Spitting Nails

I remember an expression from my childhood, I think maybe it was someone on my mother's side of the family, maybe an aunt or a cousin, but it went like this, "I'm so angry I could spit nails!". The image of my short Italian aunts with the behive hairdos piled so high on top of their heads that they seemed six feet tall, yelling unintelligible things in Italian and rusty nails projecting from their mouths, was frightening. I was only six, but the thought of it now that I'm a grown up still scares me. My Irish relatives (from the wrong side of the tracks) would just say something like, "****I'm so f@@@ing Pisssed!" They used those words pretty commonly, so they never conjured up fearful images for me.

But today, I feel like I could spit nails.

I had a moment at work while I was eating lunch, and I logged onto TPM Cafe and found a lively discussion going on about the Gulf Coast Wage Cuts enacted by our compassionate conservative President who admits that his Administration failed our most vulnerable fellow Americans, and has promised to rebuild New Orleans with billions of tax dollars. Unfortunately, if you're one of the guys standing in the feces holding the hammer, the companies in charge of the reconstruction only need to pay you 5.15 an hour. Is there anyone in this country who can live on 5.15 an hour? That's like $200 a week before taxes and everything else, and what sort of shithole will you even find to live in for even half of your monthly salary? I can't believe that we have left our fellow Americans to wade around in a city without food and water, the bodies and excrement of their neighbors floating beside them, and after taking responsibility for our shameful neglect, we are asking them to rebuild their homes on sub human wages? Is this how we care for our fellow Americans? First we leave them to drown and starve, and then we invite them back to re-build the city for slave wages? These are Americans.

Is Halliburton taking a pay cut? Is Bechtel?

I'm so angry, I'm beyond spitting nails, my South Side Irish is coming out.

The thing is, Bush can stand in the same shit that our fellow Americans stand in, and say the things that Americans want to hear, but when the speech is over, he changes his shoes and flies back to his sanitized Capital. It's all talk, but when it comes to action, he is Halliburton's bitch. When Dick says jump, George asks, "how high?" In public, our leader can say all the right things, and make all the right facial expressions, but the executive order tells the real story, and those people on CNN ( the ones who lived)who just got f*&%ed by FEMA are about to get F*&%ed again by George, Dick, and Halliburton.

And you and I paid for it with our tax dollars. Doesn't that make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside?

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