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Liprap's Lament - The Line
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
The divine - and now, the late - Lena Horne doing a song that popped up on the radio this morning in tribute to her artistry:
One big tipoff that the Macondo Prospect well in the Gulf was probably doomed from the start? It shares a name with the fictional town created by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude. So much promise, so many hopes and dreams, all dashed by man's greed and incompetence, leaving destruction, death, and emptiness behind as their lasting legacies - that is the fate both Macondos share.
Feeling worse than ever about the oil disaster, especially after I saw the interview of Deepwater Horizon worker and explosion survivor Chris Choy on the PBS NewsHour last night. Listening to the radio this morning and hearing the news that BP had suspended their attempts to cap the biggest leak with the condome, along with the interviews of Venice, LA fishermen who have no other course at the moment but to accept relief supplies, watch their bills pile up, and go work for BP sticking booms in the waters had me switching stations and taking in some of Ms Horne doing "My Blue Heaven" and then coyly playing 'round with a Beatles White Album track.
I was told I was stacking, and that it would kill me if I let it.
Oil disaster at the bottom. The little guy's recent bad behavior at school atop it. The suggestion by his teacher that he be tested for ADD/ADHD. The fact that he wasn't put in to play in his first baseball game of the year. A nice chat with the school social worker, at which point I became a basket case.
It got to be too much for me, all the things that my son was going through that were causing such major anxiety in me. I felt like a failure. I felt like I was going to tear that poor social worker's head off, and I was grateful for his calming demeanor and for the opportunity to chat with him.
I'd give anything and everything to either start this week over or go back and spend it in a hidey hole someplace, but that's just not possible. I need to get with my health care professional who specializes in helping with folks' sanity and possibly get on something else, as I haven't had a crazy-in-the-head-and-outside-myself episode like that for a long while. The school social worker said that the body can develop a tolerance to what I'm taking, and I'm probably already long past that. Helloooo, placebo effect.
Until the retooling of the serotonin to my brain, this is pretty much where I am:
Oh, and people? Just 'cause I'm out of my mind doesn't mean you can all be a buncha slackers.
Big thanks to the yaller blogger for the link to the nifty oil disaster counter that's now in my sidebar. Yes, this is still happening. Via one of Maitri's links, a nifty BBC article tells the story thus far of the spewer from down under the Gulf, noting that the oil has already reached Louisiana's Chandeleur Islands, a wildlife refuge here. Check this post of hers for how the containment dome is supposed to work (really, though, I pictured something like this). Keep in mind it's only going on one of the sources of leakage - we won't be out of the gunk yet if it does work.
Since 2007, the retired employees and the local board have petitioned the state to help pay for the teachers’ health coverage and to address other legacy issues. The results have been spotty. State lawmakers, led by state Sen. Ed Murray of New Orleans, got state funding for 25 percent of the health benefits for two years. That money supplemented 25 percent paid by the board each year. Last year, however, the board got no help. The retired employees have had to pay the difference, which averages about $670 a month right now.
This year, Murray introduced Senate Bill 240, which carves out $6 million from the Orleans Parish public education property tax millage and dedicates it to all legacy issues. The bill is supported by the local board and many education reform advocates. It won’t cover all the retired employees’ health insurance costs, but with the local board’s share it should cover about half — putting the employees back where they were before last year’s cuts.
The Senate Education Committee unanimously approved SB 240 last week. It now awaits action by the full Senate, and it must still clear the House.
The current dollar amount for the payout of reparations by an oil company for environmental damage to this country was set shortly after the Exxon Valdez oiled up part of Alaska's shores. There's now a move in Congress to get that amount increased, due to the fact that it represents small change for the company that is ultimately responsible for the latest - and largest - oil disaster yet.
The following info came through the email today:
The bill number is S. 3305, the Big Oil Bailout Prevention Act. There's no equivalent House bill yet. It's been sent to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, which David Vitter sits on. So call his office at (202) 224-4623, state your name and that you're a constituent, ask to speak to the staffer who works on environmental issues, and then here are your talking points:
-BP's liability for economic damages is currently capped at $75 million
-The annual retail sales of Louisiana's seafood industry total over $1.8 billion at minimum
-The cap is too low and BP is responsible for these damages
-BP can afford to pay since their 2010 Q1 profit alone was $5.6 billion
-Senate Bill 3305 addresses this problem by increasing the cap to $10 billion
-Please cosponsor the legislation and encourage the Senate Environment committee to bring it to the floor for a full vote
Update, 5:00 PM: From Maitri, in the comments to this post on Humid City:
Just so you know, the amazing, modern marvels of engineering that are Transocean drilling rigs are, like the Titanic, far from reckless or Rube-Goldbergian (we’ve really got to stop using this term for a while). It’s such a cool, awe-inspiring experience to be on one of those rigs. But, also like the Titanic, the failure of a crucial safety mechanism brought the whole thing down and sent millions of gallons into the sea.
