Month: September 2005

Another round of thoughts/articles/etc. on Katrina

I’ve spent most of this past Labor Day weekend around the house (most of the last week, actually), getting ready for the coming school year, but also following the Hurricane Katrina story via NPR, the web, CNN, network news, etc. Here’s kind of a summary of a few things I’ve come across lately:

  • Kevin “Political Animal” Drum gives a telling chronology of W. et al and FEMA. Actually, there are a ton of entries about all this on Drum’s blog, stories about how FEMA’s funding has gone down every year since it became part of the Department of Homeland Security, how the guy who is running FEMA used to be in charge of a group having to do with horses and had little experience in disasters, etc.
  • Here’s one entry that aired on that ultra-liberal Tim Russert. Let me quote from the site, which is really a transcript from last week’s show:

    MR. RUSSERT: Hold on. Hold on, sir. Shouldn’t the mayor of New Orleans and the governor of New Orleans bear some responsibility? Couldn’t they have been much more forceful, much more effective and much more organized in evacuating the area?

    MR. BROUSSARD (that is, Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish): Sir, they were told like me, every single day, “The cavalry’s coming,” on a federal level, “The cavalry’s coming, the cavalry’s coming, the cavalry’s coming.” I have just begun to hear the hoofs of the cavalry. The cavalry’s still not here yet, but I’ve begun to hear the hoofs, and we’re almost a week out.

    Let me give you just three quick examples. We had Wal-Mart deliver three trucks of water, trailer trucks of water. FEMA turned them back. They said we didn’t need them. This was a week ago. FEMA–we had 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel on a Coast Guard vessel docked in my parish. The Coast Guard said, “Come get the fuel right away.” When we got there with our trucks, they got a word. “FEMA says don’t give you the fuel.” Yesterday–yesterday–FEMA comes in and cuts all of our emergency communication lines. They cut them without notice. Our sheriff, Harry Lee, goes back in, he reconnects the line. He posts armed guards on our line and says, “No one is getting near these lines.” Sheriff Harry Lee said that if America–American government would have responded like Wal-Mart has responded, we wouldn’t be in this crisis.

    But I want to thank Governor Blanco for all she’s done and all her leadership. She sent in the National Guard. I just repaired a breach on my side of the 17th Street canal that the secretary didn’t foresee, a 300-foot breach. I just completed it yesterday with convoys of National Guard and local parish workers and levee board people. It took us two and a half days working 24/7. I just closed it.

    Oh, and just to be clear: these sorts of national (beyond state borders) disasters is what FEMA is supposed to do.

  • Michael Moore has weighed in, too. Okay, okay, maybe he is a bit biased, but I think he’s right, too.
  • Cuba wants to help, but W. et al won’t take it. Here’s a pretty interesting quote from this piece:

    Last September, a Category 5 hurricane battered the small island of Cuba with 160-mile-per-hour winds. More than 1.5 million Cubans were evacuated to higher ground ahead of the storm. Although the hurricane destroyed 20,000 houses, no one died.

    What is Cuban President Fidel Castro’s secret? According to Dr. Nelson Valdes, a sociology professor at the University of New Mexico, and specialist in Latin America, “the whole civil defense is embedded in the community to begin with. People know ahead of time where they are to go.”

    “Cuba’s leaders go on TV and take charge,” said Valdes. Contrast this with George W. Bush’s reaction to Hurricane Katrina. The day after Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, Bush was playing golf. He waited three days to make a TV appearance and five days before visiting the disaster site. In a scathing editorial on Thursday, the New York Times said, “nothing about the president’s demeanor yesterday – which seemed casual to the point of carelessness – suggested that he understood the depth of the current crisis.”

    “Merely sticking people in a stadium is unthinkable” in Cuba, Valdes said. “Shelters all have medical personnel, from the neighborhood. They have family doctors in Cuba, who evacuate together with the neighborhood, and already know, for example, who needs insulin.”

  • W. et al nominated Roberts to be chief justice before Rehnquist’s body was even cold. Oh yeah, and what about Katrina? The “duck and cover” political strategy has been intiated. Here are two quotes of note from today’s New York Times article:

    It (meaning the White House) orchestrated visits by cabinet members to the region, leading up to an extraordinary return visit by Mr. Bush planned for Monday, directed administration officials not to respond to attacks from Democrats on the relief efforts, and sought to move the blame for the slow response to Louisiana state officials, according to Republicans familiar with the White House plan.

    and…

    In a reflection of what has long been a hallmark of Mr. Rove’s tough political style, the administration is also working to shift the blame away from the White House and toward officials of New Orleans and Louisiana who, as it happens, are Democrats.

    “The way that emergency operations act under the law is the responsibility and the power, the authority, to order an evacuation rests with state and local officials,” Mr. Chertoff said in his television interview. “The federal government comes in and supports those officials.”

    That line of argument was echoed throughout the day, in harsher language, by Republicans reflecting the White House line.

