Horizon

Another Bus Story

This one's from the Port Arthur ISD convoy, and met official shotguns in Woodville, Texas.

"By the time we got to Lufkin, we had been on the road 29 hours. It was chaos. We had to assist wheelchair passengers out on a lift. Everyone needed something. Lufkin officials said they didn't have anything for us. I volunteered because I didn't want Port Arthur to end up like the people in New Orleans, where the bus drivers deserted," said Gordon.

"As we drove on, we saw someone with a sign that waved us over. It was St. Patrick's Catholic Church in Lufkin. They told us we could stay at their church," said volunteer Derrick Turner, driver of PAISD bus number 56, also for the disabled.

Rita and the Media, Old and New

Mark Glaser has done an excellent job of a media post-Ritam in Six Lessons from Online Coverage of Hurricane Rita, and Under the News has emerged as a great view into the newsroom. I don't have anything more than my personal observations as an evacuee, but here they are.

Failure

• I understand that nobody is willing to advise someone to stay who should leave, but a little perspective might still make for responsible reporting. Wednesday evening I heard an interview on KTRH that went like this:
  • Anchor: So what would you tell someone in Cypress who thinks "Hey, I'm on the northwest side of Houston, dozens of miles from the Gulf. Why evacuate?"
  • Meteorologist: Well, if Rita were to make landfall as a category 5 and travel directly over him, he'd face hundred-mile-an-hour winds. Does he really want to be around for that?
  Only later — after hours in line behind evacuees from northwest Houston — did we discover that category 5 hurricanes are rare and fragile creatures, and the chance of the meteorologist's apocalyptic scenario occurring were minimal.
• Anchors were addicted to the word "serious". I actually heard the sentence "This looks like a serious storm, with serious winds, that's going to affect some serious parts of the Texas coast." I keep wondering if that's some sort of strange anti-beach, where vacationers trade the usual fishing and swimming for conscription into work parties shoveling snow while wearing expressions of grim determination.
• Media consolidation has a price, and that price is local coverage of the things that worry the locals. Driving into Port Arthur, I tried to pick up the local talk radio station. What I got was an anchor with a Standard Midwestern Accent taking calls from residents and mispronouncing names. Every commercial break, he'd announce with a mixture of embarrassment and relief that they'd be "returning the station to local control" at six o'clock.
• Syndicated programs are the last thing you want to hear in evacuation traffic. After midnight, I'd joined the thousands trying to leave Houston westbound. The Beaumont and Houston news stations were playing the same program about UFOs. The only thing remotely close to hurrricane coverage was the New Orleans AM station, which had boosted power for overnight broadcast. I appreciate the irony, but it's still disquieting to be fleeing an area while listening to detailed instructions on how to avoid electrocuting yourself while re-entering your flooded house
• Effectively serving your listeners during such an event is really, really hard. Houston's KTRH is to be commended for broadcasting lists of gas stations that hadn't run dry as early as Thursday morning. That said, it would have been very helpful to find out where the backed-up traffic ends, instead of the reports on how far it was backed up. By Friday morning, they'd widened their scope enough to include Dallas and Austin traffic reports in their coverage, but it took a while.
• Similarly, radio stations in the evacuee's destinations still had a focus so narrow as to seem myopic. Once you left Houston coverage, the hurricane's target had become genericised into "the upper Texas coast", which is about as specific as "New England".

Success

• The changes came late, but they finally came. By Friday, KTRH traffic reports covered all of I-45 to Dallas and all of I-10 to San Antonio. On Saturday, Austin stations were broadcasting the Houston mayor's schedules for gradual return.
• Streaming media is one of the best things that's happened for evacuees. When you're in a strange town and desperate for news from close to home, stations like KHOU that streamed video, or KTRH and KILT that streamed audio were godsends.
• KHOU broadcast a live, raw feed of their helicopter surveying the hurricane damage. This lasted for hours, and despite technical glitches was enough to give us a pretty good idea of how different areas had fared.
• KOGT's coverage consisted of one guy on a four-wheeler traveling around neighborhoods and reporting via generator and modem. Early on, his notes were the only news from Orange County that any of us had, and their contents were passed around via phone relays.
• Every evacuee from the hurricane target had a single, simple question: "What happened to my home?" Nothing was better at answering this than NOAA's aerial survey. Makes me want to buy the pilots and IT staff several cups of coffee.

