What democracy looks like. So what's it take to goad a dispirited, marginal semi-blogger out of his torpor? Well, certainly it gave me a twinge, when I got back from my weekend in D.C. and started catching up on the blog reading, to bang into James Wolcott's snide, high-handed dismissal of the march I flew halfway across the country to join as a "flea circus." (Wolcott seems to have been most dismayed by how badly the event, "a sea of tiny, ugly billboards," scaled to his TV. I don't know, James, maybe you want to think about getting a larger screen before you do your next rally critique?) But I counted it as just a lapse: kinda dumb (a dumb he caught from Steve Gilliard, apparently), to measure the political worth of a march by how you thought the images played while you parked your ass in front of the C-SPAN, but Wolcott's too good too consistently for me not to forgive the occasional lapse, even one I have to take somewhat personally.

But then along comes a smug, ass-stupid, finger-wagging post on the same topic from the mighty keyboard of Kos, and the dam breaks. "The lack of focus" of the marchers, Kos intones, "is maddening, obviously." (Love that "obviously.")

But my biggest problem with anti-war protests is that they're obsolete. What do they accomplish? Historians still argue about the role Vietnam-era protests had on ending the war (shortened it versus prolonged it). But today, they mean nothing.

We are a media-saturated world, bombarded on all angles by information. A bunch of people marching in the street no longer have any serious emotional effect on media consumers. One picture on a front page and CNN of flag-drapped coffins would likely have a greater effect on war opinions than 1,000 marches like the one we had last weekend. ...

My question ... becomes whether the money and effort people expended getting to DC to march might've been better spent in other forms of activism -- letters to the editor, contributions to anti-war candidates, politicians, and organizations, calls and letters to their elected officials, creating anti-war media (e.g. Flash animations, documentaries), and so on.

I'm sure Jeff Jarvis would be on the same page: protest is sooo old media. Because, yeah, you want to fund those Flash animations, don't you? That's twenty-first century politics, dood. Nothing moves opinion like whimsical little thirty-second cartoons on some Web page.

It's one thing if James Wolcott is obtuse about activist politics; no one goes to a Wolcott to understand activism. Markos, on the other hand, as a self-appointed Reviver of the Democratic Party, might perhaps feel himself responsible for a bit more nuanced understanding of—not to mention uncondescending respect for—the political agency of a hundred thousand and more of his fellow citizens and ideological compatriots, and for the commitment that brought them to D.C. to exercise it. Then again, for all his gabbling about the netroots and such, it's been clear for some time now that Markos is not fundamentally more comfortable with popular activism than the Establishment consultantocrats he makes a show of railing against. "Netroots," when you come down to it, is just Kos's branding statement: as his strictures against the non-branded (or competing) forms of grassroots work should make plain. He's managed to progress not an inch past the Establishment's degraded, and degradingly passive, reduction of all politics to a traffic in "messages." There are the funders (and, optionally, in small ways, disseminators) of messages, the professional operatives (enforcers of "message discipline," one of the more unfortunate phrases of our moment) who formulate and direct them, and the "media consumers" who receive them, and if Kos has any brighter idea than that about what activism is supposed to be, I'm not aware of it. And that, I'm afraid, is the endpoint of the vaunted Kos revolution: a few new faces taking (appropriately compensated) seats around the same goddamn old conference tables. But now they've all got Blackberries!

I mean—media consumers? Does it even occur to Kos that there might be something else going on here, should be something else going on here, than a form of political advertising?

Let me tell you a little about how my march day went, since I think there's a kind of object lesson in it. My friend Mark and I got to the Ellipse not long before the scheduled start of the march, a little later than we would have been if I hadn't had the evil thought to detour first past the pathetically under-attended Freeper counter-demonstration at the Navy Memorial. (A point of historical interest for me, since it was at just that location that ol' Baldy McManwhore made his first attested appearance as Jeff Gannon at the beginning of 2003. Didn't see him there, though he was spotted at the next day's pathetically under-attended pro-war thing.) There was still a steady, strong influx of people from all directions in to the staging area along Constitution Ave., and obviously no march about to commence any time soon, so we picked our way through the tents and the knots of picnickers toward the speakers' platform, where things were in full cry. It was not edifying. Ramsay Clark was in the middle of a tedious harangue on Haiti that seemed to have been freeze-dried a year and a half ago (when the kidnapping of Aristide was still a fresh atrocity to be opposed). Followed by a Haitian speaker, followed by a Palestinian, followed as it seemed by anyone with a protest to make not on the subject of the Iraq war: no information about when we could expect the march to start, or why it had been delayed. (ANSWER's auto-erotic desire to prolong what it thought was its closeup being the only reason I could conjure myself, under the circumstances.) It felt like all the air was leaking out of the event. It got to the point that, if I'd heard one more damn no-name speaker introduced as a "tireless fighter" for this that or the other, I was gonna have to throw something.

I hit a toxic level of boredom and annoyance at the point where yet another tireless fighter declaimed, in tones of highest outrage, to the effect that sub-standard wages for African-Americans were a form of genocide. (Imagine how narrow and moldy a world of agitprop you have to live in for a statement like that to seem to have any actual political meaning.) Hoping that movement and a sense of scale might recover spirit enough yet for us to keep on with the day, we decided to hike back down across Constitution and up to the vantage of the Washington Monument. It was a good decision, even before we got to the vantage. The street was choked with people—far more than when we'd passed along it maybe forty-five minutes before. Hard to imagine such a throng of humanity clearing the air, but that's what it did. Drums, from what seemed all sides, made themselves felt as we pushed into the mass. (Nothing like rally drumming to angry up the blood.) There was a seething energy in the crowd: not an energy of rage, but of expectation, of delight even, of people ready and eager to burst out of their confines. Gaining the other side of the avenue, we slipped into the narrow, slow stream moving between the curb and the Park Service's temporary wooden fencing (made less narrow when a few people decided to take revolutionary action against the fences, to general cheer), past the flags and the signs and the Statue of Liberty on stilts and Code Pink's garish (not to say vaginal) pink-balloon peace sign that lit up the middle of the block: and sometimes the air was full of drums, sometimes of spontaneous isolated chanting, and sometimes in the intervals of the drumming and the chanting, or just from a change of the breeze, some half-heard scrap of oratory from the Ellipse drifted over: and made a direct, physical communication of just how irrelevant the haranguers, the purveyors of message, were to the people and to their purpose here.

