Category: News Stories

The Schism of the Popular Mind

Kate Moss was dropped from several contracts because some paparazzo caught her with some booger sugar. Pat Robertson openly advocated the elimination of Venezuela’s leader. What do these two events have in common? Both Kate and Pat were were publicly shamed for doing things that were honest and true to who they are. They were doing things that should surprise no one, yet so many reacted in horror.

A supermodel doing coke? Gasp! Who would have seen that coming? The major surprise here is that more photographers aren’t taking pictures of models and celebrities doing drugs. God knows there are plenty of opportunities, given that the advancements in digital camera technology can make anyone a tabloid photographer for the right price. If one were so inclined, an entire magazine could be dedicated to nothing else. Why was Kate Moss singled out? She practically founded a school of modeling commonly referred to as “heroin chic” and we’re surprised she’s doing coke? Would we feel better if it were actual heroin?

A politically active televangelist suggesting an expedient removal of a controversial foreign president? Heaven forbid. Yes, Pat Robertson is a poobah-level whack job, but he’s allowed to speak his mind. He’s completely correct in that an assassination would be cheaper than a full-scale war. He was chastised by his followers for making a decidedly un-Christian statement, but really, why isn’t advocating a war not worse? The deaths of thousands of troops is OK, but the killing of one important man is not? The public is weird like that. They’ll remind Pat, “thou shalt not kill,” but they won’t say that to the Pentagon.

Why can’t the populace just look at a cokehead model and say, “big deal, who cares?” or a religious pundit and say “that makes sense coming from him?”

Katrina Timeline

Salon has an illuminating timeline on Katrina that, to my mind, somewhat exonerates FEMA and the federal response to the disaster. It points out that Hurricane Katrina didn’t destroy New Orleans, Lake Pontchartrain did. After the storm had passed, there was a widespread feeling that the town had survived and emergency efforts were largely successful. Standard procedures were followed, and if New Orleans had been any other town, everyone would have breathed a sigh of relief and moved on (especially when compared with the devastation in Biloxi and Gulfport). But New Orleans is a city in a bowl, and its levees’ lack of structural integrity has been ignored and swept under the bureaucratic rug for decades.

Much as I enjoy seeing Bush under duress, I have a hard time faulting him for the New Orleans disaster. Sure he demoted FEMA out of his cabinet and put a useless crony in the captain’s chair, and sure he was slow to move on realizing how massive a catastrophe New Orleans truly was, but the flooding was caused by institutionalized denial on a mass scale from local, regional and federal bureaucracies over many years.

Here’s how I see it breaking down:

  • Failure 1 was a failure to prepare New Orleans for an inevitable flood, and that falls on local and state officials, and the federal officials who cut the funding for levee improvement.
  • Failure 2 was poor evacuation planning and execution by the mayor and governor, which again is only considered poor because nobody thought about the levees bursting.
  • Failure 3 was the inability of FEMA to predict that local and regional first-responders would be incapacitated by the peculiarities of the New Orleans infrastructure, namely, broken levees.
  • Failure 4 (the worst, really) was FEMA’s and the governor’s inability to figure out how to get supplies and buses for 100,000 people stranded at the Superdome. Brown’s statement of “We learned about it factually today that that’s what existed” after two days of coverage is pretty inexcusable, as is the miscalculation of turning away the thousands of private citizens who rushed to Louisiana to help.

Am I wrong?

NYT Says It All

The New York Times just about sums it up today:

The debate began after officials realized that Hurricane Katrina had exposed a critical flaw in the national disaster response plans created after the Sept. 11 attacks. According to the administration’s senior domestic security officials, the plan failed to recognize that local police, fire and medical personnel might be incapacitated.

D’oh! So relief efforts are supposed to start local and work their way up to federal. But what if the local authorities are just as paddle-free up the proverbial Shit Creek as the rest of the populace?

Now the question for the feds becomes, how forgivable was that oversight?

The Doctors Khan Update

For anyone who knows them, Adnan and Kelly are OK. They weren’t in New Orleans last weekend at all, they were in Tulsa for a wedding. They’re at Adnan’s parents’ house in West Little Rock. Reports are that their place near Tulane isn’t waterlogged, but there’s likely treefall damage and the possibility of looting.

Even the constant network news coverage of the damage doesn’t convey the devastation like this video does. And this video only covers Gulfport and Biloxi.

Katrina and the Waves

OK, sorry but I’ve actually been hoping for some TV news organization to make that crummiest of puns, and so far they haven’t given in to the urge (although admittedly I haven’t watched much of the coverage). Surely The Daily Show will be back to do it. Anyway here are some choice Flickr postings to check out:

Various scenes from Louisiana and Alabama
Pictures from above the eye
Deserted New Orleans before the storm

Update: The Times (UK) succumbed to punnery!

Shedding the Unreality

In what will hopefully become a trend of unlikely, paradigm-shifting headlines, this article entitled US scales back expectations on gains during Iraq transition, is making its way around the news sites. It says, among other things:

”What we expected to achieve was never realistic given the timetable or what unfolded on the ground,” said a senior official involved in policy since the 2003 invasion. ”We are in a process of absorbing the factors of the situation we’re in and shedding the unreality that dominated at the beginning.”

The cracks are showing; the administration can’t keep up its sunny exterior much longer. Jon Stewart and The Daily Show have been keen to point out that the rhetoric from the administration is changing quietly from the “War on Terror” to the “Global Struggle Against Extremism.” Odd thing to see them employing the kind of euphemistic language that conservatives tend to rail against. He’s not “crippled,” he’s “differently abled” – this isn’t a war, it’s now a struggle. Perhaps as old soldiers don’t die, they just fade away, the Bush administration is hoping Iraq will fade from the public consciousness.

Here’s hoping we can instead continue in our struggle to shed the unreality.

Unlikely Developments on the Marconi

Jason added a comment to one of my older entries about the format of FM101.1 here in town. He gave a link to an MSN story entitled, “Increasingly, stations move toward variety.”

There’s an unlikely headline. Everything I know about radio is seemingly refuted by this development. It’s a paradox, a conundrum, and I am flummoxed. Radio stations are experimenting with…diversity. Not the same old homogenous, bland formatting of the most chart-topping pablum, but a gloriously random mishmash of lesser-known favorites and hits. You say you want a revolution? Corporate radio, in a panic to compete with iPods and satellite radio, seems ready to deliver.

What are some other similarly unlikely headlines? “MTV Plays Video,” “Pope Promotes Prophylactics,” “Republicans Balance Budget,” “Michael Jackson Dates a Black Woman.” If you’re bored, make up some of your own and post them as comments.