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”

Via “Brad DeLong”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/09/new_orleanss_hu.html, a report from the _Times Picayune_ from July 24th of this year about the New Orleans city government’s plan for evacuating the city in the event of a major hurricane. The plan (presented here in full) was: 1. Make a video telling people that if disaster threatens they will have to get the fuck out of town themselves, because the city isn’t going to do anything to help out. 2. Distribute the video around town on DVD. This completes the evacuation plan.

In storm, N.O. wants no one left behind; Number of people without cars makes evacuation difficult By Bruce Nolan, Staff writer, New Orleans Times-Picayne, July 24, 2005

City, state and federal emergency officials are preparing to give the poorest of New Orleans’ poor a historically blunt message: In the event of a major hurricane, you’re on your own. In scripted appearances being recorded now, officials such as Mayor Ray Nagin, local Red Cross Executive Director Kay Wilkins and City Council President Oliver Thomas drive home the word that the city does not have the resources to move out of harm’s way an estimated 134,000 people without transportation.

In the video, made by the anti-poverty agency Total Community Action, they urge those people to make arrangements now by finding their own ways to leave the city in the event of an evacuation. “You’re responsible for your safety, and you should be responsible for the person next to you,” …

Officials are recording the evacuation message even as recent research by the University of New Orleans indicated that as many as 60 percent of the residents of most southeast Louisiana parishes would remain in their homes in the event of a Category 3 hurricane. Their message will be distributed on hundreds of DVDs across the city. …

In an interview at the opening of this year’s hurricane season, New Orleans Emergency Preparedness Director Joseph Matthews acknowledged that the city is overmatched. “It’s important to emphasize that we just don’t have the resources to take everybody out,” he said in a interview in late May.

So, the city told them in advance that they’d be left to drown like animals and FEMA were careful not to take any action — e.g., planning and executing a relief effort — to prevent this plan from being put into effect. It’s clear that the city and federal authorities were just made for each other. What a nightmare.

*Update*: Archpundit “has a lot more context”:http://www.archpundit.com/archives/012870.html (“1”:http://www.archpundit.com/archives/012866.html, “2”:http://www.archpundit.com/archives/012865.html, “3”:http://www.archpundit.com/archives/012864.html, “4”:http://www.archpundit.com/archives/012863.html, “5”:http://www.archpundit.com/archives/012862.html) on city, state and federal preparedness, notably on what was learned from Hurricane Ivan and how all of this speaks to current arguments over responsibility.

Go read “this L.A. Times report”:http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-children5sep05,0,113027.story?coll=la-home-headlines about seven children — mostly toddlers, the eldest, six years old — who were lost and found in New Orleans these last few days.

In the chaos that was Causeway Boulevard, this group of refugees stood out: a 6-year-old boy walking down the road, holding a 5-month-old, surrounded by five toddlers who followed him around as if he were their leader.

They were holding hands. Three of the children were about 2 years old, and one was wearing only diapers. A 3-year-old girl, who wore colorful barrettes on the ends of her braids, had her 14-month-old brother in tow. The 6-year-old spoke for all of them, and he told rescuers his name was Deamonte Love.

The story of how they got there, and what happened next, is just remarkable. There are a lot of lessons you might draw from it — organizational failures and successes, the appalling choices that people sometimes have to make, courage in unexpected places, and how important it can be be for people to pay attention and make an effort. It’s also a reminder of something else, something I can’t quite articulate properly. Events like Katrina breed chaos, and that leads to long chains of contingencies, to accidents piled upon accidents, sometimes lucky sometimes not. We come across people in the middle of such chains of events. In most cases, their situation will not conform to some tidy morality tale. It might _look_ like it does, but that’s because we like to tell stories about how people got what they deserved. What you are really seeing — as in the case of these seven children — may turn out to be another thing altogether, or the accidental byproduct of many things.