Ugly Legacy

Yesterday's Beaumont Enterprise reports on a bus convoy full of poor black evacuees looking for shelter in the nasty small towns of East Texas.

As they sat outside on folding chairs, having a smoke, they described seeing people on their front lawns glaring at them with shotguns in hand, and pickup trucks with nooses hanging in back (most of the bus passengers were black).The drivers said whenever they tried to stop to rest or let their passengers use the restroom, town officials had court orders waiting for them to get out of town, an assertion those town officials later denied.

Gulf Coast

A few days ago, Paul in Hong Kong asked why people along the Gulf Coast don't have hurricane-proof buildings. It's a good question, and I've been mulling over it for the past few days. There are a lot of potential explanations, none of them especially satisfactory.

Geography is probably the main suspect. It's the obvious reason that folks in the coastal plain don't retreat to the mountains when a hurricane approaches, as one Indian commenter suggested — the Ozarks are a long drive away. The vastness of the coastal prairie means that the entire area is a low-lying district. Orange County, Texas was spared flooding from Rita, but its average elevation is six feet above sea level. And it's an inland county.

Perhaps the local flora is the problem. Outside of the flooded parishes of Louisiana, the damage done by high winds is largely in the form of downed trees. In Austin, the scrub oaks might take down a few powerlines, but they could never really compete with the damage done by the eighty-foot pines along the Gulf.

Population density is another explanation. It doesn't require much to raise five hundred people out of a flood zone when they live in a single high-rise apartment. Elevate the foundations of the building and you're done. The task is much harder when those five hundred people all inhabit single-story dwellings. A single trailer park likely has the same footprint as a high-rise, but only houses a fraction of the people.

This brings us to economics. It doesn't add a significant percentage to the per-unit cost to hurricane-proof an expensive high-rise. Along the rural and exurban communities of the coastal prairie, however, housing is cheap — good houses on an acre of land can still be found in the five figures. This makes hurricane-proofing a significant expense to be weighed against the risk. And the risk is lower than it seems from elsewhere in the country. I'm sure that someone in Ohio has the same two-hurricane-strikes-per-year impression of Galveston that I do of southern Florida. But the coast stretches for hundreds of miles, and the comparions people are making of Rita are with Audrey, which was more than four decades ago.

English translations of Bernard-Henri Lévy's new de Tocqueville book have been appearing in the last four issues of the Atlantic. His observations on the subject are in the latest issue:

What takes you by surprise in Homestead is the vulnerability of the houses. What bewilders and stuns you is that everything has been rebuilt just as it was before, with the same prefab kits and the same kinds of trailers, which look as if they've been set down ready-made, patched together, a little rickety. You wonder what will keep them from flying apart in the same way when the next Andrew, Mitch, or Allison comes along. America has the means to protect Homestead. The American that hasn't ceased to dream of the Star Wars missile-defence shieldhas the most effective warning and prevention systems in the world. But, strangely enough, it doesn't use even a tenth of its capacity to keep the inhabitants of Homestead out of danger by strengthening building and insurance codes. Just as I've never seen a European airport as profoundly paralyzed as the major American airports can be by a snowstorm, for instance, so I can't imagine the principle of precaution so poorly applied in my country as it is here in Homestead. Why is it so neglected?

There's a culture of risk, stronger than the culture of security and the inclination to self-protection.

There are the remains of a pioneering spirit that for decades, or rather for centuries, has accomodated itself to a sense of temporary habitat, perched as it were on the side of the road, pressing forward with the frontier, and by definition precarious.

But there is also, anchored deep in the mentality of the country, a magical, semi-superstitious relationship to what Americans, even the secular ones, are prone to call Mother Nature. As if their omnipotence found its limits there, reached its rational confines there. As if the Promethean will to get the better of all things and all people imposed on itself a limit of principle and wisdom in this relationship to the elements. No pity for our enemies, the American of the twenty-first century seems to be saying; no mercy for terrorists, certainly, or even for opponents of the country's economic supremacy. But we'll let nature take her best shot.

