Irene good night, Irene good night,
Good night Irene, good night Irene,
I’ll see you in my dreams.
Last Saturday night I got married,
Me and my wife settled down,
Now me and my wife we are parted,
I think I’ll go out on the town.
Sometimes I live in the country,
Sometimes I live in town,
Sometimes I take a great notion
To jump in the river and drown.
– by Huddie Ledbetter, aka Leadbelly, 1933
I don’t know about you, but I feel anticipation in the humid air that cloaks the balcony at Big Pink. I am antsy. Something is going to happen. It is slouching toward us. I sense it.
They have spiked the dedication of Dr. King’s memorial. It was scheduled for tomorrow morning. Like several million citizens, the coming storm has caused dislocation and dismay.
The President was prompted to return to the capital to demonstrate his solidarity with the Capital against the elements, leaving the vacation on Martha’s Vineyard a day early. We don’t know if the White House Communications Agency (WACA) immediately decommissioned the two COWS they set up for his vista (Cell towers On WheelS).
In the aftermath of the storm the enhanced coverage might be useful for the First Responders on the island. The locals normally prefer spotty coverage in the interest of esthetics, thinking the permanent towers blights on the landscape.
The President had been set to speak at the ceremony at the Socialist-Realist monument to Dr. King tomorrow, but the specter of Irene bearing down. Organizers had previously said they expected to draw up to 250,000 people, but no dice. The timing dedication had huge symbolic significance, being timed to the 48th anniversary of Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered nearby on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, which has gained a new risqué reputation as a venue for daring couples to have public inmate relations.
There is controversy about the memorial, as there always is when something new is added to the Nation’s Front Yard. A pal out in Colorado Springs who is more focused than I am in the morning sent along a bit from London’s Daily Telegraph that sums it up pretty nicely:
“…there has been controversy over the choice of Lei Yixin, a 57-year-old master sculptor from Changsha in Hunan province, to carry out the work. Critics have openly asked why a black, or at least an American, artist was not chosen and even remarked that Dr. King appears slightly Asian in Mr. Lei’s rendering.
Mr. Lei, who has in the past carved two statues of Mao Tse-tung, one of which stands in the former garden of Mao Anqing, the Chinese leader’s son, carried out almost all of the work in Changsha.
More than 150 granite blocks, weighing some 1,600 tons, were then shipped from Xiamen to the port of Baltimore, and reassembled by a team of 100 workmen, including ten Chinese stonemasons brought over specifically for the project.”
I think the memorial is entirely appropriate, and the location completely justified. The fact that all the production work was done in China does strike me as verging on the bizarre, but the funds were privately raised by Dr. King’s fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha, and however they felt they had to do it is certainly OK with me. If the government had been behind it, I would be outraged.
Dr. King is one of my iconic heroes. I made the pilgrimage to his tomb and the Ebenezer Baptist Church the last time I was in Atlanta, and wandered up to the his family home, thinking of the real man and the real courage it took to get out of bed each day with the certain knowledge that violent death was coming. I liked the fact that he was human, too, and smoked. He did not like that activity to be photographed, and he liked women a great deal. He was a man in full, and he stands in my estimation as perhaps the greatest orator our nation has produced.
He was a force nature, though human and in the flesh, but also a rider of a great and inexorable gale. He did not wait on the storm. He caused it.
The other storm is approaching. The air is heavy with humidity and a certain dread. Irene’s outer bands reached Kill Devil Hills, N.C., about a half hour ago. The monument dunes where the Wright Brothers launched their gliders and then their heavier-than-air flying machine will hopefully survive intact.
I took the boys there one time to run the distance of their first flight- it is a very short sprint, and the succeeding flights went incrementally further, reaching the moon sixty-six years later.
Irene has diminished to Category One status, but it is wide and wet and still wild. She is supposed to arrive at 0200, tomorrow morning with all her remaining glory.
There appears to be time to get the usual Saturday chores complete, and I am going to have time on my hands, since the Big Pink pool is shut up tight in anticipation of the storm, the patio furniture stored safely down in the garage.
Just like it was the end of the season. Which in a way, it just might be.
I feel restless. I think I am going to go out and get some exercise. Then when the rains start, maybe read. Maybe watch a movie before we lose power.
I have batteries. I have candles. I have plenty of vodka. Let’s see what you got, Irene.
Good luck. Stay dry.
(Irene greets North Carolina. Photo AP)
Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com