“I am glad the President has nominated someone already familiar with FEMA's mission to become Deputy Director. Mr. Brown is currently General Counsel and Chief Operating Officer of the agency, a position he has held since February of 2001. Before joining the Bush Administration, I note from his resume, he served as executive director of the Independent Electrical Contractors in Denver. In the early 1980s, Mr. Brown served as staff director of the Oklahoma Senate's Finance Committee, while serving on the Edmund, Oklahoma, City Council.
He ran for Congress in the sixth district, and, in what I think is
particularly useful experience, early in his career, was assistant city manager in Edmond, with responsibility for police, fire and emergency services.”
-- Senator Joe Lieberman (D), HEARING before the COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS UNITED STATES SENATE,ONE HUNDRED SEVENTH CONGRESS ON THE NOMINATION OF MICHAEL D. BROWN TO BE DEPUTY DIRECTOR OF THE FEDERAL EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT AGENCY
Via The Left Coaster.
Population of Edmond, Oklahoma: (year 2000): 68,315.
Monday, September 05, 2005
Sunday, September 04, 2005
Being and the Wack
History is the superstition of intellectuals. They are always trawling among the time’s Rorschach blots for analogies, and for the determinants among the innumerable skirmishes of the night's ignorant armies, and for our particular future in the past, which contains all futures except one: the one where before and after are abolished. That future annihilates itself.
LI is as superstition as any of them. We do cling to the “then.” The then is where logic ( the possibilities encoded in the if/then) crosses temporality (the then that sequences the narrative). We do believe that we can create modest structures around the then, and imagine that history is coordinate with event, and that events are real. The then is my repository for what Santayana called animal faith. And so I am led down the path that led up to this week, and will lead from this week. Before we endorse any ideology whatsoever, we want to have a lucid sense of the then.
We have been thinking about this because we have been thinking about agency and structure. During the vacation, we read a lot of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. This time, we did not read it with that undertone of Derridean derision we brought to our last reading of it. Sartre’s rewiring of the whole notion of transcendence, putting it in terms that resonate with the double face of the then, struck us as a pretty good project, even if the notion of liberty on which it is grounded is peculiar and unconvincing.
Which brings us by way of the backdoor to two comments about the drowning of New Orleans. Harry, in our comments section, objects to our instant personalization of the event in terms of Bush. Harry sees structure, here, as the overriding issue. My sense that Bush has made a difference – that there is a specific Bush signature to what we have seen happening – seems to him to be a bit naïve:
“Whoever comes after him [Bush] as the sockpuppet for his class and culture will fit that description too.”
The other comment is by Jim Henley at Unqualified offerings, who writes sarcastically that the drowning of New Orleans, like 9/11, has so far confirmed the liberal in his view, the conservative in his, and the libertarian in hers:
“From what I can tell in the last couple days’ reading, Katrina has chiefly served to confirm people in their previously held views. Liberals proclaim it proof of the need for a robust federal government (shades of Bill Moyers in September 2001), conservatives find themselves confirmed in their belief in the overriding importance of social order vigorously enforced, and libertarians regard the disaster and its aftermath as an exemplary failure of government. (Anarchists see government failing at even its core functions. State-accepting libertarians see government as having ignored its core functions for inappropriate pursuits.)”
Henley’s point is that the structure of the ideologies so determines the response as to make ideology an unfalsifiable structure – a thing no test can dent. It thus removes liberalism, conservatism and libertarianism from any real situation.
I grant that both of these points are valid, insofar as agency is largely determined by the background of the sense one makes of the world through structures one has neither created nor had any choice in assimilating. You can’t pull yourself out of your culture by the hair on your head. But I also think that they over-rely on the imperviousness and determinateness of structures which, to my mind, are always slightly out of equilibrium due to acts and events. Acts and events are the wack dimension (I would substitute wack for liberty in Sartre).