Evacuation Stories

My parents arrived from their home near Port Arthur at five o'clock this afternoon. They'd spent twenty-five hours on the road between there and Austin, most of which was driving north to Nacogdoches. I made a shorter trip of thirteen and a half hours yesterday morning, twelve hours of which covered the 170 miles from Houston to Austin. Many more of my friends are from Houston or the Port Arthur area, and each had their own ordeal and worries.

Here are a few of their evacuation stories.

Some of the largest imprompu tent cites along I-45 were at gas stations. The pumps were empty, but people had parked there to sleep in the hope that a tanker would arrive in the morning.

On TX 21 west of the I-45 intersection, a woman was driving east. She lived in the area and was offering her house to anyone who was stranded.

A friend was working back roads between Houston and Austin, along with his wife and two small children. His son managed to throw up all over himself in the heat, so they stopped at the next gas station. He stripped his son naked, hosed him off with the water hose at the air compressor, and nobody even looked twice.

My parents pulled over to park and sleep next to a pickup on US-92. After they turned off their cars, two women sat up from the bed of the pickup, asking if they needed help or to use a phone. They'd pulled over to sleep as well.

The things people choose to evacuate amaze me, though they often make sense if you think about it. I passed a number of horses and deep freezers. My parents saw entire households of stuff, including lawn furniture and propane grills. My fellow evacuees might have found my pickup bed full of family history just as odd, though.

At one gas station, my parents observed a heated exchange between a man and his wife at the pump. They then saw another man intervene, give the couple five dollars to continue filling their tank, and refuse to let them return it.

Many rural towns really helped the evacuees tremendously. The entire town of Belleville seemed to be helping to direct traffic, though in San Augustine the residents looked more like a crowd watching a parade. I found gas in Industry (pop. 302), at the grocery/feed store/gas station. Lines were long, but all the clerks had turned out and were courteous and helpful. They'd even turned on the Auto-Fry, so I walked out with some hot breakfast. Corn dogs and chicken strips go better at 9:30 AM than you'd think.

An acquaintance does IT work for a mid-sized tech firm in Houston. At the last minute, their partner in Kansas City refused to allow them to back up their databases onto their servers. Today he got a call from a coworker: "Don't tell anyone because I'll probably get fired, but I got a buddy who runs an adult site to store them on his servers."

At the intersection of I-45 and TX 21, there were four gas stations still in business. On both the eastbound and westbound shoulders, cars were parked in lines for over a mile. Alongside the cars were people standing. At first my parents assumed they were in line for a bathroom or some food. Then they noticed that they were all carrying empty containers.

One sound I'll never forget is the frogs along F.M. 529. I was in a long line of stop-and-go traffic heading downhill to a creek west of Belleville. I noticed the frogs because I could hear them. I had my engine off and was coasting down hill on brakes alone. Everyone else on the quarter-mile slope was doing the same.

When traffic really stops, people get out to stretch their legs. The back roads I chose had nothing on the official evacuation routes, however. My parents actually people firing up their grills to cook meals alongside the road.

I had more luck on the back roads than on the highways. At first I thought this was a case of the have-maps versus the have-nots, until I talked to a friend from Houston. She drove south-west of the city for a while, then randomly tried any state highway or farm road that led north or west until she got to Austin. Many dead ends and turnarounds, but no waiting in traffic.

Diez Y Seis

We Texans are a stubborn bunch. Decades after the spelling reform, we still celebrate "diez y seis" instead of the unlovely "dieciséis". This gave my Spanish teacher no end of amusement, but she was a haughty Mexican with more than a touch of the fundamentalist to her so I felt justified in ignoring her scorn.

Every year St. Anthony Marie de Claret's in Kyle throws its big fundraiser, a Diez Y Seis festival. The waves of Austin's exurban growth are lapping at Kyle, and you pass new subdivisions between the tracts of ranchland on the way there. The church building Sara and I were married in was used for bingo this year, a new steel-and-limestone sanctuary having been erected across the parking lot.

They'd sold out of tamales this evening, so I had to settle on a couple of tacos de bistec and half a gordita. Something about sitting in the church hall with your belly full of simple beef dishes makes your worries melt away. Fussy babies, obnoxious technical trends, and even the niggling frustration of things you've lost around the house all fade into the muted accordion and guitarrón beats trickling in from the parking lot.