The above is one of the reasons why I carry a camera at all times.
So here we are. In distressing straits once again.
Things have piled up so much for me lately, personally and information-wise, that I'm off my Twitter addiction for a while. I can't take the streaming of all the ways in which we are getting screwed over by our own dependence on oil and by our governments' enabling of the corporations. I do applaud the other folks who are in constant tweetage, sharing the latest about the oil disaster and, for some folks, their own experiences with the nonstarting cleanup efforts. I personally get so full of the ways in which our abilities to combat this thing are sorely inadequate compared to the magnitude of what was unleashed by the faulty blowout preventers that it gets me into a deep funk.
The only things that have cheered me a little concerning this terrible mess are:
- the prospect of using this stuff called Maximum Oil Pickup (MOP) to absorb the oil. It needs to be applied by a special MOP cannon, apparently, which instantly had me thinking of this:
- Jon Stewart's take on the whole thing. I do have to admit that some things do go down much easier with a beer or two...or three...or filling up a F&%!-It Bucket with liqueur and dunking one's head into it repeatedly.
Otherwise, I recommend going to Dambala's, Jeffrey's, Oyster's, Maitri's, or Greg P's for your oil disaster commentary and updates for the time being. If you've got any other useful sources, comments, whatevah, let me know.
In the meantime, I'm going to take my own advice and take life as it comes.
Update, 3:01 PM: And then there's this (via Coozan Pat). Assessing risks just sucks. Urrrrghhh...one thing at a time, one thing at a time...
John Besh, chef and restaurateur, on the effects of the river of oil in the Gulf on the fishing industry:
But for years these fishermen have been discounted by the government. Allowing the rampant importation of sub-quality shrimp into our country was a huge slap in the face. And this disaster is another: we're acting so slowly when this has been brewing for 10 days. It took the press to tell the story that has politicians up in arms. But it's been 10 days!
I understand that it takes the government time to mobilize. But I was in the Marine Corps, and I know that if we need to we can strike heavily anywhere in the world in 24 hours. Why aren't we using that kind of enthusiasm and drive to protect our coastland? I don't think half the people in Washington have a clue of what's at stake. This is a fragile ecosystem that has had to survive so much already. We've had the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers nearly destroy nearly a third of it by dredging various canals, and there have been the aftereffects of hurricane after hurricane.
Then there's the effect of the very powerful petroleum industry, which no one has wanted to comment on. I'm not against the oil companies—they're our biggest customers (even though I'm a little tired of hearing "BP," since last I heard it was British Petroleum). But we could very well lose this entire ecosystem down here, and it would be catastrophic for the country.
These are federal waters. It's not a natural disaster, whatever I hear people say on television. It's so frustrating. The Federal government has known about this for 10 days. It should have said, "We're going to act now," and not wait for BP to take action. This is unprecedented—not a little spill from a ship. We do want to hold these companies responsible. But first and foremost, we need to protect citizens. This is much more than about birds. It's about a culture, an economy, the livelihood of thousands and thousands of people—and wetlands that have been the most concentrated source of seafood production for our entire country.
It's no wonder the fishermen are lawyering up, and it will be even less of a surprise when seafood prices double. I look forward to seeing the film Dambala comes back with from the environmental killing fields...if I'm not still sick from just thinking about all of these goings-on.
so which... has the better record, rig or mine? Honest question.
Honestly, I can't answer that, and I wish I was up on more of offshore oil rigs versus coal mines so that I could answer our family friend.
I agree with Clay that we don't know much at all about even the locations of our offshore wells in the Gulf, and we should. Much more emphasis is put on learning about how we obtain oil these days than on the details of keeping that first strike producing that precious black gold...wait...I say "these days"? It's always been that way. Most beginnings of something as monumental as our chief source of energy take on the gravity of your basic origin myth. If we could combine the story of Adam & Eve in the Garden of Eden with the first discovery of crude oil in this country, then the divinity of this enterprise would be firmly established - to the orgasmic delight of many right-wing pols - and drilling away to our government's and our energy corporations' hearts' content would be happening apace, with no regard for the effects on the environment. Bottom line, you know. We must have our gasoline. Just. Drill.