For instance: the liberal belief in a robust federal government doesn’t automatically translate into a liberal belief that we needed Homeland Security. LI, a liberal if there ever was one, for instance, thought it was a stupid idea when the Dems came up with it, and a scary idea when the GOP adopted it. That the increase in Government spending on Homeland security has gone up something like 22 percent per year since the boondoggle was started showed simply that the conservative critique of the robust federal roll stopped at its traditional limits, which are, not coincidentally, the limits of the economic interests of the conservative constituency. Like the robust Federal War Department, the robust Homeland Security department served to siphon off government money to a multitude of very GOP-ish military industrial corporations. Which is another way of saying that ideological structures aren’t necessarily homogenous and don’t necessarily serve as predictors of social action.
Those discrepancies and breaks create the Wack, which is where agency comes into play. And this is where I would have to protest against the idea that Bush is a sock puppet. Of course, we can trace a certain learning curve in Bush’s career and see how it corresponds to the culture he grew up in, but it is a mistake to think that you could put any man or woman from Bush’s class in that curve and come out with the same result.
LI is as superstition as any of them. We do cling to the “then.” The then is where logic ( the possibilities encoded in the if/then) crosses temporality (the then that sequences the narrative). We do believe that we can create modest structures around the then, and imagine that history is coordinate with event, and that events are real. The then is my repository for what Santayana called animal faith. And so I am led down the path that led up to this week, and will lead from this week. Before we endorse any ideology whatsoever, we want to have a lucid sense of the then.
We have been thinking about this because we have been thinking about agency and structure. During the vacation, we read a lot of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. This time, we did not read it with that undertone of Derridean derision we brought to our last reading of it. Sartre’s rewiring of the whole notion of transcendence, putting it in terms that resonate with the double face of the then, struck us as a pretty good project, even if the notion of liberty on which it is grounded is peculiar and unconvincing.
Which brings us by way of the backdoor to two comments about the drowning of New Orleans. Harry, in our comments section, objects to our instant personalization of the event in terms of Bush. Harry sees structure, here, as the overriding issue. My sense that Bush has made a difference – that there is a specific Bush signature to what we have seen happening – seems to him to be a bit naïve:
“Whoever comes after him [Bush] as the sockpuppet for his class and culture will fit that description too.”
The other comment is by Jim Henley at Unqualified offerings, who writes sarcastically that the drowning of New Orleans, like 9/11, has so far confirmed the liberal in his view, the conservative in his, and the libertarian in hers:
“From what I can tell in the last couple days’ reading, Katrina has chiefly served to confirm people in their previously held views. Liberals proclaim it proof of the need for a robust federal government (shades of Bill Moyers in September 2001), conservatives find themselves confirmed in their belief in the overriding importance of social order vigorously enforced, and libertarians regard the disaster and its aftermath as an exemplary failure of government. (Anarchists see government failing at even its core functions. State-accepting libertarians see government as having ignored its core functions for inappropriate pursuits.)”
Henley’s point is that the structure of the ideologies so determines the response as to make ideology an unfalsifiable structure – a thing no test can dent. It thus removes liberalism, conservatism and libertarianism from any real situation.
I grant that both of these points are valid, insofar as agency is largely determined by the background of the sense one makes of the world through structures one has neither created nor had any choice in assimilating. You can’t pull yourself out of your culture by the hair on your head. But I also think that they over-rely on the imperviousness and determinateness of structures which, to my mind, are always slightly out of equilibrium due to acts and events. Acts and events are the wack dimension (I would substitute wack for liberty in Sartre).
For instance: the liberal belief in a robust federal government doesn’t automatically translate into a liberal belief that we needed Homeland Security. LI, a liberal if there ever was one, for instance, thought it was a stupid idea when the Dems came up with it, and a scary idea when the GOP adopted it. That the increase in Government spending on Homeland security has gone up something like 22 percent per year since the boondoggle was started showed simply that the conservative critique of the robust federal roll stopped at its traditional limits, which are, not coincidentally, the limits of the economic interests of the conservative constituency. Like the robust Federal War Department, the robust Homeland Security department served to siphon off government money to a multitude of very GOP-ish military industrial corporations. Which is another way of saying that ideological structures aren’t necessarily homogenous and don’t necessarily serve as predictors of social action.
