September 16, 2005
On Television Posted by Julie M. Fenster at 01:30 PM EST Last evening, I watched a show on the Discovery Channel about a trio of young adults on a journey to meet up with the rest of their family. They had names. They had personalities. And they had, therefore, their clashes. They had triumphs and tragedies, too, and everything else you might expect in a Southern novel. But the program was not about Raintree County, it was about Europe during the Ice Age, and the people were prehistoric. This show, The Ice World, was an example of a new generation of documentaries. It is a world quite apart from the old days of Edward R. Murrow and NBC White Paper. Nowadays, directors who are tired of scouring archives for film clips, eight seconds at a time, just hire actors and create new film, along with creating names, personalities, and suitable adventures. It all started about five years ago with computer-animated dinosaurs—and me sitting there actually feeling teary over some invented dinosaur baby getting gobbled up by a mean old big dinosaur. Isn’t that what we used to call a fairy tale? Now the new fiction has moved massively into nonfiction television. In The Ice World, one of the people was named Aki. Now, who on earth knows what prehistoric people called each other? Aki seems an awful lot like a modern version of a primitive name. Who is to say that a cave man couldn’t be named Maximilian? There isn’t anything wrong with not knowing every detail of human history. But there is something very wrong with filling in facts—except in fairy tales.
September 15, 2005
New York and New Orleans Posted by John Steele Gordon at 02:15 PM EST Joshua Zeitz writes that “the suggestion that New Yorkers (or their city officials) handled catastrophe better than their counterparts in New Orleans is patently offensive.” Offensive to whom? The mayor of New Orleans, who (1) holed up during the storm and afterwards on the 27th floor of a luxury hotel without communications and (2), knowing that tens of thousands of his citizens had no means to evacuate, nonetheless failed to utilize more than a thousand city and school buses that could have moved them out of harm’s way if deployed in a timely manner? The governor, who (1) had to be coaxed by President Bush into ordering a mandatory evacuation of the city, and even then allowed the mayor to wait until the next morning to issue the order and (2) failed to deploy the National Guard in a timely manner or allow them the force necessary to prevent looting? The state government, that refused to allow the Red Cross into the Superdome with supplies immediately after the storm, supplies that could have ameliorated conditions that made the Black Hole of Calcutta look like a Club Med? Of course, who it is really offensive to is the mainstream media who have fallen on this story like a starving man on a loaf of bread, and have relentlessly pushed the notion that everything was George Bush’s fault for purely partisan purposes. They are shamelessly perpetuating a bold-faced lie. To give just one example, the New York Times ran a long article laying out this all-Bush’s-fault party line that began with a story of Governor Blanco (well-named) screaming that the federal government hadn’t come up with any buses to evacuate refugees. Did the Times even mention the fact that New Orleans’s 1,000-plus buses had been allowed to be destroyed, or run the picture sent out by the A.P. showing the hundreds of school buses, neatly lined up, windows-deep in flood water? Of course not. The federal response was, to be sure, less than perfect. How could it be otherwise when faced with an unprecedented disaster? But it was, in fact, faster and better handled than the response to Hurricane Andrew in 1992, the closest valid comparison. It is not easy to bring relief to an area the size of England that has had its road, rail, air, and communications networks devastated. An area that had no running water, no electricity, no gasoline or diesel fuel. But, hey! It’s all George Bush’s fault. He writes, ”I’ll happily concede that we have a better tradition of efficient and honest urban government [in New York City] than New Orleans. Simply put, there is no Fiorello La Guardia in recent Louisiana history.” In recent history? New Orleans and Louisiana have richly deserved reputations for having the most feckless and corrupt governments in the country and have had for centuries. But, hey! Let’s blame the federal government anyway. Why should we blame governments with 1,000 buses under their control and in place, when we can blame the federal government, which had no buses in place at all? Was it the federal government’s fault that one third of the New Orleans Police Department deserted their posts when their city needed them most? He writes that ”these two catastrophes [Katrina and 9/11] are not on the same scale.” I never said they were. I was talking about the local government response and example-setting, not the size of the disaster. Rudolph Giuliani, faced with a wholly unpredicted disaster that came without warning, handled it magnificently and led a frightened and traumatized city to swift recovery. Ray Nagin and Governor Blanco, faced with an utterly predictable disaster that came with days of warning, blamed everyone but themselves for what befell New Orleans. If you want something that’s offensive, how about that? He writes, “There are some problems that are beyond the reach, capability, and responsibility of local governments. What happened to New Orleans is a prime example.” So? Is that a good reason to do nothing except whine? Could they not have tried their best instead of not trying at all? He writes, “What’s truly deplorable is the anemic federal response to so massive a regional disaster.” Again, the federal response was not anemic. Mr. Zeitz really should get his information from more sources than a newspaper that allows its editorial pages to be disgraced twice a week by the likes of Paul Krugman, a magazine like The New Yorker, and a television network like CBS. On this story, they care as much for the truth as a pig cares for Mozart. He writes, “Under the