So, So, So, So Listen Up, 'Cause You Say Nothin', I'm Buddy Rich When I Fly Off The Handle
I'm pissed at the world, and it's sabotage
There’s something cathartic about Ad-Rock’s1 scream to lead off the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage,” exploding the song from that hypnotic MCA2 bass riff to a driving force of bombast leaving you exhausted at the end of the song.3 I’ve needed that catharsis this week.
Houston, Galveston, the surrounding counties, and the smaller towns south of Houston and along the Texas Gulf Coast were bombarded by Hurricane Beryl this week. Beryl came ashore as a category 1 hurricane, and anybody who tells you that a cat one storm is minor, is an idiot that should never believed by any sane person.
This storm did a lot of damage. The city of Houston is in bad shape. The city of Galveston is in bad shape. The surrounding regions are in bad shape. Could it have been worse? Yes. Does that matter? No.
At one point this week, over 2.5 million customers in Houston were without power — that was supposedly 80-percent of the city without electricity. As I write this, there are still over one million people without power, and it is estimated that over 500,000 customers will still be without power come Sunday.
I must first state that I have been incredibly lucky. My apartment was not damaged. My apartment complex suffered little damage. And I never lost power. You have no idea of how it feels to have been spared from this when so many others in the region have suffered damage to property, damage to self, and have had to go without power. Anyone who has ever been through a hurricane will tell you how exhausting a hurricane is, and to have to go on a week or longer without power while clearing away debris, assessing damage, repairing damages, trying to sleep, trying to care for children or the elderly is incredibly difficult.
So yes, I’m damn lucky.
But that doesn’t mean that I don’t need the catharsis of letting out that yell with Ad-Rock because there’s just so much damn nonsense and dishonesty going on with the leadership of my city and my state that I need to rant, and I need to scream, and I’m doing that here.
Here’s how damn stupid things are this week: on Wednesday, during a city council meeting, the mayor of Houston, John Whitmire, went off on a rant about the Houston Astros because the night before the Astros had dared to play a home game at Minute Maid Park when the George R. Brown Convention Center, two blocks away, had no power. And frankly, while it’s well-established that I’m an idiot, even I know that taking on the city’s most popular civic institution, perhaps the one entity in this city that draws huge bipartisan support, is not the way to win the hearts and minds of the populace of Houston.
Further, as documented by various media members, the George R. Brown Convention Center did have power at the time the Astros were playing. Second, the Astros lowered all ticket prices to five dollars, cut all concession prices, and generally gave the populace a place to go and sit in air-conditioning and relax for a few hours while the city’s electricity provider failed to provide any updates on when the power might come back.
But that’s just the stupid crap. On Thursday morning, Dan Patrick,4 the state’s Republican Lieutenant Governor, held a press conference at a Houston law firm to supposedly address the Houston clean-up and the problems with CenterPoint, the city’s power provider. Instead, Patrick decided to spend most of the press conference attacking Joe Biden as a liar, calling the head of the Harris County government a liar, calling members of the Houston press liars, then refusing to take questions from those press members he named as liars after he called them liars, and generally, praised his response to the hurricane, a response that he has had to make because the governor of the state, Republican Greg Abbott, decided to head out to Asia.
Joe Biden and the county executive are supposedly liars because Biden made a comment to the Houston Chronicle that he had tried to track down Abbott so that they could start the disaster declaration process, but that Abbott wasn’t around and the process was delayed. Patrick had responded that he couldn’t do a declaration until he made an assessment of the damage, which he finished on Tuesday afternoon, at which point he submitted a declaration for Biden to sign.
But the Houston Chronicle and a local Houston TV news station filed stories that not only quoted Biden’s comments, but that then demonstrated that in 2008 and 2017, the governors of Texas had submitted requests for disaster relief PRIOR to Hurricane Ike (2008) and Hurricane Harvey (2017) even making impact on Texas.
The news stories lied, Patrick said, because he felt that the disaster declaration wasn’t needed. Now let’s follow the mental gymnastics: Patrick said that he could have submitted a request to Joe Biden and the White House on Sunday night, but that he chose not to do so; he then said that he did not do so until Tuesday; he also further stated that the requests had, yes, indeed, been submitted in advance with Ike and Harvey. Yet it’s Joe Biden and the Houston Chronicle and other media members who lied.
AAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Houston has been beat up these past several months by the weather. We’ve been beat up the past decade and this century. Our infrastructure is falling apart. The power provider has struggled to keep Houston supplied with power, yet the state government has time and time again approved huge rate increases.