Those discrepancies and breaks create the Wack, which is where agency comes into play. And this is where I would have to protest against the idea that Bush is a sock puppet. Of course, we can trace a certain learning curve in Bush’s career and see how it corresponds to the culture he grew up in, but it is a mistake to think that you could put any man or woman from Bush’s class in that curve and come out with the same result.
the counted and the uncounted
One expects that the clearance of the Convention Center, since it is administered by thieves and murderers, will probably encompass hiding a number of corpses. This is evidence, after all, and you want to burn or bury evidence. So LI hopes that all those who knew the victims – the parents, or children, or friends – will not give up when the victims turn up in the “missing” list – will point the finger and make as much noise as possible. That the murderers Chertoff and Brown are directing efforts in NOLA means that men who have the motive for covering up their crimes are directing efforts in NOLA. There is a new chapter in the black book of the African-American massacres, and it will be curious to see how the media ignores it, and how it is swept under the rug all the way around.
John Barry’s article in the NYT (I wrote about Barry in an earlier post) includes this graf:
“The scope of the 1927 devastation also resembled today's. No one knows the death toll. The official government figures said 500, but one disaster expert said more than 1,000 in Mississippi alone. The homes of roughly one million people, nearly 1 percent of the entire population of the country, were flooded. The Red Cross fed 667,000 people for months, some for a year; 325,000 lived in tents, some sharing an eight-foot-wide levee crown with cattle, hogs and mules, with the river on one side and the flood on the other.”
Here’s an editorial from the Times-Pic, which has been one of the most reactionary papers in the U.S. for years:
"OUR OPINIONS: An open letter to the President
Dear Mr. President:
We heard you loud and clear Friday when you visited our devastated city and the Gulf Coast and said, "What is not working, we’re going to make it right."
Please forgive us if we wait to see proof of your promise before believing you. But we have good reason for our skepticism.
Bienville built New Orleans where he built it for one main reason: It’s accessible. The city between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain was easy to reach in 1718.
How much easier it is to access in 2005 now that there are interstates and bridges, airports and helipads, cruise ships, barges, buses and diesel-powered trucks.
Despite the city’s multiple points of entry, our nation’s bureaucrats spent days after last week’s hurricane wringing their hands, lamenting the fact that they could neither rescue the city’s stranded victims nor bring them food, water and medical supplies.
Meanwhile there were journalists, including some who work for The Times-Picayune, going in and out of the city via the Crescent City Connection. On Thursday morning, that crew saw a caravan of 13 Wal-Mart tractor trailers headed into town to bring food, water and supplies to a dying city.
Television reporters were doing live reports from downtown New Orleans streets. Harry Connick Jr. brought in some aid Thursday, and his efforts were the focus of a "Today" show story Friday morning.
Yet, the people trained to protect our nation, the people whose job it is to quickly bring in aid were absent. Those who should have been deploying troops were singing a sad song about how our city was impossible to reach.
We’re angry, Mr. President, and we’ll be angry long after our beloved city and surrounding parishes have been pumped dry. Our people deserved rescuing. Many who could have been were not. That’s to the government’s shame.
Mayor Ray Nagin did the right thing Sunday when he allowed those with no other alternative to seek shelter from the storm inside the Louisiana Superdome. We still don’t know what the death toll is, but one thing is certain: Had the Superdome not been opened, the city’s death toll would have been higher. The toll may even have been exponentially higher.
It was clear to us by late morning Monday that many people inside the Superdome would not be returning home. It should have been clear to our government, Mr. President. So why weren’t they evacuated out of the city immediately? We learned seven years ago, when Hurricane Georges threatened, that the Dome isn’t suitable as a long-term shelter. So what did state and national officials think would happen to tens of thousands of people trapped inside with no air conditioning, overflowing toilets and dwindling amounts of food, water and other essentials?
