September 2005

Two trade unionists and paramedics from California who found themselves trapped in New Orleans have “written an account of their experiences”:http://www.emsnetwork.org/artman/publish/article_18337.shtml . (“Alternative link”:http://www.livejournal.com/users/sfsocialists/ ) A sample:

bq. By day 4 our hotels had run out of fuel and water. Sanitation was dangerously abysmal. As the desperation and despair increased, street crime as well as water levels began to rise. The hotels turned us out and locked their doors, telling us that the “officials” told us to report to the convention center to wait for more buses. As we entered the center of the City, we finally encountered the National Guard. The Guards told us we would not be allowed into the Superdome as the City’s primary shelter had descended into a humanitarian and health hellhole. The guards further told us that the City’s only other shelter, the Convention Center, was also descending into chaos and squalor and that the police were not allowing anyone else in. Quite naturally, we asked, “If we can’t go to the only 2 shelters in the City, what was our alternative?” The guards told us that that was our problem, and no they did not have extra water to give to us. This would be the start of our numerous encounters with callous and hostile “law enforcement”.

(via “Bitch PhD”:http://bitchphd.blogspot.com/ – who has possibly the best background graphic in the blogosphere.)

Highly recommended: David Glenn has a new “article”:http://www.cjr.org/issues/2005/5/glenn.asp in the _Columbia Journalism Review_ on George Packer’s vexed relationship with the Iraq war (public health warning: David is a friend of mine, but when I say that it’s a great piece, I’m speaking truth).
[click to continue…]

Jennifer Howard has an interesting “article”:http://chronicle.com/free/v52/i03/03a01101.htm in the _Chronicle_ this week about a classic slave narrative which may not be what it seems.

bq. _The Interesting Narrative_ is a swashbuckling tale that takes its hero from an idyllic boyhood in Africa through the travails of slavery and a series of maritime adventures to spiritual, legal, and economic rebirth as a free man in England in the last decades of the 18th century. An immediate best seller in Britain, The Interesting Narrative had nine editions in its author’s lifetime. … Mr. Carretta[‘s] …. doubts about Equiano’s origins began only when he undertook a labor of love: a new Penguin edition of The Interesting Narrative. Mr. Carretta combed British records for traces of Equiano or Vassa, which was the name given him as a slave. “No one who had written on Equiano or cited him, even those who had reproduced versions of his text, had ever bothered to check. And I, having a mind of concrete, said, ‘He gives me a date, he gives me a place, he gives me a name, it should be verifiable.'” What the Maryland professor unearthed among public British documents — including a 1759 parish baptismal record and a 1773 ship’s muster, both of which list Equiano’s place of birth as South Carolina — came as a shock. “I was surprised. I was resistant, in fact,” Mr. Carretta says. “The naval record was the real problem to me, because at that point he’s free, he’s an adult. The pursers went and simply asked, ‘What’s your name? Where are you from?”

It’s not entirely certain that Equiano _wasn’t_ born in Africa; there’s a lively-sounding debate among historians on the topic. But the article still raises some quite interesting issues about the relationship between authenticity and identity. It seems to me that Equiano is an even more interesting and complicated figure if he invented part of his past than if he didn’t. Timothy Burke has an interesting “new post”:http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=94 up on the Jared Diamond debates, suggesting, if I understand him rightly, that ‘authenticity’ can be quite as much of a trap as more overt forms of condescension. I’ll have more to say on this later.

Update: the Chronicle is hosting a “colloquy”:http://chronicle.com/colloquy/ with Carretta on the topic at 1pm today.

Jim MacDonald (over at Making Light) offers us a compendium of vital life advice gleaned from folk songs. Number one is, if someone says to beware of Long Lankin, then totally beware of him, for real. More:

If you are an unmarried lady and have sex, you will get pregnant. No good will come of it.

If you are physically unable to get pregnant due to being male, the girl you had sex with will get pregnant. No good will come of it. You’ll either kill her, or she’ll kill herself, or her husband/brother/father/uncle/cousin will kill you both. In any case her Doleful Ghost will make sure everyone finds out. You will either get hanged, kill yourself, or be carried off bodily by Satan. Your last words will begin “Come all ye.”

Going to sea to avoid marrying your sweetie is an option, but if she hangs herself after your departure (and it’s even money that she’s going to) her Doleful Ghost will arrive on board your ship and the last three stanzas of your life will purely suck.

