Looters Galore

I recall that after Hurricane Wilma drowned a large part of key west in 2005 there were no reports of looting. Even after K Mart flooded with three feet of water homeless people in Key Plaza gathered up the floating merchandise and stacked on the window ledges at the store. On the other hand help wasn't long in showing up. Hurricane Katrina had hit New Orleans a few weeks earlier and Florida Governor Jeb Bush had the National Guard in the Keys as soon as the storm blew by. We had truckloads of water, food and ice available by the next day. Chef Boyardee never tasted so good! In New Orleans it was another story and the entire city was left to it's own devices for days. People starved, drowned and dehydrated in the submerged city. Then we heard stories of "looters."

From the AP archives.

What I wonder were people to do, abandoned and impoverished anyway in a city that had literally drowned. I wonder how many of us would have resisted the temptation to take food and water (and beer) off the surviving shelves? Reports of widespread shooting and violence were apparently greatly exaggerated though who was to know at the time? Now in Chile people are being accused to "looting" in the city of Concepción that has been flattened by an earthquake, I'm not sure toilet paper would be my first priority were I destitute but to each her own:

From Reuters.

And so it is one has to wonder what the protocol is when civilization has broken down all around you and the normal transactions of daily living have ceased. I suppose everyone wanted to believe that Haiti would end up a cesspit of violence after their earthquake, and this picture from a survivalist blog would reinforce that prejudice:
Yet we hear from rescue services that despite the horror, people in Haiti have behaved with admirable fortitude, restraint and self reliance. I guess people will steal given the opportunity, God knows our bankers have managed a grand theft of historic proportions right under our noses. About that I could do nothing but protest. I hope that when disaster strikes my hurricane supplies will survive intact and I will be able to hold out relatively comfortably until help arrives. I would hate to be labeled a "looter" were I forced out to hunt and gather supplies after a disaster.

Hawk Missiles

Little Hamaca city park has grown a bit recently and I never noticed until this week. The park is a small area of open space between the Riviera Canal to the north and the airport to the south and one enters off Flagler Avenue right the Urgent Care Clinic, The road into the park is called Government Road and it is long and straight and it feels endless at the mandated 15 miles per hour (25kph).It is used by cars and scooters but it is also a pedestrian path and a bicycle route as well and fifteen miles an hour is a good speed to stick to as you never quite know what you might meet on the roadway in the park:A hammock (hamaca in Spanish) in South Florida botanical talk is a small rise of high ground above the flood plain that allows hardwood trees to take root. You'll see clumps of tall trees among the mangroves all over the Everglades and in the Keys and Little Hamaca in Key West has been preserved as open space for city residents. A good job too. In 1962 this place was a key component in the front line defenses against Cuba during the missile crisis. (As an aside the film Matinée starring John Goodman is set in that period and worth a view). The US military set up mobile missile launchers around key West and also erected towers who purpose I am not sure of. In this period picture from the State Library archives it appears the towers were used to house tracking devices or radar of some sort for the hawk missiles which would be launched from their trailers:The towers and the buildings and the protective berms are still there as we shall see in a moment. Before we return to the present there was one other Hawk Missile picture from the Cuban missile crisis that I really like. It was featured in the Citizen newspaper a while back and I've never forgotten it. It shows three women and a baby walking past the missile batteries on Smathers Beach apparently unsupervised and without a care in the world. I wonder if these days with all the terrorist paranoia we will ever learn to trust each other again like this:

For the longest time the old Hawk Missile base at Little Hamaca was closed to the public.I first came out here on a ride along when I joined the police department. The K9 officer putting up with me in his patrol car brought his dog out here for training, teaching the animal to hunt for contraband hidden among the ruins. These days my more pacific dog likes to stump around sniffing on her account.There are tons of these platforms all over the place: This side of the island (the southeast corner) is rather lower lying and wetter than other parts of the city. The airport runway is built out across the salt ponds, very conveniently pointing right at the center of town to make sure flights in and out pass over the heart of the city at low altitude. Happily they don't seem to have forgotten any ordinance or left any spare missiles behind but these old oil tanks reminded me of epic industrial struggles to break up monopolies in the early 20th century, lessons forgotten today.Chevron is a common enough logo. Anyone remember Standard Oil? Don't worry, Esso (S.O.) became Exxon, Chevron, Mobil, Marathon, Conoco, Amoco and Mobil were all originally part of Rockefeller and Flagler's Standard Oil Company. Makes Goldman Sachs look like a piker!I expect that sooner or later this area will be organized and become defined by what one can and cannot do. For now it is pretty much open to anyone that wants to wander.Check out the picture of the Hawk Missile launcher above, for a resemblance.

These creatures are absolutely everywhere these days even where tourists rarely tread!

I did meet a few wanderers on scooters and bicycles looking for an exit, of which there are none here.