State Rep. Karen Carter was right Friday when she said the city didn’t have but two urgent needs: "Buses! And gas!" Every official at the Federal Emergency Management Agency should be fired, Director Michael Brown especially.
In a nationally televised interview Thursday night, he said his agency hadn’t known until that day that thousands of storm victims were stranded at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. He gave another nationally televised interview the next morning and said, "We’ve provided food to the people at the Convention Center so that they’ve gotten at least one, if not two meals, every single day."
Lies don’t get more bald-faced than that, Mr. President.
Yet, when you met with Mr. Brown Friday morning, you told him, "You’re doing a heck of a job."
That’s unbelievable.
There were thousands of people at the Convention Center because the riverfront is high ground. The fact that so many people had reached there on foot is proof that rescue vehicles could have gotten there, too.
We, who are from New Orleans, are no less American than those who live on the Great Plains or along the Atlantic Seaboard. We’re no less important than those from the Pacific Northwest or Appalachia. Our people deserved to be rescued.
No expense should have been spared. No excuses should have been voiced. Especially not one as preposterous as the claim that New Orleans couldn’t be reached.
Mr. President, we sincerely hope you fulfill your promise to make our beloved communities work right once again.
When you do, we will be the first to applaud."
John Barry’s article in the NYT (I wrote about Barry in an earlier post) includes this graf:
“The scope of the 1927 devastation also resembled today's. No one knows the death toll. The official government figures said 500, but one disaster expert said more than 1,000 in Mississippi alone. The homes of roughly one million people, nearly 1 percent of the entire population of the country, were flooded. The Red Cross fed 667,000 people for months, some for a year; 325,000 lived in tents, some sharing an eight-foot-wide levee crown with cattle, hogs and mules, with the river on one side and the flood on the other.”
Here’s an editorial from the Times-Pic, which has been one of the most reactionary papers in the U.S. for years:
"OUR OPINIONS: An open letter to the President
Dear Mr. President:
We heard you loud and clear Friday when you visited our devastated city and the Gulf Coast and said, "What is not working, we’re going to make it right."
Please forgive us if we wait to see proof of your promise before believing you. But we have good reason for our skepticism.
Bienville built New Orleans where he built it for one main reason: It’s accessible. The city between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain was easy to reach in 1718.
How much easier it is to access in 2005 now that there are interstates and bridges, airports and helipads, cruise ships, barges, buses and diesel-powered trucks.
Despite the city’s multiple points of entry, our nation’s bureaucrats spent days after last week’s hurricane wringing their hands, lamenting the fact that they could neither rescue the city’s stranded victims nor bring them food, water and medical supplies.
Meanwhile there were journalists, including some who work for The Times-Picayune, going in and out of the city via the Crescent City Connection. On Thursday morning, that crew saw a caravan of 13 Wal-Mart tractor trailers headed into town to bring food, water and supplies to a dying city.
Television reporters were doing live reports from downtown New Orleans streets. Harry Connick Jr. brought in some aid Thursday, and his efforts were the focus of a "Today" show story Friday morning.
Yet, the people trained to protect our nation, the people whose job it is to quickly bring in aid were absent. Those who should have been deploying troops were singing a sad song about how our city was impossible to reach.
We’re angry, Mr. President, and we’ll be angry long after our beloved city and surrounding parishes have been pumped dry. Our people deserved rescuing. Many who could have been were not. That’s to the government’s shame.
Mayor Ray Nagin did the right thing Sunday when he allowed those with no other alternative to seek shelter from the storm inside the Louisiana Superdome. We still don’t know what the death toll is, but one thing is certain: Had the Superdome not been opened, the city’s death toll would have been higher. The toll may even have been exponentially higher.
It was clear to us by late morning Monday that many people inside the Superdome would not be returning home. It should have been clear to our government, Mr. President. So why weren’t they evacuated out of the city immediately? We learned seven years ago, when Hurricane Georges threatened, that the Dome isn’t suitable as a long-term shelter. So what did state and national officials think would happen to tens of thousands of people trapped inside with no air conditioning, overflowing toilets and dwindling amounts of food, water and other essentials?