Bush administration, the Army Corps of Engineers has seen its project-based budget allocations decimated… and a devolution of authority to cash-strapped state and local authorities.” State and local government, in fact, are doing very well budget-wise these days. And I would bring to Mr. Zeitz’s attention the clause in the Constitution (Article I, Section 9) that “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” In other words it is Congress that decides finally how much money shall be spent where. It was Congress that decided how much money the Army Corps of Engineers should have and what it should be spent on. Louisiana got more money than almost any other state, but much of it was spent on things other than levees (a revenue-producing casino, for instance). But it’s all George Bush’s fault. He writes, “I hope that New York is never faced with anything on the scale of what just happened in New Orleans. If we are, John Steele Gordon will surely find that even the Big Apple’s leadership has its limits.” Do a thought experiment: You live in an American city. You know that disaster is about to strike and you can choose who you want to run the government in order to handle it. The choice is between Rudy Giuliani and Ray Nagin. Any questions?
September 15, 2005
Cartwright 1, Marx 0 Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 01:05 PM EST Why is there no socialism in the United States? The answer can be found by examining last Monday's Major League Baseball schedule. On Labor Day, only 22 of the 30 Major League teams were in action, and one of those games was a make-up of an earlier rainout. The same thing was true on Memorial Day: Only 10 games scheduled, out of a possible 15. A few decades ago, every team used to play on Memorial Day and Labor Day, often doubleheaders, because the clubs knew those would be among the biggest attendance days of the year. The urban proletariat had a day off, and lots of them spent it at the ballpark. But in today’s baseball calendar, Labor Day is just another Monday, with teams and fans alike often using it for travel. I don’t have any attendance figures for comparison, but a quick scan of the Sunday of Labor Day weekend's box scores (hey, that’s more research than most bloggers ever do) shows that attendance was not much different from what you’d expect on a normal Sunday. Fans can go to a game anytime they want (in fact the great majority of tickets are now purchased in advance, which is another story), but it’s not often that they get a three-day weekend. So just as today’s workers are too busy spending their money to reinforce class solidarity by marching in the Labor Day parade, they also have too many leisure options to spend Labor Day weekend watching baseball. And that’s why there’s no socialism in the United States. P.S. Of course there are plenty of people who are too poor to take a weekend vacation, but these days they’re also too poor to go to a baseball game.
September 15, 2005
Race, an American Obsession Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 12:35 PM EST In the March issue of our print magazine, David Brion Davis wrote that slavery (along with its aftereffects, to which we now assign the shorthand title “race”) was “the central fact of American history.” That’s true, of course, and the same could be said of many other things. One can complete the academic triumvirate by substituting class (as the Marxists would have it) or gender (as the feminists would) for race, and a recent book by Harold Evans portrayed technology as the driving force in American history. Then there’s migration, immigration, education, homophobia, baseball… As an analytical exercise or an aid to comprehension, saying that all of American history revolves around a single thing does have some value, though all too often it is reminiscent of the old joke about the book on elephants. (Okay, briefly: A group of Europeans of different nationalities are asked to write a book on elephants. The German compiles a 20-volume treatise on the philosophy of elephants; the Italian writes an elephant cookbook; the Frenchman writes on the love life of elephants; [insert as many more examples here as you wish]; and (here comes the punch line) the Pole writes about “Elephants and the Polish Question.”) Yet it can be all too easy to concentrate on a single aspect of a complicated situation and portray it as the key to everything. Over the last two weeks we’ve all read the summaries of previous floods, fires, earthquakes, heat waves, etc., which killed and displaced people of all races indiscriminately, yet it has become an instant clichi that the people affected by Katrina would not have suffered as badly if they had been white. Like all arguments of the “if your grandmother had wheels, she’d be a bicycle” type, this one is circular and unproveable (which is not the same as being false). To people accustomed to seeing everything in racial terms, however, it seems obvious. Similarly, AmericanHeritage.com a few days ago featured an article by our extremely able contributor Elizabeth Hoover, a fondly remembered former co-worker of mine, about the Attica riot (pardon, I mean uprising). She writes: “At the core of the situation was race.” That’s one way of looking at it. Another way is to say that the inmates were a group of vicious criminals who had severely beaten a number of guards, killing one of them, and when the corrections commissioner demanded that they release their hostages, the prisoners displayed several of them with knives held to their throats. To me, that’s the core of the situation. There’s no question that, as Elizabeth says, both sides displayed “incompetence and miscalculation,” and that the intended rescue was horrifically bungled. But it’s hard to make a charge of racism stick when so many whites were killed (and when, as the inmate quoted by Elizabeth points out, “they” were killing white college students as well). To me, the biggest lesson from Attica is that if you’re in a negotiation and trying to convince the other side of your good faith, it’s not a good idea to beat and kill your hostages, or to threaten them with knives.