The Lessons of Discourse Analysis

I came across this abstract recently, which I take to be an analysis of birthday parties from the point of view of the discourse analyst. Since I don't know all that much about the field, I thought I'd try translating it. I looked up some of the terms and came up with something along these lines:

We analyze the interactional organization and embodied actions of children and adults involved in gift-opening activities.

(This article talks about what happens when people open gifts.)

Attention is drawn to gift-opening as a situated activity system, comprised of gift-opening activities occurring within shifting participation frameworks and intense focus clusters.

(When people open gifts at parties, they tend to behave in particular ways in various circumstances, and are the focus of much attention from fellow revellers.)

Talk and embodied actions (the use of objects, body orientations, and the structure of the environment) are revealed as seamlessly conjoined in the midst of a routine birthday party.

(No one would ordinarily be tempted to analyze something so obvious. Luckily, the distinctions we invoke serve to make it seem complicated.)

Attention is further drawn to an extended summons–answer sequence involving initiation of a gift-opening, enthusiastic response cries, positive assessments of the gifts, the offering and prompting of thanks, and related actions.

(People are usually not entirely forthcoming with their true feelings about the gifts they receive, and onlookers usually feign far more interest than they really have.)

It is revealed that children at the party are not just playing games and opening gifts, but involved in a complex social system where adults model and facilitate the construction and integration of past, present, and future relationships.

(It's a good idea to refrain from hurting the feelings of others if you want to remain friends.)

Implications are raised for understanding how gift-opening activities provide opportunities for examining how language development and childhood socialization are enacted as interactional achievements.

(One must actively practice if one is to become properly socialized. Merely reading about it is not enough.)

Can anyone suggest improvements? I may have missed a few nuances here and there.

Blessed are the cheesemakers

Meanwhile, in sun-kissed Gloucestershire among the perry pears...

Beauvoir

There are conflicting reports of damage to Beauvoir, the last home of Jefferson Davis. The Jackson paper reports it "virtually demolished." The Times explains that "By comparison with many of its historic neighbors, Beauvoir is lucky. The main structure of the Davis house, ... still stands." According to the Washington Post, the archives are safe. Beauvoir's own website merely warns that "All preparations have been made to Beauvoir House and the Jefferson Davis Presidential Library for Hurricane Camille."

Like most Confederate museums, Beauvoir displays geologic strata of historical interpretation. It also houses exhibits of the kind of things you might find in a great-aunt's attic. The two I remember from our visit were a tax receipt for five chickens and a crown of thorns hand-woven by Pope Pius IX as a gift for Davis while he was in prison.

Oh Dear

My copy of Racializing Jesus arrived in the mail last night. Flipping through it, some sentences make me think we may have bit off a bit much:

• This Greek/Roman/German triangle provides Heidegger with more than a means of constructing a clearly delimited racialized hierarchy.
• Bultmann infuses into NT scholarship a series of existential and aesthetic values that are themselves deeply racialized (originary/derivative, primordial/compromised, dynamic/static, security/insecurity, authenticity/inauthenticity, theology of history/theology of word, concrete/abstract, free/enslaved).
• If reason reveals itself in the phonomenal world of history and culture, and if history is guided by reason itself, and if history has a teleological destiny (the self-manifestation of the absolute), then Hegel must incorporate culture and history into his own philosophical system

I'll give it the old college try, but I may present the professor with a doctor's note explaining my intermittent allergy to theory.

King of the Whats?

One of my favorite things to do with my spare time is find webpages created and maintained by ordinary people with some extraordinary enthusiasm for some ordinary thing. So I was delighted to find this site on the stinkiest fruit in the world, durian, in which the enthusiast argues that durian is not only The King of the Fruits, a view apparently widely held among lovers of durian, but is in fact The God of Fruits.

Amongst the new items to be found there: an item alerting readers to the existence of "FAKE DURIAN" (capitalization not mine), a link to durian-themed cartoons, a new poem added to the durian art gallery, and so on. What better way to spend your lunch hour, I ask?

So read on, if you dare step into the world of FRUIT ADVOCACY.

(I picked up some durian wine in chinatown once, by the way, and let me tell you it really does stink.)