State Rep. Karen Carter was right Friday when she said the city didn’t have but two urgent needs: "Buses! And gas!" Every official at the Federal Emergency Management Agency should be fired, Director Michael Brown especially.
In a nationally televised interview Thursday night, he said his agency hadn’t known until that day that thousands of storm victims were stranded at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. He gave another nationally televised interview the next morning and said, "We’ve provided food to the people at the Convention Center so that they’ve gotten at least one, if not two meals, every single day."
Lies don’t get more bald-faced than that, Mr. President.
Yet, when you met with Mr. Brown Friday morning, you told him, "You’re doing a heck of a job."
That’s unbelievable.
There were thousands of people at the Convention Center because the riverfront is high ground. The fact that so many people had reached there on foot is proof that rescue vehicles could have gotten there, too.
We, who are from New Orleans, are no less American than those who live on the Great Plains or along the Atlantic Seaboard. We’re no less important than those from the Pacific Northwest or Appalachia. Our people deserved to be rescued.
No expense should have been spared. No excuses should have been voiced. Especially not one as preposterous as the claim that New Orleans couldn’t be reached.
Mr. President, we sincerely hope you fulfill your promise to make our beloved communities work right once again.
When you do, we will be the first to applaud."
perhaps not
Ann Rice’s op ed in the NYT was an exercise in perfectly controlled anger and despair – which is not something we can reproduce at LI, where we are at the mercy of the portals of the senses and those rumors of the heart that we can’t quell with antacids.
“But to my country I want to say this: During this crisis you failed us. You looked down on us; you dismissed our victims; you dismissed us. You want our Jazz Fest, you want our Mardi Gras, you want our cooking and our music. Then when you saw us in real trouble, when you saw a tiny minority preying on the weak among us, you called us "Sin City," and turned your backs.
Well, we are a lot more than all that. And though we may seem the most exotic, the most atmospheric and, at times, the most downtrodden part of this land, we are still part of it. We are Americans. We are you.”
I don’t know about the “Sin City” part – the worst people in the world, who are the great honchos of American politics and media, advocated shooting people who loot directly, while conniving at the great lynching of the city, and I don’t think it was Sin City they were thinking of as much as getting the Soweto massacre right this time. These people are the true descendents of the slave traders, in them runs the blood of everything treacherous and vile, they sweated through exotic fevers in jungle just to massacre Indians and strip them of their bangles, they scalphunted, union-busted, Red-scared and peculated because they are built that way, they are instinct with every trick that will produce a bogus product and a quick buck, and they keep weighing us down with their failures and they will until the country buckles. We are ruled by thugs, whose actions are then praised by other thugs, who call themselves journalists. That is how the system works – the bad Cesars are here.
But I do like the almost childish promise in the last graf. There is always life stirring among the catacombs. Because the more I read about it, the more I think that NOLA is not down for the count. The more I think that this disaster is as much about the government, all levels of it, operating to stifle the one thing that could have saved thousands this week – the self-organized population, the one that could have had boats and buses at the Civic Center five days ago, the one that almost managed an armada out of New Orleans for 45 dollars a seat from the Monteleone Hotel.
They will screw up pumping out the water. They will screw up getting clean water to drink. They will screw up re-building. They will screw up the levies again. They will screw up relief for the refugees. They will screw up the gas. They will screw up and screw up, but I am beginning to think that the belief that the city is gone is their belief, their triumph, and – like all of their triumphs – a lie.
“But to my country I want to say this: During this crisis you failed us. You looked down on us; you dismissed our victims; you dismissed us. You want our Jazz Fest, you want our Mardi Gras, you want our cooking and our music. Then when you saw us in real trouble, when you saw a tiny minority preying on the weak among us, you called us "Sin City," and turned your backs.