By the time we'd got up to the Monument, then back down on the other side to the Port-a-Potties lined up at the end of the Mall, and back at last to the headwaters of Connecticut and Fifteenth, the march had commenced. It was on a scale vastly different from even the biggest marches I was at in Chicago before the war. There was a kind of exhiliration in seeing, still some distance before the turn that would take us in front of the White House, the head of the march a block over coiling back on itself, already passing down Sixteenth while we were still struggling up Fifteenth. And with the tension of those Chicago marches in mind, it's impossible for me to exaggerate how spirited and relaxed and cheerful this one was. Not even a clammy drizzle could bring anyone down. (Earlier, on our way up to the Monument, I'd complained to Mark that I'd been there for more than an hour and hadn't yet smelled joint one. Just didn't seem right. Somewhere along the route, near the FBI building I think, I finally caught a whiff. So did everybody around me: a group of college-age girls on my right, all wearing big Dubya masks, broke off whatever it was they'd just been chanting to improvise a new one: "Share! The! Dope! Share! The! Dope!" The whole thing was like that.) As the parade thickened and all but clotted along Pennsylvania—nobody could resist the White House, the rooftop snipers, the Secret Service scattered on the lawn, as a photo backdrop—it came to me that, for all our legitimate anger, for all the ugliness of state apparatus we were surrounded with, this march resembled nothing so much as a victory lap. For three years now we've persisted, in spite of Republican thuggery, in spite of Democratic fecklessness and bad faith, in spite of media cowardice and inattention; and without minimizing any struggle ahead, we know for a certainty that the main job is done, that we've won the argument. Hell, the truth was there right in front of us, in a White House missing its principal occupant: hadn't we just collectively forced that little punk-ass WASP bitch to flee the city for the weekend?

Along the way, somebody asked me to say why I was marching. I made some weak answer that boiled down to something like "solidarity." My answer now, I think, would boil down to "exhiliration," or maybe "carnival"—to one of those unruly quantities that make the consultants and consultant wannabes and the policy hacks feel all dirty, or (worse!) irrelevant. Protests are "obsolete," Markos? They can't change anything? Well, one thing I know inescapably is that protests change the people who do them. It couldn't have mattered less that the Big Media sights weren't trained on us, or what impression anybody not on those streets might have taken from whatever coverage was given. A hundred thousand, or two hundred, or three, of your countrymen last weekend spent a few hours of their lives, some of them for the very first time, embodying democracy. Not spectating it, not commentating it, not buying access to it—but being it, in the most direct way possible. Is it a small thing to know, in your bones, in the soles of your feet, that your citizenship belongs to you? Is it a small thing that a hundred thousand or more Americans came back home from their capital this week, came back to their communities with that knowledge? Ready, many of them, to spread it? Not a small thing at all, in my book.

Democracy is foolish, loud, ill-disciplined, inexclusive, undignified. It doesn't make a good conference panelist. It is never on message. People walk down a street, and somebody starts a chant, and in embarrassed good will you take it up for a while. And weary of it, get self-conscious again, and it peters out. And then after a while somebody somewhere else starts up another one. That's our silly, raggedy-ass democracy, and it's all we've got. God bless it.

posted by michael  4:00:46 PM  
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With the outrage meter pegged post-Katrina, much to my (almost physical) discomfort—and feeling lately, again, that it makes very little difference whether or not this particular patch of the blog commons gets tilled or not—I've been going through another spasm of Blog Aversion. Not sure where it'll end up: I could come through with half a dozen posts in short order (I've certainly had that many on my mind lately), or I could continue to be seized with that stone-in-the-gut sensation every time I contemplate opening my HTML editor. Though the fact that I've been thinking posts through in my head means that posts will likely get written again, to whatever small avail, more or less regularly before too long.

Meanwhile, if you're into this sort of thing, here's a recent poem, in the orphic-elegy vein. It's in no sense a poem that's about Katrina/New Orleans, or even that attempts to make reference, but uncontrollably there's a lot of flood imagery that's been getting into my writing lately.

Your average correspondent moves
from being born again to being
undone:  that's the power
of the waves.  They have nothing
in mind but they are all
you know.  Like you
they swing between design
and indifference.  Be patient
with them:  if this were your
only skill, to be cast
down, where do you think your appetites
would leave you?  Like two
houses, one dry and one
wet, like the paranoid crowd
that follows you:  like the storm
as it flings hosannas
into the sky, this is all the damage
you'll ever do.  Take a good
look around.  That's your picture
being torn up and
dispersed.  From this point on
you are just your community
of mourners.  There may be days
yet of uncertainty, but on the streets
of this sodden town
this is the only game going.
You are as incomplete
now as the waves
always promised you'd be.

posted by michael  1:42:18 PM  
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Do they give some kind of prize at the Times for flamboyantly bad writing? (Actually, I'm pretty sure they do: it's the op-ed space reserved for Tom Friedman's column. Ba-dum-cha.) Because it looks to me like Selena Roberts is angling for it.

Her Sunday piece (sorry, no permalink) is on the re-emergence of Curt Schilling, who mowed down the Yankees yesterday and somewhat dented their playoff hopes. Try to conceive of the combination of mood-altering drugs you'd have to take to produce prose like this:

By Schilling's thespian standards, this was a low-key sequel to his Shakespearean-timed recovery powers. Even so, the vision of Schilling resurfacing as Boston's starry-ace purchase was another momentous dig to the Yankees' vulnerable, and unfamiliar, existence as the pursuant of their rival.

Unimposing on sight, with his rounded upper body disproportionate to his vermicelli legs, Schilling has come to represent what the Yankees used to be and what they long to be again.

Schilling is the symbol of resilience and of insufferable confidence. He is the embodiment of a front-runner and of a Velcro aura. He is the personage of his city's World Series mentality and the envy of his rival's flummoxed fan base.

She really shouldn't have used the word "Shakespearean" (much less the phrase "Shakespearean-timed"): it seems to have made her come over all adjective-y and archaic. What the hell is a "starry-ace purchase"? The Yankees are "pursuant" to their rival? (Because, you know, it sounds more high-falutin and Shakespearean than "pursuer," a pedestrian word which has no advantage other than being correct. "Unimposing on sight," rather than to sight, is another symptom of the disease.) Schilling's "resurfacing" (actually, the vision of it) is a "dig" to the Yankees' "vulnerable existence"? How exactly does a hole get dug (and a "momentous" one, no less) in an existence?

I'd like to play along with Selena, and try to think about who the personage of my city's mentality might be, but I'm stuck trying to understand how someone manages to embody something as immaterial as an aura. Or, for that matter, what sort of an "aura" it is that's made of Velcro. A damn clingy aura, I guess. And prickly.