The temperature gets hotter and hotter every year. We’re hit with more and more weather extremes, more flooding, more torrential rains. Hurricane season runs from June 1 to November 30, yet for most of my life, the historical period for Houston to be hit by hurricanes has been mid-August through the end of September, not June and July. So if things are this bad now, how bad will it get if another hurricane strikes later this year, and if the hurricane is even stronger? Hell, how bad will it be if it’s just a tropical storm?
Houston getting hits by a hurricane is no shock, but it appears to have caught everybody (but for the actual people who live here) by surprise. The mayor of Houston, in between shouting about the Astros, has blamed weather forecasters for not properly forecasting the storm and its path and for his not thinking Beryl would hit Houston until the Sunday forecasts came out — he even bragged that he and the acting police chief went out driving Sunday night and were convinced that the storm was going elsewhere because things were relativity calm. And the acting chief further stated that he didn't call all of his officers into duty on Sunday because the weather folks were wrong.
The problem with this is that Whitmire and the city government were warned. And they were warned on Friday. How do we know this, because in that same Wednesday city council meeting where Whitmire shouted about the Astros, one of the city council members read from an email that was sent out by the city’s office of emergency management on Friday afternoon stating that the path of the hurricane was going to bring the dirty side of this hurricane (that’s the really bad part of the storm) directly through Houston.
AAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I am so tired of all of this. I’m tired of an electric provider that can’t keep the lights on. I’m tired of living in fear of any weather event. Hell, it can be a great day outside with temps in the 70s and still we have to worry about the electric grid crashing. Meanwhile the mayor is in an incompetent idiot and the state government treats those of us who live in cities as people who are unworthy of its attention.
So let’s crank up the volume and scream:
I can't stand it, I know you planned it
I'ma set it straight, this Watergate
I can't stand rockin' when I'm in here
'Cause your crystal ball ain't so crystal clear
So while you sit back and wonder why
I got this fuckin' thorn in my side
Oh my god, it's a mirage
I'm tellin' y'all, it's sabotage
“Sabotage” the song is a darkly funny song with lyrics screamed at the group’s producer who nagged the band for months to finish the song, and in which the lyrics were written and the vocals sung/shouted only two weeks before the album was sent to the presses. But damn it, I feel that scream right now.
So, so, so, so listen up, 'cause you can't say nothin'
You'll shut me down with a push of your button
But, yo, I'm out and I'm gone
I'll tell you now, I keep it on and on'Cause what you see, you might not get
And we can bet, so don't you get souped yet
Scheming on a thing, that's a mirage
I'm trying to tell you now, it's sabotage
But mostly, I guess, I’m mad at myself. I love Houston (yes, I complain about it a lot) and I’ve lived here all of my life so my love is that of a native who has watched its reckless and often unchecked growth, but I need to get the hell out of here. And I’m angry at myself because I’m such a fucking failure in life that I’m stuck here. I’m trapped.
The current mayor is trying to adopt the same suburbs first, the environment be damned approach that fueled the city’s growth for most of my life, and which has now lead to miles and miles of cement with crumbling roads and a drainage system from the early 1900s that is desperately in need of repair but in which the mayor has decided to toss infrastructure improvement plans aside because they will mean a few less lanes on the streets. And the state leadership has made it more than clear that it doesn’t want the types of me around anymore.
Yet I can’t leave. I’m too damn broke, my savings drained from that whole nearly dying thing, that I can’t leave. And I’m pissed at myself because I failed so miserably that I can’t leave because I know I’m not wanted, and I don’t want to stick around anywhere I’m not wanted, but…
I can't stand it, I know you planned it
I'ma set it straight, this Watergate
But I can't stand rockin' when I'm in this place
Because I feel disgrace because you're all in my face
But make no mistakes and switch up my channel
I'm Buddy Rich when I fly off the handle
What could it be, it's a mirage
You're scheming on a thing, that's sabotage
I’m sorry, but I'm angry at the world right now. I know that lots of you will disagree with what I’ve said, and the tone, but sometimes I just need to say some things. I had to get that out. Maybe I’ll get back on my nostalgia kick next week. Maybe not.
Sigh.
(Yes, I know the video to “Sabotage” is one of the most iconic music videos of all time, and I love it. But there’s just something about the intensity and rawness of this live performance below from The Late Show with David Letterman that really captures my mood).
Adam Horovitz (also playing the guitar).
Adam Yauch (the creator of the fantastic bass line).
No, I didn’t forget Mike-D aka Michael Diamond on the drums.
Dan Patrick was a godawful sportscaster on KHOU Channel 11 when I was a kid, and it’s still unbelievable to me that anybody elected this to moron to any office more powerful than dogcatcher.
I hope the people of Houston are back on their feet soon.