(Come back, Doc. Your country needs you.)
Trying not to fiddle while Rome burns, but...While I am not a person of fixed religious abode, I recognize that good work has been done by both individuals and organizations who are of fixed religious abodes. As often as I am disgusted by the evil that has been committed in the name of religion, so am I also awed by the good that has been done in its name as well; the dialogue is not monopolized by the likes of Fred Phelps or Meir Kahane or Osama bin Laden (who is not so much a religious figure as a hateful rich boy who has learned to talk the talk to religious fanatics), but to those who would spread love and comfort and assistance as well. I am lucky enough to count among my friends some truly principled believers. So why do I feel so squirrelly every time I look at my employer's approved charities list for Katrina disaster relief?
LuthorCorp announced yesterday that they would match, dollar for dollar, any charitable contributions made by their employees supporting the Hurricane Katrina relief efforts. The only conditions were that we make all contributions by October 15, and that we make our donations to one of the 13 charities on the list. Of these 13, three are secular: the American Red Cross Hurricane Disaster Relief Fund, AmeriCares and PACE Helping Hands; the rest are Christian charities. Again, I'm not trying to split moral hairs when people are starving and drowning, but -- oh, why equivocate? Yes, I am more than a little baffled that Second Harvest and Feed the Children and the UJA Federation and B'nai B'rith did not make LuthorCorp's cut of approved charities, but Operation Blessing -- run by Pat Robertson, the same Pat Robertson who said that we got what we deserved on September 11, 2001 -- did.
Trying not to fiddle while Rome burns, but...(Part Deux): Nevertheless, I am going to follow LuthorCorp's rules and throw my support behind AmeriCares, not because they are a secular organization, but because they are doing good works, not just in New Orleans but also in Darfur and Sudan and Bridgeport, Connecticut. (Even if you have already thrown your support behind another charity, AmeriCare's website is still worth checking out.) I will confess, though, that my motives are less than pure. My original plan was to eschew the matching funds, select the charity of my choice, and then just give double what I had planned to give. Then I read the press release from LuthorCorp, in which they announced that they would be donating $100,000 to the relief effort. While it's $100,000 better than nothing, it still seemed to me to be a tiny amount of money to a multibillion-dollar, Fortune 500 company. Then I read the second paragraph of the press release: $50,000 is being donated now. The balance of the $50,000 will take the form of matching contributions to employee donations.
Let me repeat that. My multibillion-dollar, Fortune 500 employer is donating $50,000 now and $50,000 in October -- as long as their employees pony up $50,000 out of their own pockets. If we don't donate, they won't either. There are salespeople in some divisions of the company whose base salaries are more than $50,000. LuthorCorp is, for all intents and purposes, donating a salary.
I'm giving. I'm digging deep. You'd better believe I'm going to make sure that my -- all together now! -- multibillion-dollar, Fortune 500 employer does not welsh on that other $50,000. Ante up, LuthorCorp!
As told by Anderson Cooper on Bill Maher: "[Survivors in New Orleans] are hearing politicians say 'We know you're frustrated.' A man here came up to me and said 'We're not frustrated. We're dead.'"
What the hell is going on in Astoria?, Part One: Dear friends at NY1, it's not that I don't appreciate your Hurricane Katrina coverage. What happened to Louisiana and Mississippi and Alabama will have ineffable consequences on all of us for years to come, and it's important that we here in New York City know this. Nevertheless, you are, first and foremost, a local news station, and while it's possible that someone out there feels a burning need to watch vox pops of motorists complaining about how much it costs to fill their gas tanks, some of us, particularly those of us who a) don't own a car and b) live in a certain part of northwestern Astoria have other questions, to wit: What caused the four-alarm fire around the corner of my house, the fire that took out four businesses and sent 18 firefighters and a civilian to the hospital? Why did I have to learn about this fire from a traffic-and-transit report, in which it was mentioned as an inconvenience to motorists ("Stay away from 31st Street and Ditmars Boulevard, due to Fire Department activity!"
? Was this really all you were able to learn? Why was it aired on a very short cycle in the middle of the day? Were the businesses adequately insured, and will they reopen? (Since one of those businesses is McDonald's, I'm sure that that one is a big fat yes, but what about the little restaurant? What about the optician's office? What about the doughnut shop?) Why were so many people on the scene overcome by smoke? How long will it be before the block loses that stubborn smell of burnt tarpaper and putrefying seafood? Can you understand that even though, in the great scheme of things, this fire doesn't draw a bead on the suffering of our New Orleanian brothers and sisters, some of us just might be curious to know what happened? Why are we watching people complaining about the price of gas again?