Did an editor really pass eyes over this? Must have been one with a Shakespearean taste for letting writers hoist themselves on their own petards.

posted by michael  3:03:55 PM  
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Chinatown. Virtually alone among the right-wing punditocracy, David Brooks seemed to have been genuinely shocked and dismayed by the appalling aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, by what it laid bare of the cruel institutional indifference to the suffering of the poor and black in America. It seemed, in spite of what one expected, in spite of years of shilling for the forces that mandated that cruelty and deepened that indifference, that Brooks had retained some sort of moral core after all—how else could he have been capable of shock? His reaction was unexpected enough, in fact, that he got some praise for it from the left—maybe even deserved praise, so long as you were willing to grade on a curve.

Well, that didn't last long, did it?

We're told you can't serve God and Mammon, and the strain of trying may have been too much for poor Brooksie. It's a contest in which Mammon decidedly has the upper hand: nothing matters so much to a right-wing pundit as the paycheck, except maybe the airtime, and both depend on reliable performance. So in today's column, Brooks takes up the Magic Airbrush of Paradox, and with it photoshops a nice, soft, comforting libertarian-ideological glow over the whole sickening mess. Turns out that the disaster-within-a-disaster, the massive failure of anticipation and response that doomed New Orleans to its toxic flood, was really a flaw—wait for it—in the nature of planning itself.

Among the many achievements of the human race - Chartres Cathedral, the Mona Lisa - surely the New Orleans emergency preparedness plan must rank among the greatest, and the fact that this plan turned out to be irrelevant to reality should not detract from its stature as a masterpiece of bureaucratic thinking. ...

One can imagine the PowerPoint presentations! The millions of cascading bullet points! The infinity of hours spent planning a hurricane response that would make a Prussian officer gasp with reverence! ...

The New Orleans emergency preparedness plan offers a precise communications strategy, so all city residents will know exactly where to go in times of crisis. It recommends that two traffic control officers be placed at each key intersection. It recommends busing the thousands of residents unable to evacuate themselves to staging areas prestocked with food.

In short, the plan was so beautiful, it's too bad reality destroyed it. The plan's authors were not stupid or venal. They are doubtless good public servants who worked in agencies set up to prepare for this storm. And yet their elaborate plan crumbled under the weight of the actual disaster.

A sense of tragic irony may be a fine thing in a novelist or playwright; it's a little beside the point, however, in a public affairs columnist. (Never mind that Brooks' GOP heroes have been selling themselves for four years now on the pitch that they've got plans to deal with all the big bad scaries out there, and the other guys don't.) What better use of their time might have been made by the people charged with planning for a disaster than, er, planning for a disaster, Brooks can't be bothered to say: then again, he only has so much space in his column, and there's a lot of easy and irrelevant mockery of PowerPoint slides and bureaucratese to be larded in.

One bureaucratic acronym conspicuous by its absence in Brooks' column is FEMA, which one would have thought had a thing or two to do with the subject. Despite his willingness to blame government "at every level," somehow the only level Brooks can get any handle on is state and local. That's a shame, because it's really not possible to speak—honestly, at least—about disaster planning in Louisiana and New Orleans without accounting for the systematic effect of the 800-pound federal gorilla. Consider the testimony about the now-famous "Hurricane Pam" exercise from one of those planners Brooks is so happy to mock (via):

There was a certain amount of contention, a few turf wars, some loud talk. None if it consequential, in the end, because of the single greatest emollient: FEMA. The Federal Emergency Management Agency promised the moon and the stars. They promised to have 1,000,000 bottles of water per day coming into affected areas within 48 hours. They promised massive prestaging with water, ice, medical supplies and generators. Anything that was needed, they would have either in place as the storm hit or ready to move in immediately after. All it would take is a phone call from local officials to the state, who would then call FEMA, and it would be done. ...

The organizers of the exercise -- particularly the former commender of LOHSEP [Louisiana Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness], Col. Michael Brown (not that one) -- insisted that the plans contain no "fairy dust": no magical leaps of supply chains or providers: if you said you would need 500 semis for your part of the plan, you had to specify where the 500 semis were coming from. ... The problem is FEMA, and by extension the Department of Homeland Security, which gobbled FEMA up in 2003. FEMA promised more than they could deliver. They cut off deeper, perhaps more meaningful discussion and planning by handing out empty promises. The plans that were made -- which were not given any sort of stamp of authority -- were never distributed or otherwise made available to those who most needed stable guidance; they vanished into the maw of FEMA and LOSHEP.

So maybe, David, the fault isn't in planning as such, or at all levels, so much as in a certain approach to planning (or to avoiding it) at an identifiable level.

Brooks winds it up with that oldest of old right-libertarian chestnuts, the biggummintistheproblem wheeze:

The paradox at the heart of the Katrina disaster ... is that we really need government in times like this, but government is extremely limited in what it can effectively do. ... For the brutal fact is, government tends toward bureaucracy, which means elaborate paper flow but ineffective action. Government depends on planning, but planners can never really anticipate the inevitable complexity of events. And American government is inevitably divided and power is inevitably devolved. ...

So of course we need limited but energetic government. But liberals who think this disaster is going to set off a progressive revival need to explain how a comprehensive governmental failure is going to restore America's faith in big government.

[The final dig at "progressive revival" is Brooksie's way of signaling that he's recovered his equilibrium, and is ready to harness back up and ride into keyboard battle. His patrons must have been giving him the stink-eye after those earlier Katrina columns, after all.]

Has this gag ever been less persuasive? Government didn't fail the citizens of New Orleans and the Gulf coast; bureaucracy didn't fail them. "Government" and "bureaucracy" are abstractions, not real things. Unless we want to push Brooks' logic—and it's not exactly a stretch—to the hopeless conclusion that government as such (American-style government, at least) is a practical impossibility, a structure designed and doomed to fail, we have to recognize that the phrase "failure of government," as he wants to use it, is essentially contentless. There is no such thing as a general "failure of government." Particular governments, particular agencies of government, fail under particular circumstances. To be more precise, the people who run governments and government agencies fail, and they do so for a complex of structural reasons that can and should be assessed and remedied.

No David, "government" (big or small) didn't fail here. But Republican government sure as hell did.

Brooks, though, is content just to throw up his hands. It's Chinatown, Jake. Then again, this may be the only pose left when the administration for which you've so relentlessly and shamelessly propagandized has just revealed its near complete bankruptcy. Too bad for Brooks that his column appears on the same day as Evan Thomas' Newsweek article, "How Bush Blew It": an article that (finally!) discusses forthrightly the way in which Presidential prickliness, defensiveness, inattention and magical thinking have become crippling problems of government. More than usually, the rot in this administration comes from the head—and the stink is now in everybody's nostrils, like it or not. David Brooks may be able, still, to wish it away (along with his own complicity) for the duration of a newspaper column: but reality, as if we needed reminding, is not so kind.

