The world has pledged over $2billion dollars in aid to the relief agencies and governments in the countries hit by the quake/tsunami.
It's approaching the "funeral of Princess Di" level of public absorption/obsession/catharsis.
The early criticisms of the US response have all been made and cataloged. It's now more important - for gadflies generally, and the arcane and suspicious in particular - to begin the arduous nattering at the edges of consensus reality that is their responsibility.
Salient points that need emphasising are:
The environmental destruction along the coastal areas that was and is a direct result of the market demand for cheap farm-raised shrimp and prawns. This mostly involved the "clearing" of the protective buffer that mangrove "swamps" provided, leaving the coastal areas vulnerable to anything the sea did.
It may have been an act of a belligerent God, but that act was made more devastating because it was assisted by heedless men whose only motive was selfish greed. Those same men, starting from the top of their economic food chains, were mostly untouched by the calamity - while the people who were killed and injured, and who lost homes and loved ones, were at worst paid bystanders in that bargain of destruction.The obstruction of aid to Banda Aceh, and the collaboration in that obstruction by governments with more authority than the Indonesian military, meaning the US primarily.
Most of us didn't know much about what was happening in Aceh before the waves hit, now we know nothing but the stark images of towns and villages completely leveled whose people have disappeared entirely. How convenient for the Indonesian military, and all those who see the war between good and evil as taking place between Judeo-Christian/capitalists and Muslim/communists.
It may indeed have been an act of God.
Two things that passed before my mediated eyes during the last week were:
the Sri Lankan government's refusal of a team of 120 Israeli emergency personnel early on, the official quoted as saying they needed supplies not people, at that time. And the early, and often repeated though constantly adjusted upward, comparison of the quake to - at first "23,000 atomic bombs" and more recently "a million atomic bombs".
I'm really critical in my reading, far more than most Americans. That got me.
What it says is that it couldn't possibly have been a bomb. It had to be a quake, because it was so big. There are no bombs that big.
As far as I know the seismic footprint of subterranean nuclear explosions is not clearly distinguishable from natural tectonic activity.
Later still, I thought to wonder how advanced "we" are in terms of explosive power.
I don't know much about nuclear weapons and I haven't yet done any research (project for today, I suppose) But the thought problem is simple enough - the atomic bomb, of which the quake was more powerful than a million of, was detonated 60 years ago. It's not unimaginable that the megatonnage or whatever it's called has increased a few thousand fold, or more, in fact I'm certain it has. How much more would depend on breakthroughs and all that secret laboratory excitement that lends itself so readily to conjecture and paranoid suspicion.
We don't know, right now, what the most powerful nuclear device is capable of, or even if there are other more powerful than nuclear devices now waiting to unleash the mighty trampling of whosever's God has his hand on the button, and his butt in the chair
So we sort of know it wasn't a bomb because:
a. there are no bombs that big. Which is impossible to prove or disprove and has to rely for its acceptance or refutation on the credibility of experts and group consensus.
b. no one, even if there are bombs that big, would want to use one, there or anywhere, now.
That's much easier to work with. There is a war against Islam. It is a vicious war waged by zealots who will stop at nothing to win. And who give every indication of being willing and capable, should they face inevitable defeat, of bring everything down with them. The ultimate suicide bombers.
Who operate behind veils of secrecy and walls of misdirection and a bunch of hard-to-metaphor symbolic devices that make it very difficult to know exactly what they're doing, much less talk about it to people who have no background for the subject whatsoever.
The Spanish train bombing.
The WTC.
The plane that was brought down in Pennsylvania that Rumsfeld so eloquently mentioned the other day as being "shot down" by terrorists.
The concerted and relatively successful for a while effort to make any accusation of conspiracy and intrigue a mark of delusional behavior in the accuser.
I could make this list as long as my fingers could still type.
It may have been an act of God, or it may have been an act of nature.
For sure it was abetted by men, it was made worse by men, the harm was increased by negligence and irresponsibility.
And it may have been caused by men entirely, though that idea is heretical and so bizarre it was hard to finish writing this.
I'm not saying it was - I'm saying the point by point refutation depends on some things that are tenuous and vague and impossible to present as evidence with any finality.
We live in an historical moment in which nothing is too strange to be - only technically impossible, and even then...