So we're drilling anyway, believe me. The Gulf of Mexico is teeming with oil platforms and rigs just like the one that blew up and capsized not far from Venice, Louisiana, injuring nearly a couple hundred people and causing eleven deaths. It's amazing that more blowouts aren't happening, that more people aren't hurt, but the industry is pretty well regulated on the production end of things (Update, 4/29: Oyster asks in the comments: "You mean the oil industry's voluntary safety/environmental regulations?" Well, crapola. Another reason why we need to be better educated about this.) . So the oil companies have accelerated the transformation of the Louisiana coastal wetlands into Swiss cheese-y dead zones with their pipelines to the refineries from the offshore wells. Bottom line, you know. We must have our gasoline. Just. Drill.
It's a serious problem...and the very prospect of it wasn't taken too seriously in the first place. It's one thing to have leaky foreign tankers causing this, another entirely to have a homegrown potential source out of control. More than just the lives lost and the lawyering-up survivors' futures are at stake - an already fragile coastline, its undersea life, and its wildlife are going to be oily, dying masses at our doorstep. An effort to keep our dependency on crude oil going is now going to be dealing a serious blow to the source of nearly a quarter of this country's seafood. If/when the prices of oysters, shrimp, and fish go to the moon throughout this country, blame BP.
But I worry the most about the fact that no one's come up with anything better than burning the stuff to get rid of it. Bleak jokes about it all are flyingfast, to be sure, but what isn't funny at all are the many amputations the oil industry keeps performing on this state - and how they are getting away with it all. This state is too dependent on it, to the point where I hope that they'll be able to absorb the oystermen, the shrimpers, and the fishermen into their workings, or that they'll at least pay them some major reparations for their lost livelihoods.
Yes, that's how bad things are here.
WWLTVThe Coast Guard is reporting that there is a new leak from the spot where the platform exploded and sank in gulf. BP says no oil leaking
I never thought I'd get anywhere near a "dayenu" moment at my synagogue's JazzFest Shabbat, a moment when there was such an embarrassment of musical and spiritual riches that I reflect back on it now and say...
If we'd had just the adult and kids' choirs singing the jazz melodies to the liturgy, it would have been great.
Adding the Panorama Jazz Band - even better.
An appearance by Sophie B. Wright School's band - raising the roof.
Having Allen Toussaint there...stratospheric.
But Toussaint's bringing up a special guest, getting some heart-in-my-throat dueling piano action on "St James Infirmary" going, then bringing him back for a grand finale of Adon Olam to the the tune of "When The Saints Go Marching In"?
Mind. Completely. Blown.
Reportedly, Paul Shaffer said it was the hippest service he'd even been to in a synagogue.
There are a couple of toys we've fallen for in the course of my son's childhood, the first being a small duck that quacked conversationally when you squeezed its belly, but then the quacking mechanism started to die, giving way to some prolonged BLEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHs emanating from the poor thing, which we thought was hilarious. The only one still in our house that we regularly replace the batteries on is the goofy giggly hippo flashlight. Believe me, we'll squeeze the handle on that thing and giggle along with it if you ask us nicely...but Lord knows when we'll stop. You've been warned.
Today I found another one - a genus of toy that I've always thought was annoying as all hell and really did a disservice to books in general. I give you...
That green thing on the lower right corner? Push those buttons and you get some great zombie language sounds to accompany the pictures of zombies in traffic, zombies at the dog park, zombies at the coffee shop... you get the idea. Nothing like seeing a zombified version of the idiotic Thomas the Tank Engine books that have you push buttons for sounds at least three to four times in the middle of every sentence. I can make my own sounds, thanks, but it's even funnier to hear a zombie calling for its undead dog.
I would have had a great guffaw at this if it weren't at our expense.
Through Michael Lewis' latest, I learned that Steve Eisman, the man who was one of the few to blow a whistle on the subprime mortgage lenders' Ponzi-like accounting structure, studied the Talmud to find the mistakes in it. Ooo-kay, starting to sober up now.
I read this round-up of Maitri's and started to get bone tired. The earth is getting damn exhausted on this Earth Day, and all fundamentalists want to talk about is how immodestly dressed women might be contributing? Oh, please. Makes me want to give to this organization that Eisman contributes to, 'cause this is where the stupid burns like hell.
Consider me all giggled out. For the time being, anyhow.
______________________
My sincerest condolences at this time also to Troy Gilbert of GulfSails and to his family on the loss of his uncle in the recent explosion of an offshore drilling rig near Venice, Louisiana. May your uncle's memory be for a blessing.