September 15, 2005
The Long Reach of History Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:20 AM EST Michael Barone, of US News and World Report, has a fascinating blog entry, “Folkways” (http://www.usnews.com/usnews/opinion/baroneblog/home.htm) on how the different cultures that settled New York and New Orleans caused different responses to disaster. Too much can be made of this, of course, but so can too little.
September 14, 2005
Being Intelligent About Intelligent Design Posted by John Steele Gordon at 04:05 PM EST The conflict between evolution and other explanations of the living world we see all around us is heating up once again. At least since 1925, with the Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee, eighty years ago, some Americans have been trying to prevent Darwinism from being taught in school, or at least require that it be presented along with other theories more congenial to their taste. The problem, of course, is that there aren’t any other theories, at least as the word ”theory” is understood by scientists. The Supreme Court has ruled that the Biblical story of creation is religion, not science, and cannot be presented as an alternative to evolution in public schools. So some have developed “intelligent design,” as an alternative. Intelligent design postulates that there are some things that evolution doesn’t, and can’t, explain, and some biological mechanisms so complex that they couldn’t be the result of an undirected process such as natural selection. Instead they are the result of an “intelligent designer,” which is otherwise undefined so as not to run afoul of the First Amendment. Many, including President Bush and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, have come out in support of teaching this idea in schools, as a plausible alternative, alongside Darwinism. The reaction among biologists and the intelligentsia generally has been little more than spluttering outrage. They point out, quite correctly, that intelligent design lacks all the attributes of a scientific theory, for it explains nothing, predicts nothing, and has no testable hypotheses. Instead, it merely says, in effect, if evolution cannot explain something, intelligent design is the answer. In other words, “a miracle happened here.” But the people have not been paying attention. A recent poll by the Pew Research Center (http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=254) reveals that only 26 percent of Americans believe that evolution by natural selection is the explanation, while fully 42 percent think that life has existed unchanged since the beginning of time. The intellectual elite should try a different tack if they want to defeat intelligent design. Let’s look at a little history. In 1950 Macmillan brought out Worlds in Collision, by Immanuel Velikovsky, which turned into a huge bestseller. It explained the various Old Testament miracles (the sun standing still for Joshua, manna from heaven, the parting of the Red Sea, etc.) by postulating assorted solar system collisions and near collisions. It was astronomical and physical nonsense, of course, and the scientific establishment went, well, nuts. Macmillan had a large textbook division, and many in academia threatened to boycott the publisher’s textbooks. So Macmillan sold the book to Doubleday, which, not coincidentally, had no textbook division. The controversy, naturally, did nothing but greatly increase sales. In the 1970s the late Carl Sagan wrote a great essay, “Venus and Velikovsky” (available in a collection of his essays called Broca’s Brain. In it Sagan explained what the scientists in 1950 should have done instead of merely denouncing Velikovsky as a charlatan: subjected his book to the scientific method and tested its hypotheses. And Sagan proceeded to do just that, in everyday, often highly amusing language, and showed how preposterous the whole idea was. If Velikovsky is right, then all we know of modern physics and much that we know of biology is wrong. Rereading the essay, it is impossible to escape the conclusion that Sagan had huge fun writing it, the literary equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel. If the Darwinists, for purposes of argumentation, would treat “Intelligent Design” as a serious scientific proposal, instead of simply anathematizing it, they could quickly blow it out of the water. And, like Carl Sagan, have a lot of fun in the process. In logic this is called assuming the premise, and it can be a deadly intellectual weapon. If eyes require an intelligent designer, as the theory’s proponent claim, then why did the intelligent designer come up with no fewer than seven different types of eyes? An intelligent designer, or at least an efficient one, would presumably have chosen the best design and spread it across creation. Evolution, of course, explains the different forms of eyes easily: they evolved separately. Why do different creatures that are totally unrelated but occupy the same ecological niche (such as hummingbirds and hawk