I recently accompanied my wife Jeanne to a teachers’ convention in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. The Smokey Mountain scenery there is magnificent, but I didn’t care much for the commercialization. There were multitudes of stores and vast multitudes of people milling about like so many houseflies on a watermelon rind.

While wife was at the meetings, I stayed behind in the motel room and worked on a paper I intend to deliver in mid-November at a scholars’ conference. By placing a small table at my patio door I could enjoy the outside air without the rain falling on me. From that vantage point I could also keep an eye on the Episcopal church across the street, which I found inspiring because it brought Anglican history to mind–men like Jeremy Taylor, Lancelot Andrewes, and John Wesley.

The high point of the visit, second only to my wife’s company, was an afternoon trip to Townsend to see the Wood & Strings Dulcimer Shop. Fine folks with a lot of fine instruments.

Just got off the phone with my sister, who lives in Houston. Presently the hurricane is two days away from Houston. So what is Houston doing? Obeying the proverb that says:

When in trouble
When in doubt
Run in circles
Scream and shout

I called her because I was eating pancakes at the Daily Grind coffeee shop in downtown Memphis and saw the morning news on television. I don’t have a television at my house, so I miss a lot of the visual data that gets strewn around the nation. I saw on the tube a long line of cars on the North Freeway, heading out of town. Come to find out, the line was bumper-to-bumper for 100 miles. Why? Because the hurricane may be there in two days.

There is no gasoline in Houston now. It’s all been bought up. The city that oil built, the home of the refineries, is out of gasoline because the lemmings have bought it up. Result? People get on the freeway and sit and sit until they run out of gas. They’re what–fifty miles from home? And stranded. Or their cars have overheated and they’re stranded. Who can come and help them? They’ll be sitting out there on the freeway when the hurricane comes in. And you know that the poor mom & pop stations up north have all been bled dry as well–so the locals up there are out of luck for a while. After all, what trucker in his right mind is going to creep along in bumper-to-bumper traffic all day just to get a shipment to Huntsville or Livingston?

The grocery stores are empty. If anyone decides to go to the extra effort to bring gasoline or groceries to the consumers, he can command a high price. But if the whiners start yelling “price gouging, price gouging!” then the suppliers had just as well stay up here where the sane people reside and let the whiners starve. Thus the whiners are ground up in the wheels of the inexorable law of supply and demand.

Maybe the freeways will clear within two days. Then the folks who waited can decide whether to drive north or stay put.

Galveston has emptied out, and that’s a good thing. There’s still plenty of time, so they may have jumped the gun; but it looks like they did okay. The expectation currently is that Galveston is scheduled for demolition on Friday or Saturday. Too bad, but anybody living on the Gulf should know that one day he’s going to be blown to kingdom come. All of us have fond memories of Galveston–and photographs. So we won’t forget what it was like in the 20th century, after it recovered from the 1900 storm. Later generations can chronicle its rebuilding after this storm, and the eventual destruction of the 21st century Galveston. That’s life on the beach: build it, enjoy it, watch it blow away. Some folks like that kind of life.

Barley Services (i.e., moi) has been robbed. On Thursday night someone broke into my truck and stole two sewer machines and a five-gallon bucket of tools.

It’s a sick feeling to come out of the house in the morning and to see your truck door hanging open and your junk lying on the pavement; especially when that truck represents your business, the only way you have of making a living.

The robber(s) simply inserted a crowbar between my two rear doors and pried the right one loose from its catches at the top and bottom. Must have required all of ten seconds. I didn’t realize that I was quite that vulnerable.

So I addressed the matter today, as you can see.

I had to turn off the radio tonight. It was just too painful. I was in my truck going home after clearing some drains for a customer and I caught President Bush’s speech in progress. He proposed the creation of a “Gulf Opportunity Zone” in response to the sinking of New Orleans. Freebies, tax cuts, etc. for everybody who will squirm up to New Orleans and suck one of the government tits.

First: nothing in the Constitution authorizes the central government to take money from Memphians and use it to rebuild New Orleans.

Second: government money entails government controls, so the entire project will be subject to federal rules and regulations–a massive increase in the size and scope of government, which entails an equal reduction in personal liberty.

Third: the central government doesn’t have that kind of money. They’re trillions of dollars in debt and continue to overspend at the rate of billions and billions per year.

Memphis is crowded with piled up resources that are trying to find their way to refugees, and we are only one city. This is repeated all across the nation. Let people alone and they will work it out themselves. If an entrepreneur wants to try something in New Orleans, let him use his own money. If he succeeds, let him keep his own money.

I’ve observed for years that there is nothing so stupid that a smart person can’t build a case for it if he wants to. Now I find a new level of idiocy set forth by a philosophy professor. He justifies the snipers in New Orleans because they were being left to die by the lazy, incomplete Bush administration rescue efforts. By shooting the rescuers, they provoked more federal action.

This may provide a clue as to why I don’t seem to be able to land a job teaching in a college philosophy & religion department.

A vacant house behind me was vandalized. Everything breakable was broken, everything tearable was torn. The perps attempted to set fire in three places, but were too dumb to get one going. (One place was in a bathtub–duh!)

Obviously kids. They did thousands of dollars worth of damage. It’s no secret who they are. Their parents have been confronted. Do they feel any compulsion to make it right?