Update: At Corrente, Lambert's also on Brooks and picks up the "failure of Republican government" theme. Beat me to it, in fact.

posted by michael  1:55:03 PM  
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The man in the attic. I woke today at my usual hour, got my usual bagel out of the freezer to thaw, began my usual morning blog-catchup. And there I was, not even 9am yet, and already I found that I'd burned through all my emotional reserves for the day.

It was this, excerpted by Billmon from a Guardian UK report, that did for me:

Volunteer rescuer Gregg Silverman, part of a 14-boat contingent from Columbus, Ohio, said he expected to find many more survivors in his excursion through the city's flooded streets. Instead, he found mostly bodies.

"They had me climb up on a roof, and I did bring an ax up to where a guy had tried to stick a pipe up through a vent,'' Silverman said. "Unfortunately, he had probably just recently perished. His dog was still there, barking. The dog wouldn't come. We had to leave the dog just up there in the attic.''

As for other bodies his group encountered: "Obviously we are not recovering them. We are just tying them up to banisters, leaving them on the roof.''

Call me a sentimentalist, but the pity of that twice left behind and surely dying dog—that noise of terrified, uncomprehending barking—put me right over the edge of tears.

Billmon thinks of the man in the attic as pushing that pipe out the ventilator grate as the waters rose, making desperate shift for breath, but I don't think that's right. His dog was still alive in the attic, after all; the rescuer believes the man "had probably just recently perished." No, I'd guess he was one of the survivors—one of the ones who thought they were lucky, and who lingered for days, hungry, dehydrated, infirm or perhaps injured, while the hope of rescue dwindled, and curdled, and turned at last into a cruel taunt. One of all those for whom help was delayed just a day or an hour too long.

Maybe the pipe was a gesture he'd made before the hope had died; maybe he was trying to fashion whatever poor signal he could to the people who he knew had to be out there, on their way, any time now. Maybe there'd been a cloth at the end of it, before it fell off. Maybe he'd waved it at intervals till his strength gave out. Or maybe, on the contrary, it was something he did late in the game. Maybe he just wanted a taste of air not fouled with his own hopeless captivity. Maybe he wanted to remind himself at the last that there was a world out there, a sky, an elsewhere.

We'll never know. We can imagine, though.

Imagine hearing the chatter of helicopters swelling and receding, and none of them ever swelling loud and staying. (And then, after a period, no chatter at all.) Imagine the helpless gusts of hope, and fear, and grief that swept through the man in the attic as the days lengthened without aid, without word. Imagine him having to suffer in mind, not just for himself but for his trapped and dumbly suffering pet. Imagine him in those endless moments, who knows how many there were, when he blamed and raged against himself for what was happening to them both.

Imagine the endless, suffocating, dripping heat, the choking stench. Imagine the torturing delirium that makes you believe there's clean, clear water just out of your reach. Imagine trying to self-ration whatever scraps of food you'd saved, if you'd saved any, in your panicked scramble to stay ahead of the flood. Imagine wringing a bit of gratitude out of your hunger when the food's gone, that at least you won't have anything left in you to soil yourself with.

Imagine crossing over into the certainty that this airless, windowless place is your last place in the world. Imagine the moment of no hope, only waiting. Imagine sleeping, and then waking, and cursing the waking with what little force you have left.

Imagine the desperate loneliness of that death.

We all of us have to die. But no one should have to die so utterly abandoned. Bad enough that thousands are needlessly dead: but dead, and in such needless torment? As distressing as it was, in the days after 9/11, to picture to oneself the deaths of those people in the towers, with no choice but to fall or burn: there was at least this much to mitigate it, that no power on earth could have saved them. It was possible to think that they realized that, might even have won (however unlikely) some kind of peace from it, from the inevitability of it. Whatever else, they at least didn't have to perish in the full knowledge that they'd been left to rot.

I'd like not to have to imagine any of this, any more than you want to. But it's not simply that I can't help myself. I'm not religious: I don't like throwing around words like "holy" and "sacred." But if anything deserves the name, then I think that imagining the death of the man in the attic is a sacred duty.

Because conscienceless men are in power over us. Because conscience, in their conception of power, has no place, no standing: and should be extirpated from public discourse, as an unnecessary drag on the doing of business. Because if we, we conscienced people, fail to imagine what we can of this death, as vividly as we can, we connive in spite of ourselves at their purposes, we assist the general smothering of scruple. We let our country slide that much further into the Hobbesian order. Because as we wish ourselves not to be abandoned in our last hours, as the man in the attic was abandoned, his world contracted to a length and diameter of pipe, we must not abandon him in thought. We must feel, we must remember, and we must accuse.

It's all we can do now for our brothers and sisters who perished in their distress. Those who let them perish must be made accountable for it. For god's sake, don't let go. Hold them to account. Hold them to account.

posted by michael  2:46:57 PM  
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Chernobyl. That's a word you won't find in this Salon article on the environmental disaster in Katrina's wake, but it seems unavoidable.

In an effort to drain New Orleans and rid it of the bacteria-laden water, the Army Corps of Engineers has begun pumping floodwater into Lake Pontchartrain, the huge but shallow lake on the city's northern border. Yet this water, as it recedes past New Orleans' highly polluted areas, is most likely laced with a frightening amount of dangerous chemicals.

From 1941 to 1986 the Thompson-Hayward Chemical Plant, near Xavier University in the center of town, packaged and mixed pesticides such as DDT, the herbicide 2,4,5-T (the main constituent of Agent Orange, which contains dioxin), and the fungicide pentachlorophenal, which also contains dioxin. While the city and federal governments launched a massive cleanup effort throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the remediation was not entirely successful: 2,600 tons of herbicide-contaminated soil reportedly couldn't be removed because it was too toxic to legally dispose of in any state, according to a 1995 article by Mark Schleifstein in the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

At the Agriculture Street Landfill, soil and debris are laden with DDT, lead, asbestos, and industrial waste — ironically, everything that was scraped from the city floor after Hurricane Betsy struck in 1965. In 1962, reports Solid Waste and Recycling magazine, "300,000 cubic yards of excess fill were removed from ASL because of ongoing subsurface fires. (The site was nicknamed 'Dante's Inferno' because of the fires.)" While the EPA eventually declared the dump a Superfund site (after the city had filled the area and built homes and a school above the infill of trash), the only cleanup the landfill underwent was the removal 5 inches of soil. A plastic barrier was put down and clean soil thrown on top.

