Rhinocrisy

Of all the awful images of bodies floating in the streets and child rapists being beat to death by mobs, the single image I can’t get out of my head is Tom Delay condemning the victims to hell some months ago.

If I were in Uganda this week, I’d certainly be asking what influence Christian missionaries had on the government’s decision to warehouse 30 million condoms while people caught AIDS.

Not that the “health and Aids campaigners” quoted would be entirely wrong in blaming the choice on the USA:

Health and Aids campaigners in Uganda are threatening legal action against the government unless it releases 30m condoms which they say are in storage.

They say government policy on Aids has changed to reflect an American demand for a greater emphasis on abstinence.

Oh, god.

I don’t want to be cynical about this. There’s so many ways I could be – talk about the incredibly poor way our government is handling this disaster, how our leaders are shopping and flirting with celebs while the dead litter the streets of New Orleans, how this is going to ravage the American economy because of the effect on Gulf oil production and Mississippi river exports – but it’s so ghoulish. And here I am wracked with guilt because I’m sitting in an office working on evolutionary biology while people sit in their own excrement in the Superdome, and water logs the timbers of the buildings of New Orleans and slowly reduces the city to flotsam.

I’m reading “Good Omens”, by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. It’s about the Apocalypse. A funny book, but I can’t help thinking that Famine, Death and Pestilence are stalking through the wreckage of New Orleans right now (War is on holiday in Iraq). I think these End Times metaphors are strangely comforting for me, because there’s really no other way to consider this rationally. If this isn’t the end, what happens after this?

The usual “charitable aid” links seem worthless. You can figure out how to send money yourself.