Well, we are a lot more than all that. And though we may seem the most exotic, the most atmospheric and, at times, the most downtrodden part of this land, we are still part of it. We are Americans. We are you.”
I don’t know about the “Sin City” part – the worst people in the world, who are the great honchos of American politics and media, advocated shooting people who loot directly, while conniving at the great lynching of the city, and I don’t think it was Sin City they were thinking of as much as getting the Soweto massacre right this time. These people are the true descendents of the slave traders, in them runs the blood of everything treacherous and vile, they sweated through exotic fevers in jungle just to massacre Indians and strip them of their bangles, they scalphunted, union-busted, Red-scared and peculated because they are built that way, they are instinct with every trick that will produce a bogus product and a quick buck, and they keep weighing us down with their failures and they will until the country buckles. We are ruled by thugs, whose actions are then praised by other thugs, who call themselves journalists. That is how the system works – the bad Cesars are here.
But I do like the almost childish promise in the last graf. There is always life stirring among the catacombs. Because the more I read about it, the more I think that NOLA is not down for the count. The more I think that this disaster is as much about the government, all levels of it, operating to stifle the one thing that could have saved thousands this week – the self-organized population, the one that could have had boats and buses at the Civic Center five days ago, the one that almost managed an armada out of New Orleans for 45 dollars a seat from the Monteleone Hotel.
They will screw up pumping out the water. They will screw up getting clean water to drink. They will screw up re-building. They will screw up the levies again. They will screw up relief for the refugees. They will screw up the gas. They will screw up and screw up, but I am beginning to think that the belief that the city is gone is their belief, their triumph, and – like all of their triumphs – a lie.
in the front of the line
“At one point Friday, the evacuation was interrupted briefly when school buses rolled up so some 700 guests and employees from the Hyatt Hotel could move to the head of the evacuation line - much to the amazement of those who had been crammed in the stinking Superdome since last Sunday.
"How does this work? They (are) clean, they are dry, they get out ahead of us?" exclaimed Howard Blue, 22, who tried to get in their line. The National Guard blocked him as other guardsmen helped the well-dressed guests with their luggage.
The 700 had been trapped in the hotel, next to the Superdome, but conditions were considerably cleaner, even without running water, than the unsanitary crush inside the dome. The Hyatt was severely damaged by the storm. Every pane of glass on the riverside wall was blown out.” -- WWL
Hugo at Theophile Gautier’s Grave
--- Robert Lowell
“… and the great age with all its light departs.
The oaks cut for the pyre of Hercules,
what a harsh roar they make
in the night vaguely breaking into stars
Death’s horses toss their heads, neigh, roll their eyes;
they are joyful because the shining day now dies.
Our age that mastered the high winds and waves
expires…”
Tina Miller, 47, had no shoes and cried with relief and exhaustion as she walked toward a bus. "I never thought I'd make it. Oh, God, I thought I'd die in there. I've never been through anything this awful."
The arena's second-story concourse looked like a dump, with more than a foot of trash except in the occasional area where people were working to keep things as tidy as possible.
Bathrooms had no lights, making people afraid to enter, and the stench from backed-up toilets inside killed any inclination toward bravery.
"When we have to go to the bathroom we just get a box. That's all you can do now," said Sandra Jones of eastern New Orleans.
Her newborn baby was running a fever, and all the small children in her area had rashes, she said.
-- WWL
I think we are all surprised that they didn’t have the Superdome’s inhabitants, some of them, carry the Hilton Hotel guests bags. But you know how it is: that kind of thing makes people feel entitled. In this country, only those who do the real work – the planning, the investing, the consulting, and all of the things that make this a truly great nation and, mind you, a great investment opportunity –should feel entitled, because haven't they earned it? We owe them so much, so very much.
Now… let’s get back to repairing the front porch on Trent Lott’s summer place, shall we?
"How does this work? They (are) clean, they are dry, they get out ahead of us?" exclaimed Howard Blue, 22, who tried to get in their line. The National Guard blocked him as other guardsmen helped the well-dressed guests with their luggage.