Coverage

There have been several unusual and telling incidents on live TV since Hurricane Katrina hit. A few of them are collected here. Particularly interesting is the video of a rapper (Kayne West) delivering what was meant to be a scripted back-and-forth with Mike Myers on a live relief concert. Instead he went off into a nervous monologue and ended with the phrase "Bush doesn't care about black people". The response to that has been interesting.

Scroll down that page to see the video (well worth it for the look on Myers's face as well as the timing of the cut to an obviously unprepared Chris Tucker). If you can't handle the video there is also a transcript linked there.

People We Know Who Should Know Better

Apocalyptic visions can blind any of us. As an addendum to his defense of the ACLU's 1940 purge of Communists , Eugene Volokh posts a link to this 1934 article in Soviet Russia Today by Roger Baldwin, director of the ACLU:

I saw considerable of the work of the OGPU. I heard a good many stories of severity, even of brutality, and many of them from the victims. While I sympathized with personal distress I just could not bring myself to get excited over the suppression of opposition when I stacked it up against what I saw of fresh, vigorous expressions of free living by workers and peasants all over the land. And further, no champion of a socialist society could fail to see that some suppression was necessary to achieve it. It could not all be done by persuasion. . . .

How long the proletarian dictatoriship will last, only world conditions and internal success in building socialism can determine. Highly centralized authority will give way. The State and police power will eventually disappear. Civil liberties will exist again;, within the confines of a socialist society; but not to oppose it, for who will want to? The extension of education, the bringing up of a generation to take active responsibility all over the Soviet Union will lessen power at the center and from on top.

If American workers, with no real liberties save to change masters or, rarely, to escape from the working class, could understand their class interests, Soviet "workers' democracy" would be their goal. And if American champions of civil liberty could all think in terms of economic freedom as the goal of their labors, they too would accept "workers' democracy" as far superior to what the capitalist world offers to any but a small minority. Yes, and they would accept — regretfully, of course — the necessity of dictatorship while the job of reorganizing society on a socialist basis is being done

ESR

I've always enjoyed Eric S. Raymond's work. He's best known for "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" but I preferred his follow-on essay "Homesteading the Noosphere". And I confess that during a slow month at a previous job, I managed to get entirely through the Jargon File (link goes to the entry on FUD). Raymond's a surprisingly charismatic speaker — seeing him in Revolution OS really doesn't prepare you for how well he interacts with an audience in person.

I've been less impressed with his writing on dating guns, and politics. Unfortunately, his take on Orwell's "Objectively pro-Fascist"falls into this latter category.

"Done With Mirrors" taking a break

Center-right history blog Done With Mirrors is closing up the shop for a while. I first stumbled across Callimachus in the results of a Technorati search for a favorite author — an excellent way to find new blogs. In the case of Done With Mirrors, I was not disappointed: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Since the inital discovery, I've checked back every week or so. There's a lot of the usual sort of political ranting done by any blogger who vents about his coworkers' politics. Buried among that, however, are nuggets worth sifting for: The etymology of "know" and related words. A pointer to an analysis of the odious Fred Phelps I might have otherwise missed. Shooting Howard Zinn in a barrel. Some thoughts on witches, on using "Nazi" as an insult, and on Memin Pinguin.

His latest such gem was a long quotation from Hans Erich Nossack's Der Undergang, including this passage:

Who can blame the helpers for being disappointed when they had to realize that what they had offered -- shelter, food, and clothing -- basically didn't make any difference at all? Perhaps something like pleasure flitted across the recipients' faces, but it didn't linger. They would walk through the strange rooms, touch an object, hold it, and look at it absently. The host would follow them with his eyes and expect some statement like: We, too, once had something like this -- and perhaps then he would have given it to them. But instead, the stranger would put it aside, and the unspoken question would fill the room: What is the use of still having such things?

Beam me up

So I was telling J. this story about three Duke University students who all by themselves managed to deliver some bottled water, drive to the New Orleans Convention Center, help out there, and drive two carloads of people to Baton Rouge. And we were wondering what if similar individual initiative had been encouraged and put to work on a much bigger scale. Hence the following:
Me (imperiously): "Why wasn't it Dunkirk?"
J: "What?"
Me: "Why wasn't it Dunkirk?"
J: "I don't know, Mr. Spock."

Sorry. Ya laugh or ya cry.