What the hell is going on in Astoria?, Part Two: Graffiti is nothing new in my neighborhood. Sure, we have pretty little houses, but we also have apartment blocks, both large and small, and those blocks have flat roofs, all of which are a boon to graffiti taggers. I have seen so much graffiti in my life that when I look out the subway window, it's just so much background clutter to me. At least it was until this morning, when we passed a house on 31st Street covered in giant fierce letters: YOU LIVE HERE, YOU DIE HERE, with an arrow pointing to one of the second floor windows. It could just be smack talk, a battle of words between taggers. But I have seen it twice now and it still makes my blood freeze, the way my blood froze when I was in college and the house down the road from my parents was sold to people who had company coming and going all hours of the day and night, and who had a van parked in the driveway, with crosshairs and SO MANY VICTIMS, SO LITTLE TIME painted on the side.
Is there such a thing as hot-weather comfort food? Yes, yes, you can make an argument that much of the foofaraw surrounding obesity includes comfort food and comfort eating as a Very Bad Thing. No, you should not find solace in your deepest emotional problems with food. Nevertheless, sometimes you do want to eat something that is friendly and soulful, cheap to buy, easy to put together and slips down your throat with the greatest of ease. It's not my own recipe; I found it in Rozanne Gold's Recipes 1-2-3. I found it about ten years ago, and I've been making it every summer -- for it can only be made in the summer -- ever since. Put a saucepan of water on to boil. Cut into dice 6 ounces of ricotta salata or manouri cheese (you can use feta, but be sure to rinse it off, and be sure also to reduce the salt you add later, as feta is much saltier than ricotta salata) and 2 medium, 1 1/2 large or 1 giant ripe tomato. Put the cheese and tomatoes into a bowl, add salt to taste, mix with your hands and let sit for about 1/2 hour. Meanwhile, boil 8 ounces orzo (rice-shaped pasta) in salted water. When the pasta is almost done, with the merest core of al dente hardness, pull it off the stove, drain it (do not rinse it!), pour it into the tomatoes and cheese, and stir until all is blended, but not so vigorously that you render the cheese into paste. This will serve about 6-8 people, unless you find yourself picking at the bowl a lot. You can eat it hot, at room temperature or cold. I'm a fan of room temperature, myself. It might not sound like much, but even after ten years, I still can't believe how good this tastes.
Closing with the punchline. Last night, Bunni (to whom I would link except that TypePad just suddenly got cranky on me), Lloyd and I went to see The Brothers Grimm. Without giving away any spoilers, I will say that everyone in the film (except for a hapless cat) gets what they deserve, and Jonathan Pryce, who plays an insane French general, gets exactly what he deserves. At that moment, he mumbles, "All I wanted was a little order. A piece of quiche would be nice." The audience, which was small but enthusiastic, laughed loudly, but I'm sure I drowned them out with my own snorty laughter. Bunni leaned over to me and whispered, "It's like you were in the room when they wrote it." I love it when that happens.
Julie, while I would normally have my conspiracy-theorist radar tuned in along with yours—hey! can we get oldies radio on this thing?—in LuthorCorp’s case, I don’t think it’s a conspiracy so much as a certain point of view. LuthorCorp is a public company, but it was a company started by one family; the CEO is a descendant of that family; there are company towns in the south named after that family. It definitely has its roots in a Southern Christian conservative milieu—and again, I’m not saying that Southern Christian conservatives can’t do good. I know people whose politics are 180 degrees from mine, but who genuinely care about their fellow human beings, not in an abstract, soul-saving sense, but in a very real, practical, how-are-we-going-to-feed-and-shelter-people-in-need? sense. I don’t doubt that the folks at the top of LuthorCorp are decent human being, but they have Southern Christian conservatism bred in the bone, and it colors their worldview in a way that can be pretty jarring when you drop it into New York City. I don’t think they consciously meant to exclude Jewish charitable groups from the approved list; I just don’t think it ever occurred to them to include them. It reminds me a bit of their voter registration drives: every two years they do a get-out-the-vote drive, in which volunteers help register their unregistered co-workers to vote. They provide voting guides, so that we can look up our elected officials’ voting records, but those records are compiled by our co’s political action committee, which is a very pro-business, anti-labor, anti-regulation PAC. The language of the guides is that of employee empowerment: “These issues affect all of us at LuthorCorp and our success as a company,” but the co. doesn’t consider that the interests of the folks at the top don’t always match those of the factory workers, who may belong to unions, or who live close enough to the manufacturing facilities that they have a clear interest in clean-air regulations and the company’s willingness to abide by them. I once brought this up to the person running the voter registration drive in 2001, and he sounded genuinely surprised to hear it. He’s not a bigot, or a plutocrat, interested in keeping the little guy down. It just never occurred to him.
On a less political note, I am thrilled that you liked the orzo salad. I don’t know why I should feel so proud, considering that Rozanne Gold really deserves the credit, but hey, that’s just the kind of gal I am.
I don’t know, bunni, I thought that the cat scene was very Gilliamesque. It would not have been out of character in Jabberwocky. But again, that’s the kind of person we are.
Deek, Fern and Molly, it is always a joy to see you. (Deek, baby, I’ll rant for you anytime.