moths) resemble each other so closely? Why not just use the same beast in each niche and be done with it? Why does the vertebrate eye have the nerve net of its retina in front of the retina instead of behind it? That’s not very intelligent design (it’s why we have a blind spot), but such things are inevitable in evolution. Any knowledgeable student of natural history could come up with hundreds of such questions that intelligent design can’t answer but evolution can. One who has done so at book length is Sir Richard Dawkins, of Oxford University, one of the most distinguished evolutionary theorists in the world, and, by orders of magnitude, the best writer for the non-specialist on the subject. His book The Selfish Gene, is one of the scientific classics of the 20th century. His book The Blind Watchmaker goes at fascinating length into exactly why no intelligent designer is required to explain the living world. The Darwinists could do themselves (not to mention millions of students) a big favor by asking advocates of intelligent design to defend their hypothesis, as all scientists must, instead of just telling them to shut up. A Sagan-style essay, readable at a sitting, would be a big first step in getting the advocates of intelligent design to destroy their own argument—by taking it seriously.
September 14, 2005
Appreciating Edmund Wilson Posted by Allen Barra at 12:55 PM EST To call Edmund Wilson (who lived from 1895 to 1972) the greatest American critic or our most dynamic man of letters doesn’t begin to hint at the scope of his achievement. Wilson’s passions ranged from modernist literature (his favorites were the writers he came of age with—Yeats, Proust, Joyce, Hemingway, though not, oddly, Kafka), to politics (particularly the ways in which Marxism had permanently shaken the world), the American Civil War, the ancient Middle East, northeastern American Indians, and just about anything else that piqued his intellect. He wrote good fiction (a novel, I Thought Of Daisy, and a collection of stories, Memoirs of Hecate County), boring plays, scintillating memoirs, and journals that now function as time capsules for the decades in which they were written; he translated classic Russian poetry; and he filled several thick, rich volumes with reviews and essays on everything from his Princeton classmate F. Scott Fitzgerald to why he hated detective stories (the best known are probably The American Earthquake, The Shores of Light, and Classics and Commercials). No other American writer has produced so many essential volumes; no American who aspires to be an intellectual can afford not to be familiar with Axel’s Castle, To The Finland Station, The Wound and The Bow, Patriotic Gore, A Window on Russia, and perhaps a dozen other Wilson titles. Hemingway said that Wilson’s opinion was the only one “in the States I have any respect for.” W. H. Auden candidly admitted that he wrote for Wilson alone. Since Wilson’s death 33 years ago there have been numerous portraits and a couple of readable biographies, but Lewis M. Dabney’s new Edmund Wilson—A Life in Literature (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $30) is by far the most comprehensive deep-dish study of both his life and work, and at a whopping 600-plus pages, a grand feast for the intellectually horny. Born and raised in Red Bank, New Jersey, a handsome sleepy town with a Southern flavor, young Edmund was given an education grounded in both the Scriptures (his mother was proud to be a descendant of Cotton Mather) and the classics. His father, a one-time attorney general of New Jersey, was an upper-class WASP with surprisingly cosmopolitan tastes. (One of his friends was a Jew, Sigmund Eisner, grandfather of the Michael Eisner who would one day head Disney Productions). Given his background, it was inevitable that Wilson would attend Princeton, where he received, as Dabney puts it, “a purely humanistic education in the tradition going back to Erasmus, though absorbed within a country club environment.” There he met and befriended F. Scott Fitzgerald, a relationship that would loom large in American literature, not only because of his influence on Fitzgerald but because of his role in reviving Fitzgerald’s reputation years after his death. Wilson’s complacent world was shaken by the piles of corpses he saw during the First World War. Sobered, and with his horizons expanded, he returned home and became a top-flight journalist and critic for Vanity Fair, and then, as The New Republic’s literary editor, helped turn that magazine into “the primary organ in the United States for people who love books. ” He finally found a home at The New Yorker, where, in the words of one of his contemporaries, one picked up the magazine “to see what in God’s name he would be doing next.” As early as the mid-1930s, he had surpassed his early idol H. L. Mencken in both scope and influence as the most acclaimed critic in the country. There were four tumultuous marriages, including one to the brilliant and acerbic novelist and