Of all the things for a TV show about New Orleans to get me back into, I never thought it'd be the music from an album I have some love-hate issues with...
Part of it was the side effects of being a sixteen-year-old who went out and got it 'cause she'd heard the musician's reputation was good. New Wave had passed me by, though I would hear bits of it on the radio from time to time and like it. As a kid in my early teens, I'd go digging in the spare change tin Dad kept on the kitchen counter and bike up West Bellfort to Chimney Rock and a record store that was selling bargain tapes, where I'd pick up whatever was cheap and, hopefully, all good. I'd splurged for this one, though, 'cause I'd heard a song or two from it and really enjoyed what I'd heard, but for me personally, at that time, the rest of the songs beyond those favored few were challenging and haunting all at once. To this day, bits and pieces of the songs still cling to me and pass through my brain...pads, paws, and claws...you're nobody in this town...I saw a newspaper picture...string 'im up!!!!
Would that I still had Spike in my album collection to this day, but I'm now going to have to run out and get it again, as somewhere along the way from teen years split between Houston and Pennsylvania to here in New Orleans, "the beloved entertainer" has gone AWOL. This time, however, I have some different perspectives under my belt, some rubber left on the roads I've traveled, and some other things to think about when I'm listening to what I now feel is Elvis Costello's most remarkable album.
It was the first time he'd worked with Allen Toussaint. It was the first time I'd ever heard of the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, who backed Costello on some of the songs and even took an instrumental turn of their own with a tune called "Stalin Malone". And it includes beautiful songs like this one:
It's sitting in my front passenger seat, even now. I do my best, when I'm putting my purse and other assorted bags next to me, to try to arrange things so that the thing doesn't get ripped or crushed. It is ever-ready to go, and I know I'll have to move it someplace else if I have to get more people in the car...but for the time being, it's comforting to have this giant plastic lorakeet beside me, its wingspan stretching from the car floor to the head restraint of the passenger seat.
Yesterday, my son took it out and ran around the park for a bit with the kite trailing behind him before heading off to dig in his favorite sand pit next to the new playground equipment. It never caught a wind that made it soar behind him, and, as it was getting warm in the field, with the sun burning down over it all, he went for the shady, sandy refuge, and I decided to give it a try.
There are moments in trying to make a kite soar when you're not sure if it's really going to work. If you can't defy gravity, how can this plastic parrot do it? It doesn't even have a streaming kite tail on it. Up until the moment I decided to go at it in earnest, the lorakeet hadn't been much higher in the air than some of the youngest, skinniest trees that had just been planted in the park.
However, luck was with me as well as some solid gusts of wind way up high, well above the tallest trees in the small park in the middle of the sliver by the river. Later on, when I had to untangle the mess of string I'd made, I couldn't believe I'd gotten the parrot to go that far up in the air, but there it was. I called my son over to see and to get a handle on it if he wanted to, but he stayed in the sand, looking up in the air for a few moments at the kite that was keeping company with the other birds that hovered above the park, then digging his hands back into the dirt. There were moments when the air seemed to drop the kite as though it were throwing away some scrap of paper and it looked like the parrot would be grounded for good in a tree or near the power lines, but I stuck with it, weaving the string carefully around outstretched branches and maneuvering the kite away from the voltage up on the poles. For a half hour, I was feeling golden.
But all good things must come to an inevitable end. The wind dropped out from under the lorakeet for good, and I sat on a nearby bench and patiently followed the string out of its tangled mass to get it all perfectly rolled back up on its spindle. The whole time, the little guy's attention was on his hands finding the wetter sand beneath the dry grains on the surface and making instant rocks he could pulverize after showing me what he'd made just by clenching his fist. When we left for the car, he wanted to run again with the kite just after him, close by where he could hear its wings flapping a little in the wind he created through his own power.
It drove home to me how different our personal interests were...not to mention the proximity of our pleasures. The kite had to be fairly close by my son for him to get a thrill from the sensory experience of it, while I gloried in it from afar. But then, there we both had been, side by side, he obsessed with bits of dirt, and I with a piece of string.
When you start your morning off with some Naomi Kleinon the radio as you're driving the kiddo to school, you know it's going to be a different sort of day.