"The New Orleans area that was flooded was an industrial area where you have all the lubricants and batteries and heavy-metal plating — it's just hideously dangerous," says geographer Wells. "We can't wait around to test the floodwater before we pump it back into the lake — people are already dying of disease from it — but it's a terrible thing to do. We're going to avoid a great human disaster by doing this, but we could be creating a damn big environmental one."

"Forget for a moment the scenario of a toxic lake in the middle of a major American city," says Rebecca Claren; "should a future hurricane breach the levees again, New Orleans could literally be submerged in poison."

For a century, chemical companies have been dumping poisons onto the ground and into the water in southeastern Louisiana—long before, but also well after, they should have known better, and after laws and regulations were supposedly in place to stop them. But nobody down there stops the chemical companies from doing whatever the hell they want to do. Or makes them pay.

The Superfund bank account, money that would normally be used to pay for cleaning up hazardous waste sites that are "an act of God," is essentially broke. The tax on chemical and oil industries that pays for Superfund cleanups expired in December 1995. According to the most recent statistics, a 1998 report by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, an environmental and health advocacy agency, $4 million for cleaning up hazardous waste sites goes uncollected every day the tax is not restored.

In fact, every year for the past decade congressional representatives have attempted to reauthorize the polluter payments, and every year the bill has been voted down. The Bush administration has consistently opposed the fee. Without the inflow of industry's money, taxpayers have instead funded the Superfund budget. Today, most of the $1.2 billion currently appropriated from the general revenue fund has already been committed to other sites around the country.

"The Superfund is supposed to be our safety net when Mother Nature is at fault," says Lois Gibbs, director of the Center for Health, Environment and Justice, a nonprofit group based in Falls Church, Va. "These fees could make a large dent in the costs of cleanup." Gibbs poses the question that geographer Wells also asked, one that the nation will likely spend the next several years trying to answer. "The entire community is now a hazardous waste dump. How do you clean up an entire city, an entire region?"

The business elites want a new New Orleans, one even less hospitable to the poor (and black) than formerly? It's Chernobyl. Who's going to locate there if they've got a choice about it, if they know what they'll be getting themselves and their children into?

posted by michael  12:29:44 PM  
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Straits. Arthur makes it sound as though there's little or nothing to be done to help him in this pass—but read it anyhow. He's one of the good guys.
posted by michael  11:02:06 AM  
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Protest politics. Relatively little time just now to post—or, frankly, emotional energy, after the last week—so I'm poaching a bit here, since this is something of a hot-under-the-collar topic for me. Patrick at yelladog asked an eminently sensible set of questions (in a tone of civility I'd never have been able to manage) over at AMERICAblog the other day wondering why, exactly, John Aravosis felt the need to dis-recommend the big Sept. 24th protest march based on the likelihood that ANSWER and what Aravosis calls "the kitchen-sink coalition" would be involved in it. "I for one will have nothing to do with a protest that is devoted to that kind of wingnut crap," said John, "wignut crap" in his lingo meaning concern for such things as "ending U.S. colonialism ... in Haiti, Palestine, Cuba and beyond."

Foolish, wingnutty me, thinking that a critique of U.S. imperialism might be rather crucial to protest of an imperialist war of U.S. aggression. [Aravosis, not so incidentally, thinks it's "nuts" for Haiti to be on the list of protest-worthy items. To quote him at slightly more length, from the same comment thread referenced above: "Haiti? We fucking saved Haiti." A fine example of Aravosis' deeply informed and violently progressive response to questions of imperialism. So full is the man's self-confidence (or self-infatuation—judge yourself from his excerpted remarks) that he appears not to recognize when he's talking out his ass. Anyone wishing chapter and verse on just how completely and disastrously "we" have managed to "save" Haiti could do worse than starting with eRobin's copious and exhaustively well-linked series of posts on the subject. I'd suggest Aravosis, in particular, might want to just shut the fuck up about Haiti till he's tried to learn himself one or two things.]

Patrick, for his trouble, got some flamage on the thread and not much else. So he posted at yelladog, which is where I joined the discussion. I mentioned the prevalence of the "dirty hippie" stereotype among the knee-jerk anti-protest liberals, and Patrick asked, "Why are these people letting the Right's perceptions of them determine whether or not they go and protest?" And since my reply said just what I wanted it to say, I record it here for the ages:

The simple answer, of course, is that they really don't want to protest, and disdain for protesters is as good an excuse as any not to get off your ass.

For Ezra Klein or Matt Y. et al., I think it's at least in part a careerist thing. Policy operatives just aren't going to be credible, in the view of the right people, if they're exhorting the masses to get out there and stand shoulder-to-shoulder and do unseemly things like yelling. And politics is no place for the masses anyway. There's a significant degree of classism in it.

Larger point, though: it's not that the anti-protest libs are avoiding doing something they'd otherwise do because they somehow fear the opprobrium of the Right. It's because the perceptions of the Right, wrt protest, are their perceptions too. They've internalized a stereotyped anti-liberal discourse so powerfully disseminated throughout our culture, in the wake of the '60s, that it's managed to naturalize those stereotypes even in people of otherwise good political will. I remember something like this from my own experience doing union work as a grad student, among grad students: it was an enormous hurdle (one I had first to leap over for myself) to get people on the cusp of academic careers to shed themselves of their entirely unreflective disdain for the idea of working-class associations—which you had to do before they'd even consider the possibility of joining up. The desire not to be one of those janitors or secretaries was of the same order as the desire not to be one of those gross hippie weirdos, and like any ingrained bigotry it's a very powerful one.

And I want to underscore that last point, because there's a degree of painful personal introspection in it. I was involved early on, when TAs at Yale formed a loose association called (it was the late '80s) TA Solidarity: and then I sat completely on the sidelines for a year or more, when the organization began to push in the direction of unionization (and alliance with Yale's recognized—though barely tolerated—unions of maintenance and clerical/technical employees). Big Marxist that I was, I was in the grip of a disdain I scarcely understood for colleagues I thought of as sentimental lefties, playing at what I thought of (again, without interrogating it) as an impractical, outmoded politics. [When of course it was really TA Solidarity that had been sentimental and impractical, based as it was on a politics of nothing more than moral suasion, on maintaining the self-defeating figment of collegiality between student pre-professionals and the university administration.] Fortunately I had friends who hammered me into waking up—who shamed me, in particular, into bussing along down to Virginia with them for a really moving and eye-opening march in support of striking service workers at Colonial Williamsburg—but it wasn't easy. I wasn't easy—and I had every theoretical reason in the world to have been. So I think I know what I'm talking about here.

posted by michael  12:00:09 PM  
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One bit of good news for us Big Star fans: from the Memphis Commercial Appeal, Alex Chilton is alive and well. "Ron Easley, a friend and fellow musician who has recorded a number of albums with him, said Chilton called early Monday morning from a hotel in a city Easley would not name. He said Chilton was evacuated by helicopter from his home Sunday and later flown out of the area." (Though it can't have been Sunday, can it? Tuesday, more like.) So maybe I really will get to see Big Star tour behind the new album.


posted by michael  10:05:58 AM  
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Plastic Caribbean. A tropical depression of a different sort has settled over those of us—well, me anyway—who live within shouting distance of Wrigley Field: an area known locally as Wrigleyville, now temporarily an outpost of the Margaritaville Nation. Of whose existence until the last couple of days I had absolutely no inkling. Were you aware that Jimmy Buffet had fans? Not just fans, but fans enough to fill Wrigley Field to capacity on two consecutive days? How many generations ago was it that this guy last had a hit record, anyway? (I won't ask how long ago he had a deserved hit record, because that was approximately never.)