critic Mary McCarthy. (“American letters,” write Wilson’s biographer, “has not seen another alliance so flawed and distinguished.” There were dozens of celebrated affairs and friendships—whether in pursuit of one or the other, in Dabney’s sly phrasing, “he was always in search of a promising student.” His feuds, most notably his famous falling out with the Russian imigri novelist Vladimir Nabokov, dominated the pages of the leading literary periodicals. Given Wilson’s decades-long on and off romance with Marxism, it’s amazing in retrospect that he and the fanatical anti-Communist Nabokov were ever friends at all. Always, always, there was alcohol, astonishing quantities of it. Edmund Wilson, concludes Dabney, “was the only well known literary alcoholic of his generation who was not compromised by his drinking,” but, as Dabney makes clear, “alcohol undermined his marriages.” A Life in Literature humanizes our greatest man of letters without ever trivializing him. The most American of the twentieth century’s great scholars, Wilson spoke “with a pronounced British accent” while bristling at British class snobbishness. The great interpreter of Joyce and Eliot liked to relax with Bing Crosby records; by age 60 he enjoyed sitting down with Frank Sinatra’s album In the Wee Small Hours. He was a model of urbanity and intellectual control to some, but Anais Nin found him “irrational, lustful, violent.” A Seneca Indian woman he befriended while writing Apologies to The Iroquois was so impressed by his sincerity that she offered to make him a member of the tribe and named her son for him. Indeed at times in Dabney’s enormously satisfying account there seem to be several Edmund Wilsons, all of them products of a time, as the author puts it, “culturally narrower than ours,” but “in some respects more literate.” Till the end of his life Edmund Wilson reflected the confidence, vitality and sometimes arrogance of an America that had, with startling swiftness in the history of the western world, become not only important but dominant, a society whose “Mass culture was not yet its primary export.” A Life in Literature makes one nostalgic for such a time and such a man.
September 14, 2005
New Orleans: Another View Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 08:10 AM EST I admit to finding John Steele Gordon’s comparison of New York on 9/11 and New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina baffling. Having shared space on the American Heritage masthead with John for several years, and having worked amicably with him on several of his fine pieces for the magazine, I’m sure he meant no real malice. He’s a true gentleman. But the suggestion that New Yorkers (or their city officials) handled catastrophe better than their counterparts in New Orleans is patently offensive and rests on a poor historical comparison. I’m a New Yorker and am fiercely proud of my city. I’ll happily concede that we have a better tradition of efficient and honest urban government than New Orleans. Simply put, there is no Fiorello La Guardia in recent Louisiana history. But these two catastrophes are not on the same scale. Except for the poor souls trapped in the Twin Towers or on board the doomed flights, or those who lived in the shadow of the World Trade Center, very few New Yorkers suffered the devastating loss of property, life or livelihood that New Orleanians are facing. The physical devastation of 9/11 was largely limited to the several blocks around the WTC. It had a real economic impact on the city, to be sure. But most of New Orleans has been wiped from the face of the map. Homes, schools, businesses, roads, bridges, highways, power plants—gone, and in a matter of minutes. There are some problems that are beyond the reach, capability, and responsibility of local governments. What happened to New Orleans is a prime example. What’s truly deplorable is the anemic federal response to so massive a regional disaster. Under the Bush administration, the Army Corps of Engineers has seen its project-based budget allocations decimated; FEMA, which functioned with considerable skill under the Clinton administration, was turned over to a third-rate partisan hack whose only “qualification” for heading up an important government agency—one that falls under the auspices of the Department of Homeland Security—was his prior tenure with the International Arabian Horse Association; and the nation’s ability to address man-made or natural disasters has been sorely compromised by mounting budget deficits and a devolution of authority to cash-strapped state and local authorities. We are very much on a road back to the 1920s, when Americans apotheosized the private sector and stripped the federal state of the wherewithal to deal with national and regional catastrophes. See how well that worked out in 1929? I hope that New York is never faced with anything on the scale of what just happened in New Orleans. If we are, John Steele Gordon will surely find that even the Big Apple's leadership has its limits.