Sorting

Its easy to feel ungrateful to donors when you're the person who has to load, move, and especially sort their donations. It's dull, sweaty work, and you find yourself carping about the things that are icky or absurd instead of marveling at people's generosity. A box of books might be enticing, but is Great Dialogues of Plato really the best thing to give to a resettled hurricane evacuee? How about The Year in Milwaukee Brewers History?

One of my jobs this weekend was sorting through donated toiletries. Can of hairspray? Into the pile of hair care products. Half-bottle of shampoo? Trash. Stick of deoderant? Open it up and see if it's been used. The worst are opaque bottles of lotion — the stuff's so gooey that it's really hard to tell.

The woman working with me had been doing this longer than I had. "I actually found used toothbrushes," she said.

"Really?"

"Yes."

"But," she added, "there were hundreds of new ones."

Watching the Poor

I needed some comforting a few days ago, so I opened my Everyman’s Library edition of Orwell essays. Say what you will about the ill-lit avenues of the soul that seeks solace in Orwell, but when your thoughts want ordering, he gets the job done. In How the Poor Die, a reflection on the indignities and miseries the needy suffer when they become ill, he shows the poor as objects, crowded into unsanitary wards, worthy of care just a notch above negligence. As human beings, they fade into invisibility.

We prefer our poor invisible; usually they are reliably so. We don’t want to see them and they don’t want to be seen. This is the signature article of our covenant with them.

New Orleans is the story of the breakdown of that agreement.

Last week the invisible became visible.

We watched as they did what they were told, when New Orleans implemented the Charles Darwin Evacuation Plan. Those with money and transport got out; the poor got a football stadium of questionable seaworthiness.

As the crisis developed, the poor took shape. They grew faces, they found voices. They wanted their babies to live, their grandparents to get medical care. They wanted a meal and a drink of water. They wanted to get away from the filth. They wanted to sleep in a place without corpses.

We wondered how the government could fail to bring relief to New Orleans when the press could broadcast from its streets. As it turns out, the answers didn’t lie in standard human incompetence, bureaucratic muddling, or indifference.

While the nation watched its poor die, to the President they remained invisible.

The disconnect feels unforgivable.

One grim feature of the American Dream is that we never lose our suspicion the floorboards between the ground floor of financial security and the dirt cellar of poverty are not entirely dependable. Many of us believe we are one or two bad breaks away from joining the ranks of the invisible; we recognize much of our good fortune as an accident of birth. We now know our government can be blind to what is easily accessible on a television set. To be fair, the President was just a few days behind the rest of the country in recognizing the poor. Our fear is that we, if left behind in a New Orleans, wouldn’t last that long.

crossposted at MRBFK

Cafe du Monde R.I.P.?

The original Cafe du Monde is or was a very lovely cafe with terrace on the New Orleans waterfront. You will have visited there if you've been to New Orleans as a tourist. IIRC it was nearly destroyed some years ago by a ship overshooting its berth in the harbor, so it is assuredly low-lying and hence very possibly gone. There is, however, a branch office in the suburbs so maybe the company is not gone -- just the original shop with the cafe au lait and beignets that you wouldn't dare refer to as just plain coffee and donuts.

Raines

Should've suspected the former NYT editor could write.

The man can write.

....so can our SF Chron letter-writers.

BTW, about the knock-on effects of the hurricane:

On Monday I was looking for a new shirt in the Marshall's discount store in San Francisco and heard a conversation between two women near the fitting rooms. I think both were mothers of daughters. They were disgusted with the choice of clothes remaining, saying everything had already been picked over by earlier back-to-school shoppers. One of the women said she hadn't been able to come earlier -- I gathered with her daughter -- because they had been waiting for some money from New Orleans and the check had been delayed by the flood evacuation.

So, I thought, ish, here we go, how many more families are there like this one?

I'm guessing the check might have been something like alimony or child support, and probably whoever was earning that money is now displaced and not earning, and next month a check doesn't come to a family in San Francisco, or maybe instead what arrives is refugee relatives to a household that can already barely send a daughter to school with new discount blue jeans.

There is a steady flow back and forth of poor people between California and the South. We will have refugees here very soon even though San Francisco is an expensive place to live. There is going to be a little less to go around everywhere, not just on the Gulf Coast.