So we now have more than the usual in-season number of suburban dipshits running around drunk and pissing in the alleys, only this time it's suburban dipshits in Hawaiian shirts, plastic leis and ludicrous big straw hats. (Not all of them aging boomers, either; some are young enough that they really ought to know better.) I've never noticed that people much need the excuse of lazy, anodyne party music to get shit-faced in a crowd: perhaps it's just that they need an excuse to get shit-faced in a crowd on umbrella drinks. I take this as yet another indicator, if one were needed, of my profound cultural alienation from mainstream Amurrica. Whatever. When the plastic-Caribbean tunes start echoing down my block, I'm slapping on the headphones and turning up the Flaming Lips loud. (The sublime "Evil Will Prevail," from Clouds Taste Metallic, in some bizarre way has become my song of consolation this last week.) Now that's a nation worth belonging to.

On the other hand, there are those who know better than I do how not just to get along but to take advantage in such circumstances. On the corner of Waveland and Southport, in front of the Jewel, a group of altogether too cute little girls are handing out cups of some kind of vile instant pink lemonade in exchange for donations to Katrina relief. (I chatted briefly with the supervising mom: She, "It's good to teach them responsibility for others." Me, "I just wish somebody had ever taught that to the people running our government." She, "Yeah, I wanted to wear my buttons, but I decided not to. No point alienating somebody who might give." Reminding me once again how nice it is, after years in the south, to live in a place where hating Republicans is pretty much the default position—you just have to watch out for those suburbanites.) The girls knew who they were pitching to, and that didn't simply mean the wearing of leis. As I walked off after handing over my spare singles, one of them was shouting, "Lemonade for Katrina! Full of Vitamin C! Good for HANGOVERS!!"

posted by michael  1:44:45 PM  
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Questions. Frank Rich has this to say in today's NYT:

Eventually we’re going to have to examine the administration’s behavior before, during and after this storm as closely as its history before, during and after 9/11. We’re going to have to ask if troops and matériel of all kinds could have arrived faster without the drain of national resources into a quagmire. We’re going to have to ask why it took almost two days of people being without food, shelter and water for Mr. Bush to get back to Washington.

On the contrary, and in spite of the fulminations of liberal elitists, I say we have to come together as a nation and support our President. Because if we start questioning the administration's behavior during the Katrina disaster, then the terrorists hurricanes will have already won.

Update: Great minds, and all. Looks like Tom Tomorrow was thinking along the same lines.

And Giblets is on board! Let the Global War on Weather commence!

posted by michael  9:07:19 AM  
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Must read. Blah3 pulls together the various strands of Bush's Potemkin photo-op tour on Friday. It's worse than you imagine, and seems inescapable that the mechanics of getting Bush his compassion pics actually made things worse—to the point where people who were just hanging on (say in Charlie Melancon's district) must have died for it. I don't know how my disgust with this man and this government could get any higher, but I've been wrong about that before.


posted by michael  8:57:59 AM  
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You know what I'd really like to see? (Other than actual, effective aid coming to the hurricane victims, that is.) I'd really like to see George W. Bush, and Michael Chertoff, and that jackass failed horse lawyer head of FEMA Mike Brown—oh, and Condi Rice too, in her nice new $3000 Ferragamo pumps—I'd like to see them all air-dropped into the Ninth Ward somewhere with nothing but the clothes on their backs and told to make their own goddamn way to safety. That's what I'd like to see. That, to me, would look like justice.

Not that I imagine that, even then, the experience would create any capacity in any of them for empathy. Actually, by the end of the second day Condi'd probably have eaten the rest of 'em anyway.

posted by michael  11:34:59 AM  
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Paralysis. Jordan Flaherty, editor of Left Turn magazine, is a New Orleans resident and an evacuee who's just left the city. From his account:

In the refugee camp I just left, on the I-10 freeway near Causeway, thousands of people (at least 90% black and poor) stood and squatted in mud and trash behind metal barricades, under an unforgiving sun, with heavily armed soldiers standing guard over them. When a bus would come through, it would stop at a random spot, state police would open a gap in one of the barricades, and people would rush for the bus, with no information given about where the bus was going. Once inside (we were told) evacuees would be told where the bus was taking them - Baton Rouge, Houston, Arkansas, Dallas, or other locations. I was told that if you boarded a bus bound for Arkansas (for example), even people with family and a place to stay in Baton Rouge would not be allowed to get out of the bus as it passed through Baton Rouge. You had no choice but to go to the shelter in Arkansas. If you had people willing to come to New Orleans to pick you up, they could not come within 17 miles of the camp.

I traveled throughout the camp and spoke to Red Cross workers, Salvation Army workers, National Guard, and state police, and although they were friendly, no one could give me any details on when buses would arrive, how many, where they would go to, or any other information. I spoke to the several teams of journalists nearby, and asked if any of them had been able to get any information from any federal or state officials on any of these questions, and all of them, from Australian tv to local Fox affiliates complained of an unorganized, non-communicative, mess. One cameraman told me “as someone who’s been here in this camp for two days, the only information I can give you is this: get out by nightfall. You don’t want to be here at night.”

There was also no visible attempt by any of those running the camp to set up any sort of transparent and consistent system, for instance a line to get on buses, a way to register contact information or find family members, special needs services for children and infirm, phone services, treatment for possible disease exposure, nor even a single trash can.

