A Cut of Catastrophe

---

Hardyville, my mid-nowhere hometown, doesn’t go in much for natural disasters. Hurricanes and tornadoes think we’re too far off the beaten path. There’s not enough water to work up a good flood. And although they say sagebrush can crackle into a pretty impressive wildfire, ours mostly just sits there and doesn’t bother.

For catastrophic excitement, I call my cousin Lucy. Lucy lives in Washington state, where life is a thrilling round of volcano eruptions, mudslides, tsunamis, earthquakes and Gen-Xers hurling themselves from the windows of their Hummers in despair over dot-com bombs.

Most recently it was the earthquake. Not The Big One – although they’ll probably get theirs before God punishes L.A. for Barbra Streisand and Battlefield Earth. This earthquake, the one that hit February 28, was ”A” big one, but it didn’t have enough gore or body parts to interest Dan Rather, so the rest of the world forgot about it after a day or two.

Not everybody forgot, though.

“The whole county’s crawly with FEMA people!” Lucy griped when I called her up last week.

“FEMA? You mean they’re finally building those concentration camps?”

“I wish,” she snapped. “At least that would boost the local economy. Put some of our layabout loggers to work building something. No, not camps. I’m talking about the earthquake.”

“Huh?” I asked incisively. I knew Lucy lived in the boonies, waaaay on the edges of the earthquake zone. As I recall, she suffered a broken ketchup bottle and a slopped-over bowl of dog water, neither of which seemed to require federal intervention, even by today’s standards.

“Yeah, the earthquake. Two months later and we’re infested – infested with FEMAoids!”

“Buh …” I interjected forcefully.

“Posters all over the county telling us to call for federal money. Half dozen articles in the paper every week about all the benefits we can get to help us recover from our losses. They had a meeting the other day – you won’t believe this – but our spotted-owl kissing congressman organized a whoop-de-doo meeting to tell us how the government could help us. Get this: 21 people showed up. Ten of ‘em – 10 of ‘em! -- were from FEMA, the Small Business Association or the Disastrous State Management Agency, giving presentations on how we could apply for grants and loans and subsidies and goodness knows what else. Begging us to beg the government for benefits!”

“Uh,” I finally marshaled my thoughts to ask, “for what? You did say a broken ketchup bottle, didn’t you?”

“And three dents in my counter where soup cans fell on it. Don’t forget that. And believe me, I was one of the most hard hit in the county. Nothing happened out here. Nothing. All the bad stuff was in Pugieland. Yet they’re out here, trying to peddle us millions.”

“For what?”

“Okay, here’s a sample. At the meeting one of the FEMA guys said you can get unemployment benefits because of the earthquake – get this – even if you were unemployed at the time of the earthquake, and are still unemployed now, but think you might be unemployed now because of the quake. They made all this stuff the headline story in the newspaper.”

“Too bad you’re self employed.”

“Oh no, self-employed, too. If you are self-employed and were unemployed at the time of the earthquake, same thing. You know, all they’re doing is hunting for the kind of people who like to work scams and mooch handouts. Worse, they’re actually thinking up scams for wannabe scam artists too dumb to scam without federal scam planning. That’s all. Just trolling for scum to give money to. And you people out there in Hardyville – you! -- have to pay for it.”

We sighed a minute over the state the world has fallen to. Country people, even, being encouraged to suck at the Big Tit. “It doesn’t pay to be independent, does it?” I finally sighed. “Doesn’t make sense to be an old, self-reliant American, these crazy days.” .

Lucy said a bad word. Then she bunched up her resolve and said, “You know I think I oughta go for it. I mean, three dents in the counter! I figure they ought to give me a new house and a whole new set of furniture for that, don’t you suppose?”

“Well, at least a doublewide. They do that.”

“No. No doublewide. That’s tacky. I have standards.”

“I dunno if you can get an actual house out of it.”

“But just think how traumatized I was! I deserve it! I’m suffering! They keep telling me how much I’m suffering, and who am I to contradict the federal government? I can’t possibly go on living here, looking at those dents every day and reminding myself of the horror – the sheer, psychically wounding horror I endured. Why, I wake up in the middle of the night, hearing that ketchup bottle plummeting  … the stress, ohgod, the stress! I haven’t been able to sleep or, why, even have sex since …”

“Lucy, you haven’t had sex since Arlo left you for that UPS driver.”

“Right, but if I haven’t had sex since the earthquake, even if I wasn’t having sex before the earthquake, if I think it’s because of the earthquake …?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t think they’ll go for that one. Not with a Republican in office.”

“But I’m suffering,” she whimpered, even managing to sound sincere. I didn’t mention how much more she suffered when Arlo the self-admiring clod was around. Really, she’s better off with the sexless devotion of Biscuit, her semi-purebred mutthound.

“Maybe they could throw in some post-traumatic stress therapy,” I offered.

“At least.”

“Lessee, job benefits, house, therapy. Hey, you’re not part Indian or anything, are you? I’ll bet you could get some extra benefit for that. Minority? Any kind of minority?”

 “Mongrel!” she wailed. “Plain old Mongrel-English-Dutch-German-Irish-Italian-Who-Knows-What-Else-American. Ever since the earthquake, I don’t even know what kind of ethnic I am. I didn’t know what kind of ethnic I was before, but now if I think it’s because of the earthquake …”

“Gotta be some kinda benefit in that. Mixed race is in this year. And there you are, with your whole cultural heritage erased. I mean, that’s, like, individual genocide or something. All because of an earthquake. You shouldn’t just get cheap loans. You should get reparations.”

“But does it count if all the mixes in my race where white people?”

“I dunno. Call one of those 800 numbers and ask. If they’re really looking that hard to dig up misery to throw money at, maybe they can invent a sexless-white-mongrel-one-person-cultural-genocide-with-three-dents-in-her-counter-top-and-a-broken-ketchup-bottle-highly-traumatized-abandoned-by-her-boyfriend-earthquake-victim program.”

Lucy sniffed. I could hear her tallying up the Tax-Tit dollars. But she must have come up short of a million because the next thing she said was:

“You know, it’s time we recognized how deeply the rights of our companion animal species suffer in the aftermath of a natural disaster. Why, when the water flung itself violently out of her bowl, Biscuit … why, she has no way to give voice to the full depths of her anguish, but as her guardian, I’m sure I ...”

“Yep,” I agreed, “that must be worth at least another ten thou, Hey, Luce, can I talk you out of a FEMA application? I’m a little short on cash this month and I think I’m starting to suffer trauma from the lack of natural disasters around here.”

Thank you to Jim Bovard and Tina Terry, who let me steal some of their best lines. The information about FEMA in rural Washington is all true.