I listened to her discussing how much the current California officials and the federal government's bailout of AIG and the banks had a hand in the situation in which Berkeley students find themselves paying even more money for the education they get and there are still layoffs of the school faculty and personnel. She kicked it off with how an emergency situation created by man-made levee failures in New Orleans helped kick off the Friedman-esque privatization of the public school system. Though it was only the first part of the lecture that was broadcast, Klein detailed how current officials, think tanks, and the decisions they all make in reaction to the emergencies they are at least partially responsible for get us all paying more just to live. What can we do in the face of all this? Tune in for part two next week, the radio said. Just my luck...
Yesterday, I checked out the open thread here and found the observation that, thus far, in David Simon's latest show, "all most of the men (characters) want to do is party and the women are the serious ones". I couldn't resist jumping into that fray, as it's been my experience that even in damn-near-everything-goes New Orleans, women have to at least have a veneer of responsibility about them. God forbid you should let your kids get sunburned at an outdoor festival here. If you don't at least have more control over your household than your man does, you ain't worth much. And, as a woman, if you are the one who goes completely insane from all the crap involved in rebuilding your life here - even though trying to rebuild around here would drive a multicolored many-eyed-and-eared alien from another galaxy insane - you're already of the "weaker sex" and your reaction simply confirms this. Hell, even Naomi Klein isn't immune - DJ Pop Tart made it a point just after the radio broadcast of complimenting Klein on her mad research skillz, and I couldn't help but think that the author and lecturer had to be extraordinary in some part because she was female.
So, atop disaster capitalism and sexism comes the NIMBY-ism: my husband was told recently that feeding the city's homeless was somehow unseemly because of the large numbers of people that were lining up to receive what was probably the only good meal most of them had all day and how the line was snaking outside of the building in which they were receiving the food. No real mention of why there were growing numbers of "those people" lined up in the first place. Complete and total ignorance of the causes of poverty and of the funding cuts to social services were the hallmarks of this call to cease and desist. You homeless people get off my lawn and out of my city!
Some days, the -isms will kill you if you let them.
This past Sunday was Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, and nothing drove that home for me more than to see Agnieszka Holland's name in the opening credits of Treme as the director of the series' pilot episode.
You see, Holland became well-known around the world for her work as director and writer of the film Europa Europa, based on the story of Solomon Perel, who escaped the horrors of deportation and the death camps by becoming, through a series of improbable events, a member of the Hitler Youth. Although the following clip is in German with subtitles in Spanish, the basic idea behind the scene in the classroom is there: the fear that the young Solomon, hiding in plain sight, expresses throughout the lesson in the "scientifically proven" physical superiority of the Aryan race, and his sheer discomfort turning to relief in being singled out, measured, and finally declared an example of the superior Nordic ideal, "diluted" by some Baltic ancestry. Holland is masterful at showing the absurdity of this class in bigotry, making us giggle a little at how the boy's very appearance turns the pseudo-science into a big lie and enables him to live another day:
Europa Europa, as films about the Shoah go, is one of the best; it seems as though, at every turn, Perel is finding people around him who have things to hide at a terrible time in world history when, if one couldn't physically escape the war-torn countries of Europe and the Pacific, you had to fight the hells they presented in any way you could, just to survive, even if it meant becoming someone else....and I think, as far as the film's critical reception went, it helped that, although it was controversial and seemed crazy at times, it was based on a true story. Comparing Europa's reception to that of Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful showed what a fine line creative people walk when making art about the awful times when, through willfulness or even the sheer banality of neglect, large numbers of the human race did (and still do) unspeakable things to each other. How dare a non-Jewish actor and director make the Shoah a backdrop for comedy?
Even after many decades, the memory of the six million executed for being Jewish and the mass killings of other peoples deemed "lesser" by the Nazis looms painfully large...just as the suffering incurred by those who survived the levee breaches here with little more than their own lives is still ever-present, a sore spot that must be treated with care on a creative level still, even though nearly five years has passed.
If anyone can bring that out in moving pictures and make it live even for the people who weren't here, it's Agnieszka Holland, and I think she took a good stab at it this past Sunday night.
I don't know if she'll be directing any more episodes of Treme. If she does, I know they'll be well worth watching.
"Fun!" Moshe Waldoks spits, imitating the accented fury of a survivor. "You're making fun of our suffering?! What do you know about vat vee vent through!" Into the silence ripped by Waldoks' scripted fury, Lisa Lipkin drops an answer: "We're not making fun of what you went through. We're making fun of what we're going through now."
...But humor does more: In every joke is the hint of the hidden horror. This is not laughter through tears, it is laughter despite tears. Humor also punctures, wounds, shocks, and reveals. If they're doing the job right, the prophet and the jester have similar roles, Waldoks says: "Both are making the comfortable uncomfortable."
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