose’s blithe, dangerous response to that background. I don’t know if shrugged when he said “It comes with the turf,” but he seems all in on the value of his voters being wildly misinformed by his paymasters. He’s showing a gross, nihilistic willingness to put up with anything in order to get a sliver of power from oligarchs and demigods. Read more.
‘God Help Them’
“A different kind of relocation” is powerful way to think about the programs outlined in this item from the New York Times. The story talks about the Department of Interior’s efforts to help Native American tribes in Louisiana and the Pacific Northwest become some of the United States’ first climate refugees and to institute response programs to things like toxic algae and severe storms that threaten their reservations.
“The federal government has been quietly trying to shift its approach away from endlessly rebuilding after disasters and toward helping the most exposed communities retreat from vulnerable areas. But moving is expensive, and as disasters intensify, demand from communities to relocate will only increase, straining the government’s ability to pay for it.
That makes the new program both test case and precedent for perhaps the most challenging dilemma facing the United States as it adapts to climate change: How should the government decide which places to help first?
‘That is the toughest question,’ said Bryan Newland, assistant secretary of Indian Affairs at the Interior Department.
Mr. Newland, a citizen of the Bay Mills Indian Community, conceded that not every tribe that needs help will get money through the program. And even the winning tribes won’t get all the funds they need to move. Still, he said, ‘we’ve got to start somewhere.’” Read more.
The Son I’ll Never Have by Mark Wunderlich
The son I’ll never have is crossing the lawn. He is lying on an imaginary bed,
the coverlet pulled up over his knees — knees I don’t dare describe.
I recoil from imagining him as meat and bone, as a mind
and hands stroking the fur of his pet rabbit.
I never gave him the accordion I used to play, my mother and I
in duets, “The Minnesota Polka,” “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,”
never watched him push noodles into his mouth with fingers
while I wished he would use the spoon shiny with disuse.
I am free from longing to be free, I do as I please,
my money is my own, all the mistakes I make are only my mistakes.
What is it to look at something you made and see the future?
What is it to have someone made by your body, but whose mind
remains just out of reach? I’ll never know. Come here, little rabbit.
Eat these greens. I will pet your cloudy fur with the mind’s hand.
Heavy Rotation
Say It Plain…
Still on Twitter, probably until I die or it dies, but the hippo knows the score…
