03/21/2013

After the Flood

Adrienne and I are watching the first season of Tremé on disc.  I resisted this for three years, despite the praise the show – and the way it was made  – received from New Orleans friends.

If you haven’t seen it, the HBO series opens three months after Hurricane Katrina and takes place in an historic New Orleans neighborhood that’s racially, socially and economically mixed.

I’ve occasionally worked in Gulf Coast communities for over 20 years.  I was there right after Katrina and several times since and the show gets it right.  It gets New Orleans right and it gets Katrina’s aftermath right.

A friend’s parents were hit hard in the Rockaways by Sandy; my in-laws on the Jersey Shore were luckier.  In some parts of Vermont, still getting back on their feet after 2011’s Irene, there’s what you might call disaster envy, the feeling that victims of other, more telegenic or politically-connected storms got more federal assistance.  (“Yeah, and what’d we get?  A jam jar by the register at the convenience store with our photo taped to it.”)
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By floegel | Posted in Civil Liberty, Commentary, Global Warming | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0)
03/14/2013

The Irish Letter

Before the Internet, the passing along of office jokes had to be accomplished with typewriters and copiers.  I remember a few of these coming into my house when I was a child.  (Copiers were then new technology, but Rochester was the home of Xerox).

One that stuck in my head was the prototypical “letter from your Irish cousin.”  I can’t remember if my German dad or Irish mom brought it into the house, but (of course) I was able to find a copy on the web.

The letter contains six imprecations directed at the English and/or Protestants and three reminders to keep sending money.  This line’s typical: “Your cousin Biddie had a baby. One of them Limey officers in fancy uniform took advantage of her. He offered to marry her but her father said ‘NO,’ better a bastard in the family than a bloody Englishman. God bless him and may the child never know.”
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By floegel | Posted in Civil Liberty, Commentary | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0)
03/07/2013

The Time Tunnel

But for the grace of God

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, Trekkies, there go I.  In the mid-1960s, Star Trek wasn’t the only implausible, sci-fi haven for hack actors.  For one, glorious 30-episode season (1966-67) ABC aired The Time Tunnel.

With a premise as cardboard as its sets, Time Tunnel hurtled time-traveling techie protagonists Tony (James Darren) and Doug (Robert Colbert) – two of the whitest guys of 60s tee vee – from one historic event to another and then plucked them away before they could be killed at Little Bighorn, go down on the Titanic or get blasted to bits by the Krakatoa eruption.  Somehow, they never wound up in the middle of the beet harvest in 15th-century France.

The battle of New Orleans, Pearl Harbor, D-Day, the Alamo, Gettysburg, Iwo Jima –  somehow a device that manipulates time and space had an affinity for combat, particularly American combat.  From four and a half billion years of Earth history, the boys just kept landing in North America during one 190-period.  Is science hard or what?
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary, Global Warming | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)
02/28/2013

Hot New World, Toxic Old World

In the New Yorker magazine a few weeks ago, Ian Frazier wrote about the effects of Hurricane Sandy on Staten Island.

His report mixes the heartache and loss suffered by the community with the cold, wet facts of climate change and other injuries we’ve inflicted on our surroundings.  At one point, Mr. Frazier (whose nickname is Sandy) is dubious that some of the storm’s victims’ bodies were actually – as the New York Times reported – found among cattails.  He doubts cattails still exist on Staten Island.  He checks the territory and reports that, as suspected, any cattails in the marsh at the end of McLaughlin Street long ago succumbed to invasive phragmites.

Invasive phragmites (pronounced “frag-mighties”), unlike their native cousins, do not co-exist with cattails.  Mr. Frazier tells us they reproduce by dropping seeds and by sending out runners both above and below ground, thus driving out the native cattails.

I immediately thought of my own 21st-century nature preserve – the Superfund site near my house.  A former industrial canal, it was used for decades as a dump for coal gas residue.  Now thirty years into its federally designated isolation , it’s a dystopian mix of wasteland and wildlife habitat.
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary, Global Warming, Toxics | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)
02/21/2013

Letters to the Dead

As I mentioned two weeks ago, this month I’m spending a good deal of time with my friend Joan, who died in February 2003. We worked together at a newspaper and became friends, correspondents and opponents in a stimulating two-decade debate.

When she passed, the editors of our old paper graciously printed a memorial I’d written, which began: “My long argument with Joan Dickenson is over. If she won, neither of us will ever know. Our argument concerned the existence of God and the immortality of the soul. (Joan did not dispute small matters.)”

Joan’s inhabitation of my thoughts these recent months has made me wonder if I’m not letting my side of the argument down. If she were here (let’s say in corporeal form, for the sake of argument), she’d remind me that if I truly believed in life after death, I’d have continued the debate. Why not? That’s how Joan debated; if she saw a flaw in my argument, rather than charge in and slay me, she’d politely point it out, encourage me to amend it, make my side stronger and invite me to have at her again. Either as her protégé at prose, which I was/am or her opposite in philosophical combat, she wanted me at my best. Defeating a weakling was no triumph for her, it would have left her in the shoes of a bully, the last place she wanted to stand. Continue reading »

By floegel | Posted in Commentary | Tagged | Comments (0)
02/14/2013

Me… We

I’m a me person.  It sounds egotistic; I don’t mean it that way (although an honest person could argue it’s true).  What I mean is the story of my life is mine alone.

It’s true, like Alfred Tennyson’s Ulysses, I am a part of all that I have met.  I have, like most of Americans of my generation, lived my life steering by stars I could see clearly.

For a while, those constellations took me into community organizing, to towns that were targets of corporations looking for places to put things no one wants – dumps, incinerators – despoilers of air and water.  People talk about throwing things away, but they never say where “away” is.  Towns that are “away” are poor with high concentrations of people of color.  As you’d expect of people who live “away,” they don’t have much money or power.
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By floegel | Posted in Civil Liberty, Commentary, Toxics | Tagged , , | Comments (0)
02/07/2013

Gimme A Call

In the dim and distant ‘80s, as a newspaper reporter, I had to call a certain mayor – a longtime and fairly cagey politician – and ask him a difficult question I’d neglected to bring up when I’d interviewed him earlier.  I fretted for a while at my desk, did a couple role plays in my head, tried to think of follow-up questions because I expected him to wiggle away from what he didn’t want to go on record with.  Deadline approached, I had to take the plunge, so I grabbed the phone and punched his number.

I hit him with my blunt question (finesse has never been my strength).  Dead silence, then a cough, a stammer and then he admitted to something I was sure he would not want to see in the paper.  Flustered, I scratched notes as quick as I could and reformed my follow-up on the spot, hardly believing my good fortune.  The mayor spilled yet more beans in terse, odd sentences; I kept him on the line until I’d gotten all I wanted and way more than I’d expected.

I hung up and sat back in my chair, wondering what had just happened.  Then it hit me.  “Gotcha,” I said and started rewriting my lede sentence.  What I realized was the mayor was uncomfortable speaking on the phone.  From then on, whenever I wanted to ask him about a subject he wanted to talk about, I’d ask in person and he’d give me paragraphs of good copy.  When I suspected he didn’t want to talk, I’d telephone.  (“Mayor?  Sorry to bug you like this, just one thing I forgot to ask…”)

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