Another Open Letter

Dear Everyone, Because of the emails I’ve been receiving since the Open Letter to America went live less than a week ago, at least one thing has become apparent… I need to explain myself to you. Perchance we should start at the beginning? It’ll make it much easier to grasp. First of all, www.rumandmonkey.com is a satirical site, where the writing efforts of various humourists and satirists get published. Yes, the boys will very occasionally publish something serious, but the site can generally be relied upon to be taking the piss. Out of everyone. Especially ourselves… Sometimes, when a satirist sits down to write a parody, the parody cuts close to the bone – be it the sensibilities of the readers, or when the parody becomes almost indistinguishable from the object of the lampooning. And so – when I sat down to write a piece that was, essentially, a parody of the extreme polemics I’ve been reading since Katrina turned New Orleans into a swimming pool, I had a fairly clear message in mind… that the editorial direction of the reporting, which in itself was appalling, needed to be highlighted. People needed to read something that brought to mind the fact that the United States, for all of its posturing on the world stage, suffers the same flaws as the rest of us. Those flaws have been highlighted in stark, brutal relief – the flaws of governance, the flaws of humanity and the flaws of living in a first world nation that believes itself impregnable. So the letter was written, in order to hammer home a point about the effectiveness of the media in pushing a political barrow… and, to be frank, it worked. Really, really well. A little too well, perhaps… Most of you missed the point. It’s not surprising – even those close to me questioned my motivations in writing something like that. I’ve received phone calls aplenty regarding the content – hell, even my parents sat me down to talk to me about this one… I’ve received a lot of mail about it – I’ll probably write a series of harsh (but funny) responses to them, and publish them here as the final part of a vitriolic triptych on the topic of weather, subhuman behaviour and the weaknesses of government… For what it’s worth, most of the mail I’ve received has been positive – I think that says more about the people that visit Rum and Monkey than anything else – and I’m at pains to have all of you that have written in support for the article understand that I didn’t do this to set any of you up…. But the end result is this – the piece was meant as a parody. It’s not supposed to be taken seriously, except to highlight two things, the first of which is the differences in media coverage that this event has garnered over similar circumstances, such as the tsunami in Asia at the end of last year. It was to highlight the fact that most of the writers who have been immeasurably critical of the survivors have been throwing rocks at these people from the relative comfort of clean clothes, drinking clean water in an office building that isn't flooded all the way to the third floor... Secondly, it was meant to highlight the difference in governmental response to the problem – this time it wasn’t terrorism that brought a segment of the US to its knees, but an ‘act of god’ – oh, the gruesome irony… and while the government sat on its hands and showed the world that when New York’s in trouble, it’ll break a million laws to get things fixed, but should the poor folk down south find themselves underwater, it’s more important that everything appear ‘normal’ – that the President continue to goof with his mates, cut cakes and open buildings while people drowned, starved or died of thirst in the world’s richest nation… Although, it should be said that I’m absolutely certain that at some stage, George Bush will have asked at least one of his aides whether it were possible to “bomb the weather – show it not to fuck with America…” But against the backdrop of a natural disaster, it is interesting to note one final thing – the assertion that civil, democratic society is, quite literally, only three hot meals and a bottle of water away from breaking down completely came perilously close to being proven true. And that in itself needs to be understood before anybody starts pointing the finger at who is to blame – be it George Bush blaming the weather, Rev Jesse Jackson erroneously calling it a race issue (it’s a class issue, Jesse… While the well-off loaded their widescreens and wide arses into the family Winnebago, it was the lower classes that were left, quite literally, to sink or swim.) or the world’s media blaming two dozen armed men for a ‘rampage that shocked the world.’ The awful finality of the problem is all that remains now – the corpses are still floating in the witches brew that fills the streets, and the usual government post-disaster rhetoric has begun. Bullshit talks, and money walks, right? Right…

What do you think, did we get it right? Comment here...

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