The 700 had been trapped in the hotel, next to the Superdome, but conditions were considerably cleaner, even without running water, than the unsanitary crush inside the dome. The Hyatt was severely damaged by the storm. Every pane of glass on the riverside wall was blown out.” -- WWL
Hugo at Theophile Gautier’s Grave
--- Robert Lowell
“… and the great age with all its light departs.
The oaks cut for the pyre of Hercules,
what a harsh roar they make
in the night vaguely breaking into stars
Death’s horses toss their heads, neigh, roll their eyes;
they are joyful because the shining day now dies.
Our age that mastered the high winds and waves
expires…”
Tina Miller, 47, had no shoes and cried with relief and exhaustion as she walked toward a bus. "I never thought I'd make it. Oh, God, I thought I'd die in there. I've never been through anything this awful."
The arena's second-story concourse looked like a dump, with more than a foot of trash except in the occasional area where people were working to keep things as tidy as possible.
Bathrooms had no lights, making people afraid to enter, and the stench from backed-up toilets inside killed any inclination toward bravery.
"When we have to go to the bathroom we just get a box. That's all you can do now," said Sandra Jones of eastern New Orleans.
Her newborn baby was running a fever, and all the small children in her area had rashes, she said.
-- WWL
I think we are all surprised that they didn’t have the Superdome’s inhabitants, some of them, carry the Hilton Hotel guests bags. But you know how it is: that kind of thing makes people feel entitled. In this country, only those who do the real work – the planning, the investing, the consulting, and all of the things that make this a truly great nation and, mind you, a great investment opportunity –should feel entitled, because haven't they earned it? We owe them so much, so very much.
Now… let’s get back to repairing the front porch on Trent Lott’s summer place, shall we?
Saturday, September 03, 2005
the current myth
There has been some discussion about various comments made by Bill O’Reilly and the like – including the head of FEMA – about the culpability of those who did not evacuate. Usually, LI could care less about any comments made by Bill O’Reilly – we don’t have to look around for talking heads to be outraged at, screw em - but this is an issue that is so clear cut that we are worried about the myth that is building before our eyes. The response of the liberal community has been has been that those who are poor and elderly, having no transportation, couldn’t get out.
No. Please, do not censor what happened. This is a half truth. The truth is that those who had no transportation but public transportation had no choice but to stay. They were left behind as an INTENTIONAL act of the government, which located shelters in the city and took the people it could to those shelters. Now, supposedly the traffic jam going out of the city was such that the complete bus system of New Orleans would have added an incalculable delay to the evacuation – but it should be emphasized again and again that the moral responsibility for those people lies with the government that directed them, forcibly, into those shelters and then abandoned them. We know they were abandoned by every proof, including statements from Brown and the head of Homeland Security that they did not know, until four days later, that there were thousands at the Civic Center – and this doesn’t even address the hospitals. We have every proof, in other words, of mass negligent homicide. FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security are as guilty of murder as Union Carbide was, when it killed 25,000 people in Bopal India. That is the long and short of it. I would actually have every sympathy with a person who shot and killed the armed gangbangers that ravaged parts of the city, and I would feel similarly for those who punished the state. But in both cases, sympathy should not be extended into advocacy. There should definitely be trials. Not impeachment, fuck that – trials for manslaughter.
Of course there won't be. Fantasy baseball, fantasy justice, fantasy all the way -- what else is the Web good for?
No. Please, do not censor what happened. This is a half truth. The truth is that those who had no transportation but public transportation had no choice but to stay. They were left behind as an INTENTIONAL act of the government, which located shelters in the city and took the people it could to those shelters. Now, supposedly the traffic jam going out of the city was such that the complete bus system of New Orleans would have added an incalculable delay to the evacuation – but it should be emphasized again and again that the moral responsibility for those people lies with the government that directed them, forcibly, into those shelters and then abandoned them. We know they were abandoned by every proof, including statements from Brown and the head of Homeland Security that they did not know, until four days later, that there were thousands at the Civic Center – and this doesn’t even address the hospitals. We have every proof, in other words, of mass negligent homicide. FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security are as guilty of murder as Union Carbide was, when it killed 25,000 people in Bopal India. That is the long and short of it. I would actually have every sympathy with a person who shot and killed the armed gangbangers that ravaged parts of the city, and I would feel similarly for those who punished the state. But in both cases, sympathy should not be extended into advocacy. There should definitely be trials. Not impeachment, fuck that – trials for manslaughter.