We're seeing reports accumulate now that indicate that the suffering in New Orleans has mounted, not just because of haplessness and indifference, but because the city has been cordoned off—literally—by a regime of utterly heartless inflexibility. (Watch Shepard Smith and Geraldo Rivera all but breaking from the effort to thrust the reality of this into Sean Hannity's smug, overfed face.) The Red Cross has confirmed that it was ordered not to enter New Orleans with relief. (The "logic," if it can be called that, is that the presence of aid "would keep people from evacuating and encourage others to come into the city." State agencies have a different explanation, claiming it's unsafe for relief organizations to be in a disaster zone, but likewise admit the policy is in place.) Private individuals attempting to bring aid have been stopped and turned back. There is reason to question whether even authorized relief was forced to cool its heels till it could arrive in New Orleans to maximum political effect, as a backdrop to Bush's "compassion" tour yesterday.

And the people on I-10 who couldn't tell Jordan Flaherty anything, or set up a "transparent and consistent system" for dealing with the refugees in their care? They're not inflexible, or indifferent, because they're cruel. Hell, they're on that miserable freeway to help. (I'll set aside, for now, the racial politics that has caused civil authority consistently to treat refugees as a species of criminal suspect.) But they're under stress, and it's forced them to shut down in crucial ways. It's what happens when you've got enormous and immediate responsibility and no way to fulfill it. The aid workers, the Guard, the state police, have themselves been abandoned—told nothing, given no clear instructions, given no way to relieve the situation. They're being required to improvise, under the direst circumstances, and given nothing to improvise with.

And this is what emerges, over and over, as the chief characteristic of this grotesquely unnecessary tragedy: abandonment and improvisation. No plan, no information, and people freezing in place because of it. What we have here—as the perfect and final expression of the Bush Way—is not government, but anti-government. People are resourceful in times of need: left simply to their own initiative, New Orleanians in their isolated, improvised communities would have figured things out, though the cost would have been awful. (Which is why you have planning in the first place, so that you don't have to bear the cost of figuring it out yourselves in the moment of crisis.) But when you expect leadership—and find yourself, instead, in a vacuum—that's when paralysis sets in. The question now is whether, as a country, we can shake ourselves at last out of the paralysis of these last five years.

posted by michael  10:26:09 AM  
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Print the legend. At Fact-esque, eRobin catches David Sanger of the Times doing what his paper calls "news analysis," and the rest of the world calls "fluffing":

[President Bush] prides himself as a crisis manager. He observed in a debate with Vice President Al Gore in 2000 that natural catastrophes were "a time to test your mettle."

The next few weeks will determine whether he can manage several challenges at once, in the chaos of Iraq and the humanitarian and economic fallout along the Gulf Coast. ...

"If anyone is telling you that Iraq is getting in the way, well that's hogwash," [Bush's ex-FEMA director Joe] Allbaugh said from Baton Rouge, where he was clinging to a bad cellphone connection while trying to help muster private industry to aid in the disaster relief.

David Sanger is, of course, paid at least in part for his skill plying the heroic myth. "Clinging" is especially good—the storm is passed, but the second and greater storm, the storm of helping, is still being braved by Bush's loyal retainers. Loyal, even unto their private post-government lobbying practices.

Would it be churlish to wonder just what kind of "mustering" Joe Allbaugh (whose qualifications for directing the nation's disaster preparedness system included his managing Bush's gubernatorial campaign in 1994, as well as serving as campaign manager in the 2000 presidential election) was doing over that bad cellphone connection? Via Pam, I think I have an idea:

The US Navy asked Halliburton to repair naval facilities damaged by Hurricane Katrina, the Houston Chronicle reported today. The work was assigned to Halliburton's KBR subsidiary under the Navy's $500 million CONCAP contract awarded to KBR in 2001 and renewed in 2004. The repairs will take place in Louisiana and Mississippi. ...

Earlier this year, the Navy awarded $350 million in contracts to KBR and three other companies to repair naval facilities in northwest Florida damaged by Hurricane Ivan, which struck in September 2004. The ongoing repair work involves aircraft support facilities, medium industrial buildings, marine construction, mechanical and electrical improvements, civil construction, and family housing renovation. In March, the former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which is tasked with responding to hurricane disasters, became a lobbyist for KBR. Joe Allbaugh was director of FEMA during the first two years of the Bush administration.

Nah, it's impolite to remind people of stuff like that. Conflicts with the myth.

posted by michael  11:01:56 PM  
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Not just New Orleans. As awful as things have been for people stranded in New Orleans, it's sobering to think that they may be the lucky ones: at least attention is being paid, if not yet sufficiently by the federal government, and some movement occurring, if not yet enough. Plaquemines and Jefferson parish, to the south and southeast of New Orleans, took the first hit from the storm, and St. Bernard parish, east of NOLA and bearing the brunt of the storm surge, has been reported to be largely under water. Those places aren't exactly crawling with media.

Nor with responders. The WWLTV blog reports that St. Bernard parish officials have yet to be contacted by anyone from FEMA, five days now after Katrina passed. And the blog follows that with an AP report, just to let you know that today's ceremonial Bush tour was every bit as futile, from the standpoint of actual results, as you might have expected it to be:

Thousands of people stranded in two swamped parishes south of New Orleans are just as desperate for food, water and supplies as those trapped in the city, but they can't get the attention of federal disaster relief officials, Rep. Charlie Melancon, D-La., said Friday.

And to make matters worse, Melancon said in a telephone interview, he was unable to deliver that message to President Bush during his visit to New Orleans on Friday because the president's security detail couldn't clear him in to meet with Bush on Air Force One.

After waiting 90 minutes while a U.S. marshal using a satellite phone repeatedly tried, and failed, to contact Bush's plane -- located just 300 yards away at New Orleans' Armstrong airport -- a disgusted Melancon left.

"After an hour and a half of that, and two hours to get down there, I am now back on my way, without seeing the president, not accomplishing anything in my mind today. I've wasted time while people are dying in South Louisiana," he said.

Be nice if somebody could spare a thought for the rural poor, too. Apparently they're even more expendable than New Orleanians.

posted by michael  7:51:53 PM  
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Just watched Bush's remarks live at the NOLA airport. Verbal glad-handing—thanks all around to the mayor, the governor, the senators. (Paging Anderson Cooper ...) "I understand" this and "I understand" that ... with an edge of defensiveness ("I get it, alright? Get off my back already!"), and because it's all and only about him. Not a word, not a single goddamn word, to suggest that there may have been any lag in response, to suggest that American citizens might have any legitimate concern over how the disaster has been handled and what that reveals about the state of emergency preparedness in the country in general. Or to suggest that those who are suffering and dying needlessly are owed any sort of apology.

I did a spit-take when he said that he "understands" that the crisis requires "an immediate response." What the fuck does he think is "immediate" about Friday?