If you are a young gentleman who had sex it is possible the girl won’t get pregnant. In those rare instances you will either get Saint Cynthia’s Fire or the Great Pox instead. No good will have come of it….

Have nothing to do with former boyfriends who turn up and say it’s no big deal that you’re now married to someone else and have a child. If their intentions are legit, that’s got to be a problem. If it’s not a problem, their intentions are not legit.

You are justified in cherishing the direst suspicions of a suddenly and unexpectedly returned significant other who mentions a long journey, a far shore, or a narrow bed, or who’s oddly skittish about the imminent arrival of cockcrow.

If you are a young lady and you meet a young man who says his name is “Ramble Away,” don’t be surprised if, by the time you know you’re pregnant, it turns out he’s moved and left no forwarding address.

I’d just like to add a few words based on American folksongs (probably derivative of the English ones): if you do kill your pregnant lover by drowning her in the cold, cold sea, the odds are good that someone will find her body and make a fiddle bow of her long black hair, and pegs of her white finger bones, and then the only song that fiddle will play will cry your guilt out to the world. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

This post is a follow-up to another from a few days ago.

First, the bullet-point version of this post:

• A one-question survey has very limited utility
• Most respondents have tweaked their default homepage
• Several types of default pages are popular with respondents
• We cannot generalize findings from one blog’s readership to another
• When trying to learn about people’s Web uses, it can be very helpful and interesting to ask them for details

Second, thanks to the 784 of you who took the survey! Read on for more.

[click to continue…]

Alan Wolfe and Tyler Cowen are “discussing”:http://www.slate.com/id/2125041/entry/2125046/ Barbara Ehrenreich’s book “Bait and Switch”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0805076069/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/ on Slate this week. The book is a kind of white-collar counterpart to Nickel and Dimed, where Ehrenreich tries to get a job (using an invented identity) in the media/public relations sector. Neither Wolfe nor Cowen is much impressed by the result, so I wonder whether they’ll be able to keep agreeing with each other about this for the next few days.

Today, Tyler opens his comments by saying, “We still need a good book on why white-collar workers are having a harder time finding jobs.” I suggest Vicki Smith’s Crossing the Great Divide: Worker Risk and Opportunity in the New Economy, which does what Ehrenreich is trying to do, only — if Tyler’s characterization of Bait and Switch is accurate — with more nuance and better methods. Smith is a sociologist at U.C. Davis. Her book looks at the efforts of non-union, white-collar workers to build careers for themselves at three companies (including a photocopy service firm and a computer outfit) and a job-search club. It’s a clear and nuanced piece of work, and it might be what Tyler is looking to read. (The next few paragraphs draw on an unpublished discussion of mine about the book.)

[click to continue…]

Via Norm, a piece by Mike Brearley, who understands why cricket is thrilling and why this test series in particular has been so gripping. But he perpetuates a myth about Headingley 1981, that I want to kill. He says:

The comparison is no doubt indecent, but nevertheless valid: people remember where they were on the last day at Headingley, 1981, just as those of us who are old enough remember where we were when we heard of John F Kennedy’s assassination, or the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.

Well, I do remember where I was on the last day of Headingley 1981. But that is incidental. What I really remember is where I was in the final session of the Saturday when first Dilley, and then Botham, truned a hopeless situation into one in which you started to fantasize about what eventually happened. I suspect Brearley remembers the last day better because, though he never says it, it was a day when a captain won a match.

Anyway, if you’ve got a TV, watch it tomorrow [or the day after, if you are reading this on Tuesday — thanks Chris] for Benaud. If you have a ticket, or can steal one, go for Warne. And pity the rest of us.

I received the following rather short and non-specific press release yesterday, a result, I presume, of my previous “post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/09/02/3741/ on Innovative Emergency Management. Clearly, James Lee Witt and company are looking to disassociate themselves from IEM. I have no specific knowledge of what their relationship was; I suspect that there’s an interesting story here, but your guess is as good as mine as to what it involves.

bq. JAMES LEE WITT ASSOCIATES STATEMENT ON IEM DISASTER PLAN

bq. In May of 2004, IEM included James Lee Witt Associates, LLC in their proposal to the Federal Emergency Management Agency for developing a FEMA Catastrophic Plan for Southeast Louisiana and the New Madrid Seismic Zone.

bq. After the proposal was submitted to FEMA, James Lee Witt Associates was not approached again by IEM, nor did JLWA have any involvement whatsoever in the project.