Maria writes below about American mythologies; Barbara Ehrenreich has a new book (“review by Scott McLemee”:http://www.mclemee.com/id149.html) coming out which speaks to one particular version of this by examining the genteel poverty of the middle aged woman with middling qualifications seeking a white-collar job. She catalogues the chancers, coaches and con artists who purport to be able to help desperate job-seekers to reinvent themselves and to make themselves employable. This “New York Times essay”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/14/books/review/14EHRENRE.html?ei=5070&en=e62ba9053f2ac858&ex=1126065600&pagewanted=print gives a taste of her main theme – how job coaches, business best-sellers and the like reproduce a kind of mythology of the market which systematically masks the forces that actually drive it. Her take on _Who Moved My Cheese?_, which seems to have spent umpteen fucking years at the top of the NYT non-fiction bestseller list:

bq. The Mice Come Out Ahead. Although the plot of ”Who Moved My Cheese?” centers on two tiny, maze-dwelling, cheese-dependent people named Hem and Haw, there are also two subsidiary characters, both mice. When the cheese is moved, the tiny people waste time ranting and raving ”at the injustice of it all,” as the book’s title suggests. But the mice just scurry off to locate an alternative cheese source. They prevail, we learn, because they ”kept life simple. They didn’t overanalyze or overcomplicate things.” In the mysteriously titled ”QBQ! The Question Behind the Question,” we are told that questions beginning with ”who” or ”why” are symptoms of ”victim thinking.” Happily, rodents are less prone to it than humans. That may be why we never learn the identity of the Cheese Mover; the who-question reveals a dangerous human tendency to ”overanalyze,” which could lead you to look upward, resentfully, toward the C-suites where the true Masters of the Universe dwell.

William Browning Spencer’s wonderful “Resume With Monsters”:http://www.powells.com/partner/29956/s?kw=Resume%20with%20Monsters, a grim comedy of dead-end jobs, in which Ehrenreich’s Masters of the Universe have escaped from the Cthulhu Mythos, gets the underlying message of these books exactly right.

bq. It was a payday at work, and the motivational pamphlet that came with the check was entitled “You Matter!” and Philip effectively resisted reading it at work, but when he returned home and was emptying out his pockets, he saw it and read it while standing up, and it was every bit as bad as he suspected. It began “Successful people are people who always give one hundred percent, who understand that a company’s success depends on an individual’s determination to excel. You may say to yourself, ‘I am an insignificant person in this big company. I could be laid off tomorrow along with five hundred of my fellow workers, and no one would care.’ The truth is, what you do is important to people who _are_ important. While you may, indeed be one of many, your labor can benefit someone who is, in fact, _genuinely_ important. You can …” Philip put the motivational pamphlet down. The writer had gone too far this time, Philip thought.

Listening to “Bob Harris Country”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio2/shows/bobharriscountry/playlist.shtml last Thursday, I was really captivated by “Tom Russell”:http://www.tomrussell.com/ talking about Charles Bukowski. I didn’t know anything about Bukowski, except having a vague idea that he might be something to do with the beat poets. Anyway, I was intruiged enough to go out and buy “Post Office”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0876850867/junius-20 , Bukowski’s grittily written account of working for the US post office as a relief postman and then as a clerk whilst being almost permanently drunk, gambling and womanizing.

bq. It began as a mistake.

A great opening line to hook you in, reminiscent of Hammett or Chandler, except this isn’t a crime story. Brilliant muscular writing about snagging with petty authority figures, trudging around delivering letters to lunatics in the pouring rain, mean and manipulative men and women, making money at the track, routine, boredom, cheating the system.

One of the best things I’ve read in a while, I don’t mind saying. Completely non-boring. I’ve now gone out and bought “Ham on Rye”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0876855575/junius-20 , which I’m really looking forward to, as well as a book of poems: “You Get So Alone At Times That It Just Makes Sense”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0876856830/junius-20 . Comments to further remedy my Bukowski-related ignorance (or my Tom Russell-related ignorance for that matter) would be most welcome.

I imagine that Joel (the thorough and keen-eyed guy who is copyediting my book manuscript) probably considered throwing in a few of these “lesser-known copyediting and proofreading symbols”:http://www.geist.com/comix/comix.php?id=18 as he dealt with my alleged prose last month. (Via “Making Light”:http://www.nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/.)

The Hurricane Katrina disaster and looming political crisis aren’t easy for an outsider to decipher. But we do have one advantage; not having believed in many American myths in the first place. For starters, the myth that the US is a generous and free country where anyone can achieve almost anything. [click to continue…]