And I nearly threw my laptop through the television while he fumbled his way through a narrative about efforts to fill in the breach of the 17th St. levee, and said—paraphrasing—"The people of New Orleans have got to understand that a lot of people are working hard" to deal with the problem. With the clear implication (present, really, throughout the remarks, but nowhere clearer than this) that nobody in the city had any right to be, you know, impatient or anything. A little gratitude, please.

Oh, and he got in a quick smirk about how he used to go over to New Orleans when he was in Texas to have a little fun—"a little too much fun, sometimes." He's confident NOLA will be a fun place once again, hell an even funner place, by the time all that hard work of restoration and repair is done.

I don't think I'll ever in my life forget the shame I feel as an American that this motherfucker is President.

posted by michael  5:21:59 PM  
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Après moi, le déluge. Much of this you'll have already seen elsewhere. It doesn't matter at this point—not only do I need to put this stuff together, purely for my own mental health, but we need to disseminate it as widely and as relentlessly as possible. This blog is just a drop in the ocean—but enough drops create a storm, and a storm needs to break over Bush's head, over his entire maladministration. It's not even a question of anger, though of course if it doesn't make you angry I have to wonder about your moral wiring: it's a question of the safety of every American. It's been four years since 9/11, and this unbelievable fuckup of disaster relief in New Orleans is what we have to show for it? Where has the goddamn Homeland Security money been going?

Outside the [New Orleans convention] center, people complained that they were evacuated, taken to the convention hall by bus, dropped off and given nothing.

At least seven bodies were scattered outside, and hungry people broke through the steel doors to a food service entrance and began pushing out pallets of water and juice and whatever else they could find.

MSNBC, "Cries for help spread across New Orleans"

Just moments ago at the Ferragamo on 5th Avenue, Condoleeza Rice was seen spending several thousands of dollars on some nice, new shoes (we’ve confirmed this, so her new heels will surely get coverage from the WaPo’s Robin Givhan). A fellow shopper, unable to fathom the absurdity of Rice’s timing, went up to the Secretary and reportedly shouted, “How dare you shop for shoes while thousands are dying and homeless!” Never one to have her fashion choices questioned, Rice had security PHYSICALLY REMOVE the woman.

Gawker item

An old man in a chaise lounge lay dead in a grassy median as hungry babies wailed around him. Around the corner, an elderly woman lay dead in her wheelchair, covered with a blanket, and another body lay beside her wrapped in a sheet.

“I don’t treat my dog like that,” Daniel Edwards said as he pointed at the woman in the wheelchair. “I buried my dog.”

On Wednesday reporters listening to horrific stories of death and survival at the Biloxi Junior High School shelter looked north across Irish Hill Road and saw Air Force personnel playing basketball and performing calisthenics.

Playing basketball and performing calisthenics!

When asked why these young men were not being used to help in the recovery effort, our reporters were told that it would be pointless to send military personnel down to the beach to pick up debris.

Biloxi Sun-Herald editorial (via E&P)

The street outside the center, above the floodwaters, smelled of urine and feces, and was choked with dirty diapers, old bottles and garbage.

“We are out here like pure animals. We don’t have help,” said the Rev. Isaac Clark, 68.

People there, some holding crying babies or elderly barely able to stand up, shouted for help as TV news crews passed by.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff—who devoted time to delivering a planned photo op promoting September as "National Preparedness Month"—said in an interview on NBC's Today, "It's not a question of not having enough assistance. The critical thing was to get people out of there before the disaster. Some people chose not to obey that order. That was a mistake on their part."

People are literally dying. Right in front of us as we were watching this a man went into a seizure on the ground. It looked like he was dying. People tried to prop his head up. No one has medical training. No ambulance can come. It is just heartbreaking that people are just sitting there without food or water waiting for the buses to come take them away. People keep asking us - when are the buses coming. And I just have to say, I don't know.

Chris Lawrence, CNN (via Atrios)

Well, I fully understand people wanting things to have happened yesterday. I mean, I understand the anxiety of people on the ground. I can imagine—I just can't imagine what it is like to be waving a sign saying 'come and get me now'. So there is frustration. But I want people to know there is a lot of help coming.

I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees.

George W. Bush, interviewed on Good Morning, America

posted by michael  4:30:39 PM  
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One of the many reaons I can't be a right-winger is that my immediate response to suffering of the sort going on in New Orleans is to identify emotionally with the people undergoing it—rather than, say, with the image of gun-toting authority given a rare chance at open season on poor black folks. Ron Brynaert links to one of the loopier of the latter type, but there's no need to go very far afield, not when you've got a blogosphere that hosts the honored likes of Michelle "You Loot, I Shoot" Malkin and Glenn Reynolds. I imagine the netherworld of Freepers and Little Green Nutballs are full of the most edifying sentiments, but I can't bring myself to go there.

I've been spending the last couple of days helplessly imagining myself dehydrating on rooftops, building despair hour after sweltering hour in the Superdome, or worse. That, and mapping my images of the city I knew—only partially and haphazardly, to my sadness—against the flooded, toxic hell that's replaced it. I don't really have sufficient strength of mind to write the thing out—except to mention the feeling I can't shake, half rational, half superstitious, that this disaster, more than 9/11, is the knell of the Era of Inescapable Bad Things that may be upon us.

I will offer a bit of a link dump, though, of discussions I've found useful in thinking about the larger outlines of the NOLA story:

Salon has reprinted an excerpt from the "Atchafalaya" chapter of John McPhee's The Control of Nature, and Billmon works the same territory, with a wider scope. Hard not to think that the effort of nearly two centuries, to shape the Mississippi Delta (against every possible natural process) into a highway for commerce, has reached a dead end. And greenboy tacks on to Billmon's post a reminder that the exploitation of the Gulf for oil and natural gas has had its own consequences for the stability of the delta.

Nadezhda, at Liberals against Terrorism, rounds up some early discussion of the economic consequences of Katrina. BenP at MyDD excerpts a Stratfor discussion along the same lines, and adds some further thoughts.

You've probably seen as much questioning as I have about the appalling lack of leadership and preparedness at the federal level, but if you haven't, this post from Steve Soto at the Left Coaster is as good a place as any to start. (Plus it has the vanity guitar image which by any right should become as much an icon of the Bush presidency as the My Pet Goat deer-in-headlights shot.) Nadezhda has another good starting point on FEMA and Homeland Security and policy tradeoffs.

Speaking of mapping, it seems that Google Earth hackers are doing valuable work with overlays that leaves the unimaginative, out-of-the-box coverage in most print and broadcast media far behind. It's impossible to understand the story of the flood without being able to see the relationships between places. I can't manage Google Earth with my video card; fortunately Kathryn Cramer is digesting some of the best stuff and posting images.

posted by michael  12:40:52 PM  
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