I was lucky enough to attend part of the Kidbrooke School celebrations in July, though mainly in order to have my children see my dad speak while he is in his prime. Now BBC Radio 4 has come up with what promises to be a brilliant history of the Comprehensive School. Highlights from the first, rivetting, show include the story of how London County Council officials were impressed by comprehensive schooling in the States (see, European leftists do learn things from the US), the story of Stewart Mason’s experiment in Tory Leicestershire (he had the sneaky idea of calling all the comprehensive schools Grammar Schools, though his reform had the undesirable side-effect of inventing the middle school) and an exemplary media performance by my esteemed former colleague David Crook. They get the history just about right, but more impressively the show really gives the texture of the debates and the experience of people whose lives were affected by the reforms. Radio at its best. Future episodes promise interviews with Kenneth Baker, Roy Hattersley, John O Farrell and one Tim Brighouse (wonder what he’ll say).

Risa Wechsler at “Cosmic Variance”:http://cosmicvariance.com/2005/09/06/white-house-excludes-epa-from-hurricane-response-task-force/:

bq. The White House has convened a Cabinet-level task force in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina that does not include EPA … One source with the government watchdog group OMB Watch says the administration was “short sighted by not including [EPA] right away,” saying it is likely that toxic material, human waste and other contaminants released as as a result of the hurricane are polluting the area and threatening public health. The source speculates that the White House excluded EPA from the task force because of a fear that agency staff may find politically damaging information, similar to what happened in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, when EPA was critical of the administration’s response to the environmental contamination caused by the terrorist attacks.

Laura Rozen at “War and Piece”:http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/002529.html:

bq. This is incredible. The Bush administration and FEMA have been encouraging Katrina donations to a supposed charity called “Operation Blessing,” headed by Rev. Pat Robertson. Many people pointed this out, in recent days. But what’s truly shocking is that it has been well documented that Robertson’s Operation Blessing diverted charity funds during the Rwandan genocide to bring in diamond mining equipment for a Robertson-headed mining corporation to Zaire.

“Suzanne Nossel”:http://www.democracyarsenal.org/2005/09/rebuilding_new_.html …

bq. Call me paranoid, but if Iraq is any indication, there’s good reason to be concerned to ensure that the devastation of New Orleans does not wind up simply lining the pockets of contractors with deep connections to the Bush Administration. For the reconstruction of Iraq, exigencies like the need for speed and the lack of security on the ground were used to justify granting massive, long-term no bid contracts to firms with tight ties to senior members of the Administration. The principal beneficiary was, of course, Halliburton, where Dick Cheney was CEO prior to becoming Vice President.

meet “Josh Marshall”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2005_09_04.php#006422:

bq. The White House is already laying the groundwork for centralizing all authority over contracting within the executive branch, which for all intents and purposes means the White House. No oversight. No transparency. Halliburton ready at the trough. Like a friend of mine said earlier this evening, it really is going to be the biggest slush fund of all time.

Genuine conservative Greg Djerejian “on the response to Katrina”:http://www.belgraviadispatch.com/archives/004741.html:

bq. [a lack of accountability] has become standard operating procedure with this Administration. Colossal missteps are made (no serious attention paid to what might happen if the levees were breached, no thought of moving to expeditiously evacuate the Superdome, no apprecation that basic law and order might be grossly imperiled if the city became submerged in floodwaters, no contingency planning for an insurgency in Iraq, no appreciation of the full ramifications of tossing aside the Geneva Conventions) and time and again there is a staggering lack of accountability. Well, here at B.D. we’re sick of the empty bear hugs and cutesy nicknames, the circle the wagons damage control mentality, cheap ass-covering and rampant buck-passing, the guitar-strumming and talk of Trent Lott’s porch looking all antebellum swell post reconstruction and Kennebunkport ‘let them move to Texas’ insouciance. Above all else, B.D is sick of the sheer spectacle of grim incompetence that humiliated this nation as New Orleans descended into mayhem reminiscent of wartime Haiti or Liberia–with hundreds if not thousands perhaps needlessly dying because of government ineptitude (though the human toll would be immense even if the planning and governmental reaction had been far superior). There was massive culpability, to be sure, at the local and state level as well. But, make no mistake, the federal response during the first week was grotesquely amateur. Particularly with FEMA, of course, but also at the now so risibly named Department of Homeland Security. The government failed in its most fundamental duty–ensuring the basic physical safety of its citizens. And it failed miserably. Does anyone have confidence that, tomorrow say, if Tulsa or Peoria or Dallas or Chicago where attacked by a chemical or biological weapon–that our government would be able to mount an effective response? I certainly don’t. After all, the government knew a Category 4 or 5 was about to slam into New Orleans. There won’t be any such warning issued by al-Qaeda, of course.