It never ceases to amaze me how a city as small and constrained as Key West manages to find space for so many activities. There are tennis courts all over town, a skate park on Flagler Avenue, the PAL program in Bahama Village and now a paint ball field out here:There used to be people complaining about paint ballers in the salt ponds so instead of getting all legislative they built them a place to enjoy their sport in peace. This is Key West though and we do need a fair amount of signage to get through the day. My dog is a daredevil.Views are hard to find in the Keys so when presented with a berm rising up above the mangroves, Cheyenne and I were nothing loathe. The Missile Farm in all it's abandoned glory, looking west:Looking east towards Las Salinas, Oceanview and South Roosevelt Boulevard:And south at the airport:

To the north across Little Hamaca Park are the canal side homes on Riviera Drive:

And more antennae to the northwest. It's an absolute forest of them around here.

This old monument looks like the southernmost buoy that predated the one currently in use. Perhaps they had nowhere else to put it.

In 1981 when I first rode into Key West the point was marked with a sign but I guess that wasn't good enough as time went by and the city "upgraded" to a buoy. Another reminder to take pictures because things are always changing.

Governing By Myth

I want to understand a paradox that makes me crazy. Modern Republican policy makers talk total nonsense and they are believed and yet when Democrats try to put across some reasonable and not terribly far fetched ideas they are scorned. Yet the people doing the scorning are the very beneficiaries of the Democrat proposals. There are so many examples in recent history of this maddening paradox I hardly know where to start.

For instance Republicans have announced forcefully there is no need for health insurance reform, that everything is pretty much okay as it stands and the President's plans are going to bring Communism to our shores. It is obvious to any human being that our insurance system is a total rip-off designed to squeeze profits out of sickness, a technique that involves denying coverage, refusing to pay, forcing patients to struggle with mounds of paperwork to get what should be theirs by virtue of premiums paid. Yet when Democrats offer a reform people without insurance shout them down. I recall early on in the campaign a protester injured at an anti reform event had no insurance to cover the costs of the injury!

Consider the campaign of presidential candidate John Kerry, a decorated war veteran running on the Democrat ticket against President George Bush the Younger, a man who evaded military service by joining the Alabama National Guard and failed to report for duty there as required. yet Kerry's war record was wrecked and he lost horribly and the draft dodger (not forgetting the Vice President who famously advised he had "more important things to do" when asked why he was deferred five times) got re-elected by people who loudly proclaim their loyalty to the military and to some brand of patriotism known only to them.

Consider the budget deficit, run up to astronomical heights by a consistent policy of cutting taxes and increasing spending. This craziness took off under President Reagan and has continued to this day. When it is pointed out to conservatives that President Clinton left office with a budget surplus, this achievement, unique is decades of governance, is simply shrugged off. And those famously loud crass "patriots" bay for the blood of socialist "democrats." Do we recall how the right wing nutters warned us ominously of President Obama's plans to take away people's guns? These are the "patriots" who cheered President Bush on as he claimed the right of the President to be above the law, to allow any surveillance of US citizens, to permit torture and to hold suspects indefinitely without trial or even access to lawyers? we still have our guns but our civil liberties are more eroded than ever.

I wish I understood why Democrats can't confront these Republican myths and put them where they deserve to be, out of sight under some moldy militia rock somewhere. But there again, expecting Democrats in leadership positions to stand up for anything to anyone is asking a bit too much. Perhaps I should join the tea baggers and demand to see a Presidential birth certificate. that would show those Dems!

Street Signs

I don't think my wife would agree with the sentiment, but after six weeks in the pound I expect it might ring true for Cheyenne. I did not notice the sign underneath until I got home but you can read the site at Key West Week in my web list. I expect I should tweet it or link it or something. This is more my speed, a printed newspaper, but I have to ask why did some dork feel the need to leave a coffee cup here when there is a city trash can across the street? If I were God I would make better use of my thunderbolts.I spend a great deal of time these days standing and staring into space while Cheyenne does her own version of trash clean up. Which prompted me to whip out the pocket camera and produce a series of disjointed pictures. Another variant of One Human Family. This one is a difficult one to live up to. Especially in winter. God help me I really try to be empathetic to snowbirds but by this stage in their annual migration I just want them to go home. They clutter my street, they clutter the commute, they clutter the citizen's voice with petulant whining and they clutter my brain so I start sounding like them. Enough!This Jeep is a Kaiser 1969 CJ5 and it's owner likes to use it sparingly because he prefers to get around town on his bicycle. Apparently his neighbors (see rant above, I'm guessing) think it messes up the beauty of the roadway. How do I know? Read on. They used to have a time limit on street parking in Key West until one day, I'm told someone Important got their car towed while away on vacation. So the new rules state that a car may be left indefinitely on the street if it is in drivable condition with up to date registration. If it has a flat tire or broken window or is filled with junk it is considered abandoned and we (Police Dispatch) can get it towed. It seems the owner of the Jeep is getting called on his anti-internal -combustion stance by his neighbors. So he put a sign in the window for all to see.I called him up to thank him for the sign and I think he was surprised to hear from me. Frankly it gets old being the middleman in disputes between neighbors arguing about on-street parking. I live in the county in a stilt house and I park underneath my house. It is an arrangement I like. If it was that important to me I would either a) live in a house with Off Street Parking in the city or b)move out to the county like me and burn hydrocarbons commuting. This is one of those things about living in cute old town Key West. Your neighbors are right next door and they may not be as tolerant as you might expect in a town packed this tightly together. Europeans have spent centuries learning to try to get along in their tight, cramped cities. It's going to take a few generations for Americans to master the art and here in Key West it's not a lesson easily learned by newcomers all starry eyed about moving to the Southernmost City. You know how I go on about offsets? Look at these three homes near Solares Hill.Consideration of your neighbors should be in the rental contract or purchase agreement but it rarely is. People who go on to live for a long time, perhaps the rest of their lives, in Key West learn the art and practice it daily. Other people are gruesome neighbors or unhappy transplants and they are the ones that keep forcing their neighbors to call the police. Imagine living across the fence from someone who just drove you crazy?