Of course there won't be. Fantasy baseball, fantasy justice, fantasy all the way -- what else is the Web good for?
Love in the ruins
Now in these dread latter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A. and of the Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death-dealing Western world I came to myself in a grove of young pines and the question came to me: has it happened at last? – Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins.
Have I lived through the Golden age?
This question has been rushing at me, like a savage with an upraised asagai posed to strike my very heart, as one of the major American cities dies and three levels of government murders (oh, but in the second degree, and with the best intentions) as many African-Americans as it can get away with.
America has definitely changed. That the country would screw its bottom 30 percent is dog bites man news. That it would screw the middle and the top should make us sit up, indeed.
The artist in me appreciates the fine aesthetic sensibility of the muse of history, anointing a man as trivial as George Bush as the symbol of the zeitgeist. George Bush is an empty man – he makes Warren G. Harding seem like J.P. Sartre. But LI, ever the liberal, estimated the evil of that vacuum. Evil in the secular sense – the power of destruction linked to the blindness of vanity. It never occurred to me that the Bush administration would treat his Red States as it has treated Baghdad.
Anyway, the headlines today bring some hope that this phase of the ‘accidental” lynching of the urban poor is seguing into a more comfortable next phase. Perhaps we will get to see some judicial lynching of a selected looting gangbanger – such exemplary punishments are always good for the gonads – followed by some patting on the back of those whose actions in the past couple of days have cost hundreds of lives. The media hasn’t yet picked its hero yet, for this urbicide, but we are all on edge – that’s merely a matter of time and photo ops at the White House.
Meanwhile, I am working on my own extinction. I am a relic of an earlier era, dead meat for the knacker shop, in which “this is America” wasn’t the equivalent of grinning plutocrats on Murdoch’s channel defending our right to loot globally and shoot looters locally. A Dylan line sums up my non-necessity in the New Era: “it’s a wonder that we still know how to breath.”
Have I lived through the Golden age?
This question has been rushing at me, like a savage with an upraised asagai posed to strike my very heart, as one of the major American cities dies and three levels of government murders (oh, but in the second degree, and with the best intentions) as many African-Americans as it can get away with.
America has definitely changed. That the country would screw its bottom 30 percent is dog bites man news. That it would screw the middle and the top should make us sit up, indeed.
The artist in me appreciates the fine aesthetic sensibility of the muse of history, anointing a man as trivial as George Bush as the symbol of the zeitgeist. George Bush is an empty man – he makes Warren G. Harding seem like J.P. Sartre. But LI, ever the liberal, estimated the evil of that vacuum. Evil in the secular sense – the power of destruction linked to the blindness of vanity. It never occurred to me that the Bush administration would treat his Red States as it has treated Baghdad.
Anyway, the headlines today bring some hope that this phase of the ‘accidental” lynching of the urban poor is seguing into a more comfortable next phase. Perhaps we will get to see some judicial lynching of a selected looting gangbanger – such exemplary punishments are always good for the gonads – followed by some patting on the back of those whose actions in the past couple of days have cost hundreds of lives. The media hasn’t yet picked its hero yet, for this urbicide, but we are all on edge – that’s merely a matter of time and photo ops at the White House.
Meanwhile, I am working on my own extinction. I am a relic of an earlier era, dead meat for the knacker shop, in which “this is America” wasn’t the equivalent of grinning plutocrats on Murdoch’s channel defending our right to loot globally and shoot looters locally. A Dylan line sums up my non-necessity in the New Era: “it’s a wonder that we still know how to breath.”
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