Ho ho ho. :rolleyes:

“Alas, alas, for the great city that was clothed in fine linen, in purple and scarlet, adorned with gold, with jewels, and with pearls! For in a single hour all this wealth has been laid waste.” And all shipmasters and seafaring men, sailors and all whose trade is on the sea, stood far off and cried out as they saw the smoke of her burning, “What city was like the great city?” And they threw dust on their heads as they wept and mourned, crying out, “Alas, alas, for the great city where all who had ships at sea grew rich by her wealth! For in a single hour she has been laid waste.” Revelation 18:16-19

The level of Monday morning quarterbacking I’ve heard since New Orleans went under is absolutely overwhelming. The fever to spout off and declare what “they” should do covers the airwaves at all hours of the day and night.

Before the levees broke, I had quipped to my wife “I haven’t tuned in to Air America yet, but I’m sure that they’re blaming the hurricane on Bush.” I was, of course, being facetious. Although they blame everything great and small on Bush (flat tire, measles, pothole on Third Street–it’s all Bush’s fault), I wasn’t really going to slander them by claiming that they’d blame the weather on him.

But, sho ’nuff, they did. According to them, because he didn’t endorse the Kyoto Protocols and because of global warming, hurricanes are getting worse. And he cut New Orleans flood control funding and sent the money to Iraq instead.

But, interestingly, the conservative talk shows also are swamped with callers screaming about how somebody ought to do something. The unspoken presumption is that the caller cares about the sufferers more than do the rescuers who are risking their lives and wearing themselves to exhaustion. That presumption is, of course, stupid.

We can’t talk bad about the looters, you know. They wouldn’t be misbehaving if white folks weren’t so mean to them. We shall call them henceforth “undocumented shoppers” and consider their sniping at the rescuers as home rule and self determination. The fire you see in this entry’s photograph is just the indiginous peoples attempt at authentic self-expression and a symbol of their solidarity and their rejection of oppressive imperialist value structures.

And then we have the panic buying at the pumps: lemmings on the run. I have plenty of gasoline presently, so I look on from a distance. I stopped by a small independent station this afternoon to buy an oatmeal cookie for lunch (okay, in lieu of lunch) and I asked the proprietor “When will you have gasoline again?” He answered “I’ll probably get a delivery tonight. Yesterday morning I bought 6,000 gallons. It was gone by 6 PM. Usually 6,000 would last three or four days.” And Memphians are doing this in spite of the local refinery guys getting on TV and announcing “There is no gasoline shortage; we have plenty of gasoline in Memphis and plenty more where that came from.” But the lemmings are buying it so fast the delivery trucks can’t keep up with them.

Just to rub some salt in the wound, as if it could get any worse, we have the prophets announcing that God has judged New Orleans for its wickedness. But how can anybody know that unless he hears voices in his head? The Bible doesn’t say New Orleans is (was) doomed. Certainly God hates sin, but I question to what degree New Orleans surpassed her neighbors. How come San Francisco is doing fine tonight? What about Saginaw, Michigan? Or Miami, Florida? I’m thinking now of a small town in Mississippi where the divorce-and-remarriage situation was so foul, you needed a scorecard to keep the players straight. The day care center had to constantly update their records to know day-by-day who was authorized to pick up any given child. There were drugs, fornication, drunkards, hate, corruption, blasphemy, etc. All I could say in the town’s favor is that homosexuality was not open and accepted.

The Lord Jesus specifically said that a natural disaster should not be taken to mean that those who perished were more wicked than others. The prophets should know that.

Beam me up, Scotty. There’s no intelligent life down here.

Hurricane Katrina landed ashore this morning in New Orleans.

I don’t usually follow hurricanes. I figure that the world is full of tragedy and there’s little I can do about most of it, including the hurricanes. But Katrina caught my attention early because New Orleans is a little closer to home.

I spent ten years headquartered in Mississippi, and New Orleans was close enough to be considered a neighbor. Part of those ten years was spent pastoring in northern Louisiana. A number of my sister churches were in south Louisiana and they introduced me to cajun culture; another point of contact with The Big Easy.

More recently, I spent a few days in New Orleans in 1996 attending the annual meeting of two organizations: the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature. These are professional associations of religion teachers and scholars. In those days, they held their annual meetings jointly. I opined that this was so that the participants would have to endure it only once. I’m tellin’ ya, if engineers were this screwy, we’d still be living in grass huts.

I got to know the city a little better during that visit. I walked the old streets and, plumber that I am, I took note of the sewer system. Some of those manhole covers looked to me as though they were a hundred years old or older. I came upon some city workers who had dug a big hole exposing part of the system for repairs. This was like an artist being invited to tour the Louvre.

Very few people realize the critical role that plumbing plays in civilization. Without it, little would be possible. Instead, we’d be living in mud, walking in our own waste, and drinking polluted water–which was once the description of places like Paris or London.

New Orleans depends on pumps for drainage, since it sits below sea level. As I write these words, more rain is falling down there than the system can handle. It will flood, and the waste that was previously kept at bay by the plumbing system will be unleashed on the city.

That old system of pumps and levees will finally get the appreciation it deserves once this typhoon has blown over and the mess is getting cleaned up.

Rose at 6 and was on the job at 8. Not very early for me, but it was, after all, Saturday, and I had to get in a little biscuits, syrup, bacon, and bluegrass on the radio.

I took my camera under the house this morning, just to see what a photo would look like. Now I know.

Pictured here are my two sons. The older one (on the right) got married in July. The younger one was his best man.

This is the bride, of course. Not the best photo, but what do you expect from a plumber?