The Rodel Foundation is no longer the Arts powerhouse it was in Key West, victim to some degree of the vanishing wealth scam that has struck most of us to some level or another. The newspaper reported recently the Key West Symphony is struggling to pay the musicians their wages and they've been holding fundraisers in the city to stage another performance of the Key West Nutcracker next Christmas. It's all a far cry from a few years ago when money was washing through the city like Wilma's floodwaters. Rodel wanted to buy the old Harris School on Southard Street to create an art center of some sort but the School District baulked and now some developer has paid a lot less money for the building (4.7 million I believe) and to my surprise the untouched old wreck is now up for lease?There is an RV parked on the grounds, possibly to house a caretaker I thought, and "No Trespassing" signs have sprouted everywhere so one assumes work will begin soon to refurbish the building. I hope they lease it to interesting businesses but I wonder what those might be in a Great Recession? Not artists I doubt. I saw this piece of weirdness on Carstens Lane. Cheyenne was restless and I struggled to get the picture before she dragged me away.I wonder what prompts someone to stick an artificial raven on the porch? So many questions, so little time.This sign... ...prompted me to muse about the lawsuit currently being fought between the self styled Secretary General of the Conch Republic, a man who has made a business out of selling passports and paraphernalia relating to the celebration of a brief "Keys secession" in 1982. He claims rights on the annual celebration not on the name itself, so now business people in the Upper Keys want to do the same thing for their islands (which in my opinion in no way resemble any of the precepts that underlie the notion of the mythical Conch Republic) but they don't want to acknowledge his creative drive. And off they all go to court. Apparently the Secretary General is widening his commercial horizons at his office on Simonton Street. Perhaps the inability to spell "bicycle" or "kayak" is part of the charm, or else denotes a truly maverick spirit that has yet to learn how to use the spell checker. The words "Conch Republic" (properly spelled) I am sure we are relieved to learn are both in the common domain, until some giant corporation decides to sweep them up, no doubt. Far from the realm of the tribunals this sign seems to denote a gentle spirit that I find appealing.And in consideration of parking problems alluded to earlier this scooter defines sensible transportation in a small town, or perhaps in any modern town: I was struck by the endless hand rail separating two properties in close proximity. What would Chuck Pefley do? I asked myself, in the rhetorical style of a man in Seattle with but one photograph per day.
And finally to end our ramble we go out to the backside of the airport where to my surprise we find this sign of refugees fleeing Communist oppression (and free health care) 90 miles to the south. I thought this plane was long gone but apparently not, it still sits next to Little Hamaca Park, a relic of a hijacking that brought some Cubans to the impoverished land of the free and home of the Tea Partiers:A Cuban American family has gone to court in Miami and been granted a monetary award against the Cuban government which shot down a family member who apparently flew into Cuban airspace (an assertion stoutly denied by family members who weren't there). So now when an incident of hijacking takes place instead of returning the aircraft to Cuba as required by international law the planes are handed over to the grieving widow, as one more way to endlessly sour relations between our two countries. And here it sits, one last symbol of the Cold War stuck in limbo in Key West.Actually it is secure behind a fence and this is what it really looks like from the public land on the city side of the airport fence:It's a funny old world where this sort of nonsense can go on and on and on. Perhaps one day President Obama will put his big girl's blouse on and not only act like the leader of the majority party in Congress but also end the stupid embargo with a stroke of the presidential pen. I need to ride the Bonneville in the mountains of Cuba. At this rate Cheyenne will be dead before that can happen so I am putting the sidecar plans on hold. Blame the president for that one too.