espaliered fruit tree

Missouri, the country's cartographic linchpin

I was enraged about the aftermath of Katrina, too. For a while, that September, I couldn't go online, open a newspaper, or even take cash from an ATM without encountering entreaties to aid the hurricane's homeless victims. The fund-raising apparatus was so far-reaching and well-orchestrated it seemed quasi-official, like the "Support Our Troops" ribbons that had shown up on half the country's cars overnight. But it seemed to me that helping Katrina's homeless victims ought to be the government's job, not mine. I'd always voted for candidates who wanted to raise my taxes, because I thought paying taxes was patriotic and because my idea of how to be left alone--my libertarian ideal!--was a well-funded, well-managed central government that spared me from having to make a hundred different spending decisions every week. Like, was Katrina as bad as the Pakistan earthquake? As bad as breast cancer? As bad as AIDS in Africa? Not as bad? How much less bad? I wanted my government to figure these things out.

why give political succor

We were standing in the lee of an eatery

For the next twenty minutes, the three of us boarded and re-boarded the dismal merry-go-round, ensuring that our ride tickets weren't going to waste. I stared at the merry-go-round's chevroned metal floor and radiated shame, mentally vomiting back the treat they'd tried to give me. My mother, ever the dutiful traveler, took pictures of my father and me on our uncomfortably small horses, but beneath her forcible cheer she was angry at me, because she knew she was the one I was getting even with, because of our fight about clothes. My father, his fingers loosely grasping a horse-impaling metal pole, gazed into the distance with a look of resignation that summarized his life. I don't see how either of them bore it. I'd been their late, happy child, and now there was nothing I wanted more than to get away from them. My mother seemed to me hideously comformist and hopelessly obsessed with money and appearances; my father seemed to me allergic to every kind of fun. I didn't want the things they wanted. I didn't value what they valued. And were were all equally sorry to be riding the merry-go-round, and we were all equally at a loss to explain what had happened to us.