OK, I know that there are people who think that we shouldn’t lower ourselves to engage with the likes of Mark Steyn, but I did post a few days ago about “his previously-expressed”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/09/02/what-they-said-or-social-disasters-iii/ view that “natural” disasters reveal the shortcomings of the societies and political institutions they happen to. So I’ve been looking out for his reponse to Katrina and “in today’s Telegraph”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2005/09/06/do0602.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2005/09/06/ixopinion.html he lets us have it. Sure there’s a lot of Bushite spin about how the local politicians are really the ones to blame. But Steyn finally distills the essence of his view:

bq. Welfare culture is bad not just because, as in Europe, it’s bankrupting the state, but because it enfeebles the citizenry, it erodes self-reliance and resourcefulness.

So there we have it. The lavish benefits showered on the poor of Louisiana (how the Dutch, French and Germans must envy them!) have eroded their resourcefulness.

I’m a little late to notice this, but via “Alan Schussman”:http://www.schussman.com/article/1157/short and “AmericaBlog”:http://americablog.blogspot.com/2005/09/hyatt-hotels-got-food-and-supplies-to.html, I just read the following “press release”:http://biz.yahoo.com/iw/050902/094479.html, which was issued on Friday:

CHICAGO, IL–(MARKET WIRE)–Sep 2, 2005 — Hyatt Regency New Orleans and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) today announced the evacuation of hurricane victims — including both guests and employees — from the hotel. With the exception of a small group of Hyatt executives, safety experts, city officials and FEMA representatives, all guests have vacated the premises. … *A convoy of food and supplies provided by Hyatt hotels in Atlanta and Houston arrived at Hyatt Regency New Orleans on Wednesday of this week*.

Hyatt had a convoy arrive by _Wednesday_? As “Alan notes”:http://www.schussman.com/article/1157/short, Google Maps helpfully tells us that the New Orleans Hyatt Regency is “less than two tenths of a mile”:http://maps.google.com/maps?spn=0.009273,0.014799&saddr=500+Poydras+St,+New+Orleans,+LA+70130&daddr=900+Convention+Center+Blvd,+New+Orleans,+70130&hl=en away from the goddamn Convention Center. I guess FEMA couldn’t figure out the last leg of the trip or something?

*Update*: Look, just to be clear, this post isn’t really about whether the disaster should make me or anyone else want to become a libertarian. Examples like this show — in case you needed more evidence — that there is absolutely _no good reason_ the federal government couldn’t have mounted a serious relief effort for the people of New Orleans much, much faster than it did, and especially for the thousands at the convention center and the Superdome. Commenters who claim I’m somehow ignoring the way the problem scales up are mistaken. You can fit an awful lot of food and water into a few container trucks. Don’t tell me that isn’t within the operational capacities of the U.S. army. The people down there could have at least had a minimum of care. Instead, they were abandoned. I don’t accept that evacuating the people at the center and the Superdome was some kind of impossibility in the first day or two, either: sports stadium- and convention-center-sized groups of people are moved via train or bus all the time, filling and emptying venues in the space of a couple of hours. It’s a question of good organization, that’s all.

From “Editor and Publisher magazine”:http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001054719:

bq. In a segment at the top of the show on the surge of evacuees to the Texas city, Barbara Bush said: “Almost everyone I’ve talked to says we’re going to move to Houston.” Then she added: “What I’m hearing is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. “And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this–this (she chuckles slightly) is working very well for them.”

Jaysus. The very rich are different from you and me.

(via “Atrios”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2005_09_04_atrios_archive.html#112596381619694000).

Update: It’s even worse. “Michael Froomkin”:http://www.discourse.net/archives/2005/09/the_modern_let_them_eat_cake_moment.html has a link to an “NPR segment”:http://www.publicradio.org/tools/media/player/marketplace/2005/09/05_mpp?start=00:00:01:00.0&end=00:00:04:36.0 recording her comments. She actually said, “What I’m hearing _which is sort of scary_ is that they want to stay”