Despite the title, there is not a single hint of CT in this diary; what follows is a long analogy that emerged over the course of a morning's hard labor.
As part of my own personal Green Initiative, I have been growing vegetables. I live on a steep hillside, and I've had to build terraces in order to have horizontal space to plant vegetables. So far so good; over the past three years I have terraced around sixteen separate growing patches, and there are still vegetables from last year's crop in my freezer. We haven't had to buy any substantial amount of fresh produce for two years.
On one corner of my property is a garage. And when I say garage, what I really mean is Unusable Eyesore. Cracked concrete walls stream water during storms. Concrete floor is so broken that walking on it presents a danger to life and limb...when it's not an impassable mudpit after the rains.
Well, I've been wanting to do something for several years, and now I'm doing it, which is why I've been out in front on the roof of a dangerously dilapidated structure wielding a pinch bar and a sledgehammer. Which is where I got the long analogy I mentioned earlier.
Shall we?
My plan is to put on a flat roof and build a whole array of self-watering planters; the garage roof space gets a ton of sunlight all day, and it has really griped my wagger to see it going unused all these years.
In order to put on a flat roof, the old roof has to go. Then the cracks in the masonry have to be repaired...including one HUMONGOUS crack that was triggered by blasting for the nearby expressway, back in 1958 (the year I was born).
The people who assembled this roof in the first place were clearly not the compulsively neat and orderly type. The whole system is obviously jury-rigged, held together by nails, screws, gravity and the force of habit that buildings develop over years.
I started pulling it apart last week.
First to go: shingles.
Shingles, shingles, shingles, shingles, shingles, shingles, shingles, shingles, shingles, shingles, shingles, shingles, shingles, shingles, shingles, shingles, shingles, shingles, shingles, shingles, shingles, shingles, shingles, shingles, shingles, shingles, shingles, shingles, shingles, shingles, shingles, shingles, shingles, shingles, shingles, shingles, shingles, shingles, shingles, shingles, shingles, shingles...
A simple, albeit dirty, job. But a real pain in the ass to clean up. Now there are broken shingles everywhere, and they have to be assembled and bagged and taken to the dump.
As I got to the end of the shingle-removing task, I came to one corner, where, inexplicably, the pitch of the roof met a cinder-block wall...fourteen inches below the top of the wall. That is, there was a deep diagonal trough where the pitch of the roof intersected a masonry vertical: a perfect place for water to collect and seep into the structure. Naturally, over the past fifty years, that's what's been happening. And equally naturally, the previous owners chose to ignore the problem, choosing instead to pour TAR into the trough every couple of years.
So I started trying to pry shingles loose from the accumulated tar. My small crowbar didn't get enough purchase, so I took out my six-foot pinch bar and wedged it under one surface. I pulled and pushed, got a little motion...
...at which point the pinch bar came loose from the roof structure and whacked me on the forehead.
Yup. You read that right. Last week, your intrepid diarist hit himself in the face with a crowbar. A little blood; nothing too extreme. By this morning it was only a tiny scab.
But I digress. I finally got all the roofing surfaces loose from the masonry and pulled them up, tar, scrap wood and all. To find...what? A huge nest of carpenter ants, running this way and that, desperately trying to carry eggs off to new locations. I had to stop, get a gallon of white vinegar, and pour it all over the frantic bugs.
Yuck.
Today I started removing the plywood roofing, one sheet at a time. The wood is still intact for the most part, and I will be using it for exterior sheathing on the big planters I'm envisioning. Right now, though, there are ten sheets of plywood lying in random piles on the pavement in front of the garage. I will need to put in a bunch of time pulling out nails before I can use them for anything else.
When I was removing the last sheet I was standing on the internal braces inside the roof structure; they wobbled a lot. The structural work inside the garage was very poorly done, and I was conscious that this work would be getting more dangerous in the days to come. As I got the plywood pulled free from the joists and tossed onto the pavement I saw, inside the wood of the front walls...another nest of ants, running here and there, with thousands of eggs all ready to go.
At which point the thought struck me: President Obama has a lot of controlled demolition to do; while it makes me impatient, I think it's better that he's taking it slow.
I could have just gone out onto the garage with a Sawz-All and a sledgehammer and turned it into rubble. But the cleanup would be five times as long, there would be nothing salvageable, and the danger to my own life and limb would have been enormously greater (and I'd never complete the task if I was in the hospital recovering from a broken leg or worse). Similarly, when anyone is trying to take apart or re-engineer a complex structure, every set of actions can have complex consequences, and every action can reveal a host of smaller systems that have their own implications for the demolition and subsequent reconstruction (for example, nests of rabid Christianist Apocalyptoid Dominionists, frantically scurrying here and there in the sunlight, trying to find a place to hide their eggs).
Now I don't really know if he's serious about trying to demolish and re-engineer the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Media Complex (MICMC). I certainly hope so; it is a terrible waste and a source of endless misery everywhere in the world. But let's say he is (if he's not, then we've just been manipulated and lied to, just like we've been manipulated and lied to before...in which case it's time to get out the pitchforks and torches).
In which case, it should be obvious: we're not going to get everything we want, right away. "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," for example, is not only an idiotic policy that robs our armed forces of much-needed ability while simultaneously marginalizing and dehumanizing thousands upon thousands of individuals — it's also an element in a larger structure, one which has built up over decades and centuries. And given that the entire MICMC is wholly dedicated to marginalizing and dehumanizing other people for the sake of power and profit, the military establishment's attitude toward gays is just another symptom of a larger problem: a profit-driven devaluation of The Other.
Restructuring the MICMC and recycling its infrastructure and resources for the needs of a just and humane world is the most complex piece of controlled demolition anyone's ever tried yet. Successful completion of this task (let alone the restructuring any of the other anti-human, pro-profit systems that have brought the whole human race to the brink of utter climaticide) involves opening up the structure, examining its construction, testing its "failure points," contending with the equivalent of huge nests of scurrying ants which had hitherto been hidden...you get the picture.
So...the first part of my thought is: we need to be patient. If President Obama seems to be moving slower than we'd like, maybe it's because he doesn't want to whack himself in the face with a crowbar, so to speak. If he's assessing the details of the larger structure, and figuring out how to move without causing catastrophic consequences, I'm not averse to waiting. News like this helps me keep my patience.
But the second part of my thought is: we must keep pushing him. Because it is the Our Vision that provides the motivation to do the work in the first place. And what provides the power? Our faxes, phone calls, letters, conversations, blog posts, protest signs, LTEs, office visits, bumper stickers and all the other expressions of our anger and frustration at an unjust world; these are the electricity that powers the Sawz-All, the muscle that drives the crowbar and the hammer. So let's keep up the pressure. If we give up, if we shut up, it's the equivalent of pulling the plug on the power saw...and the man's got a world of work to do.
So now I'll hit "publish" and this diary will go out into the world...and I'll hang around for a while, sending some faxes and making some phone calls before my elected representatives close up shop for the day. And then I'll go back outside and clean up some debris and think carefully about how to demolish the rest of the structure without making matters any worse.