September 13, 2005
Why Katrina is Not Vietnam Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 02:50 PM EST Just as Vietnam was the first "living room" war, Katrina was the first gigantic disaster (in the class of Chicago, San Francisco, Galveston, etc.) to be televised. And just as Lyndon Johnson was criticized for things that had gone unremarked in past wars because they were now being broadcast in living color every evening, so too is George W. Bush's popularity suffering as the extremely messy aftermath of an overwhelming natural calamity is rehashed and updated 24 hours a day. Moreover, in contrast with previous disasters, Americans now seem to expect the President to solve all problems, preferably within 24 hours. That wasn't always the case. I've just been editing an article about California's Salton Sea, which was formed a century ago by a series of floods caused by unsuccessful attempts to control the Colorado River. At one point in 1906, after several dams in a row had burst, E. H. Harriman of the Southern Pacific Railroad, which had taken over the irrigation project, appealed to President Roosevelt for help. The President replied, in effect: It's your problem, you fix it. (It should be noted that many fewer lives were at stake in the thinly populated Imperial Valley at that time.) The difference here is that while the Vietnam War dragged on for the remainder of LBJ's presidency and beyond, ultimately costing him his job, the acute phase of Katrina seems already to be drawing to a close. In addition, LBJ faced an enemy that may have understood American public opinion better than he did and that knew how to time its attacks for maximum political effect. Bush cannot lose his job, he does not face a malicious opponent (except in the political arena), and once the reconstruction gets going, he should be able to point to a steady string of successes. So the long-term outlook is for the disaster to do little lasting harm to the President's popularity.
September 13, 2005
Chief Justice of What? Posted by John Steele Gordon at 08:45 AM EST As the term is likely to be heard more often than usual in the next few weeks, as Judge John Roberts goes through his confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, it might be pointed out that there is a subtle difference between the titles of Chief Justice and the other members of the Supreme Court. Already several TV news programs have got it wrong. The associate justices are properly called "Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States." But the Chief Justice is simply "Chief Justice of the United States." The office of Chief Justice is actually named in the Constitution, although not, curiously, in Article III, which establishes the Judicial Branch, but in Article I, Section 3, which requires that impeachment trials of the President in the Senate shall be presided over by the Chief Justice. Other than a fancier title, however, the Chief Justice is basically only primus inter pares, first among equals. He receives a slightly higher salary and, I imagine, has slightly fancier chambers, presides over the weekly conferences in which cases are decided, and assigns the task of writing the opinion if he is in the majority (otherwise the senior associate justice in the majority does so). He also functions as the chief administrator of the federal judiciary. But like the eight associate justices, he has but one vote.
September 12, 2005
Facta, Non Verba Posted by Julie M. Fenster at 02:05 PM EST At 9:05 a.m. on December 6, 1917, an ammunition ship called the Mont Blanc blew up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, causing a chain reaction among the many other explosives boats crowding the harbor and obliterating one and a half square miles of the small city. A man-made tidal wave followed. More than 1,600 people out of the population of about 45,000 were killed instantly; 9,000 were badly injured by the force of the explosion or by pieces of ships and the city raining down on them. Many of the rest were homeless. At 9:00 p.m. on December 6, 1917—just twelve hours later—a train loaded with medical supplies left Boston for Halifax. That was only the start; the next day, the Bostonians were really prepared. They sent a special train to Halifax, carrying all of the equipment and furniture needed for a 500-bed emergency hospital. Also aboard were 25 physicians, 68 nurses, eight orderlies, and two obstetricians. The inclusion of the obstetricians (in what seemed to be strictly a trauma situation) surprised the people in Halifax, until they found themselves inundated with premature births over the subsequent week. The Bostonians had anticipated that. A few days later, when Boston’s good Samaritans heard that a blizzard was headed for Halifax, they took it upon themselves to send 837 cases of glass, putty, and tools and twenty-five glaziers to reinstall the windows blown out by the explosion. The response from Boston, entirely unbidden, casts shame on all of us who sat by the television, waiting for the U.S. government to act in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Of course, the crisis cast sickening shame on the government. But it was no shining hour for individual initiative, either.
September 12, 2005
Trompe L'Oeil in New Orleans? Posted by Ellen Feldman at 08:55 AM EST When you take a train north from Grand Central Terminal in New York, the tracks of what I still think of as the old New York Central emerge from a tunnel running under Park Avenue into the daylight at 97th Street. If you look up from your reading a little north of that and gaze eastward you will see a good number of abandoned buildings. The sight is not unusual for an inner city, but something about these buildings is. The windows are painted with bright curtains and blooming flowerpots and other trompe l'oeil scenes of a flourishing community. At least they were a year and a half ago, when I last took the train north.
I have been thinking about those windows a great deal as I have watched the tragedy unfolding in New Orleans and listened to the reactions from the rest of the country. This cannot be America, Americans say over and over again, with shame and heartbreak and disbelief. I share their shame and heartbreak. I wonder at their disbelief. Have they not sat in front of their televisions repeatedly in the past few decades watching American cities erupt in violence? A hundred years ago this summer, New York City suffered a record heat wave. In that pre-air-conditioning era, many died. The heat was democratic, but man-made conditions skewed the odds. The death toll was much higher in the crowded tenements of the Lower East Side, where a single bathroom might serve an entire building, a breath of air never entered, and entire families slept in one bed. Those tenements no longer exist, partly because reformers like Jacob Riis forced Americans to see them. The tragedy in New Orleans has forced Americans to see misery and inequality not in some safely distant third-world country but in our midst. As just about everyone has pointed out by now, the preponderance of citizens trapped in the rising waters and locked in the Superdome were black. Without money or a car they could not get out. Like the heat wave a hundred years ago, Katrina was democratic. Our society is less so. The stories and pictures coming out of New Orleans have shown us that. The question now is whether as the flood waters recede we will continue to see, or merely go back to looking at the pretty trompe l'oeil paintings that celebrate the richest country in the world without noticing its poorest citizens.
September 9, 2005
Should We Rebuild? Posted by Richard F. Snow at 03:00 PM EST There’s been some talk in recent days about simply letting New Orleans go: The town had a great run, but now it’s time to concede the game to nature, whose imperatives the city has taunted since its earliest years. The money and effort involved in rebuilding could more prudently be spent elsewhere. And I suppose that’s true—the “prudently,” I mean. But New Orleans has never been a prudent city. Few of our cities have: San Francisco straddling a volatile flaw in the planet’s crust; Manhattan on its preposterous little sliver of an island; Los Angeles summoning the water on which it survives through a not entirely benign alchemy. New Orleans has also always been “challenged” ( to use the annoying goody-goody word the TV stations have affixed to this catastrophe). Over 40,000 of its citizens died of yellow fever between 1817, when records were first kept, and 1905, when the city was host to the last epidemic of the disease in America. One of these scourges killed the Confederate general John Bell Hood and his wife, leaving ten orphaned Hoods all under the age of ten. But the city has always been more than a dangerous goad to nature. When in 1908 the playwright Israel Zangwell declared America a “melting pot,” he was almost certainly thinking of New York City, a crucible where the heat was intense but the ingredients had come of their own accord. New Orleans is different. The ancestors of many of the people we’ve been seeing in the wrenching newscasts came to this place against their will and under conditions worse than those in the Superdome. Many of their neighbors came at bayonet point, as it were, when the British kicked them out of Canada once the French and Indian War was over. These of course were the Acadians—the Cajuns. Under the lower heat of their particular melting pot, the Africans and the French—and the Spanish, and all the rest—gave their country and the world the most wonderful lesson about the resilience and ingenuity of the human spirit. The society they eventually formed was restless, sometimes brutal, ravaged by every horseman of the Apocalypse—and increasingly bright, buoyant, and shining with genius. So we have jazz, and a city in a swamp that for generations everybody has wanted to visit. New Orleans is America’s Venice, a place of spooky, wise ancient buildings that have seen it all yet still can throw off the occasional sunken flash of immediacy, of sexuality, of fun. And so much of that fun is the product of a long, painful struggle to overcome every kind of affliction that the world can deploy. I think we have to rebuild New Orleans just the way Italy has so far rescued Venice from the marauding waters. New Orleans is our Venice without that ancient state’s dispiriting redundant history of murdered doges. Of course it WILL be rebuilt. It is easy to forget amid the happy chaotics of Mardi Gras that this is a great commercial center which generates a substantial portion of America’s wealth. But it is also an irreplaceable part of America's soul.
|