  • New Orleans newspaper, The Times-Picayune, wrote an open letter to W. that I think kind of sums things up pretty well. I’m guessing that W. won’t be writing back.
  • Finally, I’ll say this, and I don’t offer it as a critique of the Bush administration per se because I’m not sure the Democrats are a whole lot better on this score. Like everyone else, I’ve been watching the news footage of rescues, of the Super Dome, of the NOLA convention center, of angry people in the streets, etc., and I cannot get by the fact that damn near all of these people are black. Why? Well, because most of these people are poor and they had no way out– see this Washington Post article about that— and because I think it’s pretty clear that our government (local, state, federal) doesn’t care a whole lot about poor black people (or poor people of other colors, either), I’m not so sure that it ever did, and I’m fairly convinced that it never will.

    I guess I have known for a long time that the United States– which is my country, and which is a country that I do love– is simply not “the best in the world,” despite the myths we tell ourselves. It just isn’t, and you can’t look at what’s happening on the Gulf Coast and still think that it is. And I guess this is what saddens me most about the whole thing.

Update/Addition:

Barbara “Babs” Bush said that things are working out “very well” for the poor. Afterall, they are getting out of that shithole of New Orleans to live in the great state of Texas– and even Houston! Jeesh….

My Freshman Day (sorta…)

I participated in a freshman orientation session yesterday morning at EMU. Basically, the session I lead was about “life in the classroom,” and my job was to give them a sense about what classroom life was like in 50 minutes or less. Needless to say, I didn’t manage to accomplish that; I think they’ll actually have to start going to class before they can figure out for themselves what it means to be a “college student.”

I was able to work through an explanation of the handout they give to students, which has sections about things like the need to attend class, reading the syllabus, appropriate class conduct, not cheating, where to get tutoring help, etc. I guess it was useful for them. I mean, all of this stuff strikes me as common sense, but of course, what counts as “common sense” depends on the community that you are in. For example, a couple of students asked about this thing called a “syllabus” and about books (“How am I supposed to know what books to get for my classes?”). Questions that definitely mark these kids as “new.”

And I should point out that they were “kids.” We have a lot of “non-traditional” students at EMU, but as far as I could tell, all of these students were right out of high school and getting ready to live in the dorms, away from home for the first time ever. Most of these students were born around 1987, and this makes me feel quite old. Given that I was in my junior year in college back in ’87, it is no longer a stretch to say that I’m old enough to be the father of these kids. Yikes.

Anyway, while a lot of the questions these future students had about the classroom struck me as simplistic and obvious, I was also struck by how little I knew about the part of EMU that they inhabit on a day-to-day basis. Maybe I’m thinking about this now because I am reading the excellent book My Freshman Year by Rebekah “not her real name” Nathan, which is about an anthropology professor who enrolls as a freshman to research the life of college students the same way that studied other “distant and foreign” cultures. I haven’t come close to finishing reading it yet, but early on, Nathan talks about how different the university looks to her as a student than it did as a college professor. Among other things, she means this in a basic geographic sense: Nathan talks about how as a faculty member, she was able to park and thus enter the buildings where she worked from a particular vantage point. But as a student, especially living in the dorms, the university had a completely different geography, one that she found disorienting and confusing.

I experienced a little bit of that confusion myself on Sunday. While most of the orientation session I led was on “my turf” of the classroom, the students also asked about things having to do with meal plans, some dorm life issues, and registering for classes. There were two “student leaders” in my group, college juniors and seniors who were hired to usher around the new freshman, and I’m glad they were there. I had no clue about the questions these students were asking, and I found some of the answers surprising– the meal plan that students buy works everywhere except Wendy’s in the union, for example.

I could go on, and I guess I shouldn’t be that surprised that what the university looks like is different based on one’s point of view. But I guess I was just struck by how very different this place seems to look to students than it looks to me. Something worth thinking about as I get ready to actually teach….

An "Intelligent Design" theory I am willing to support

On my official blog, I try to steer clear of direct and overt politics and such. I don’t agree with the right’s argument that academia is too liberal to be fair to conservative students and I’ve voiced my opinions about all that here, but generally, I save my expressions of my politics and religious beliefs for my unofficial blog.

But I want to come out here all in favor of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or, as it has also been called, Pastafarianism.

A friend of mine sent me a link to an August 29 New York Times article, “But Is There Intelligent Spaghetti Out There?” As the article reports, the Kansas State Board of Education is giving preliminary approval for the teaching of alternatives to evolution like “Intelligent Design” in science classes. Bobby Henderson, “a 25-year-old with a physics degree from Oregon State University,” has some problems with this, which he shared in an “Open Letter to the Kansas School Board” in which he explains that if they are not willing to include the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster’s teachings about the origins of life in their “Intellifent Design” curriculum, he would take legal action. To quote from the New York Times piece:

In perfect deadpan he wrote that although he agreed that science students should “hear multiple viewpoints” of how the universe came to be, he was worried that they would be hearing only one theory of intelligent design. After all, he noted, there are many such theories, including his own fervent belief that “the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster.” He demanded equal time in the classroom and threatened a lawsuit.

Soon he was flooded with e-mail messages. Ninety-five percent of those who wrote to him, he said on his Web site, were “in favor of teaching Flying Spaghetti Monsterism in schools.” Five percent suggested that he would be going to hell. Lawyers contacted him inquiring how serious he was about a lawsuit against the Kansas board. His answer: “Very.”

I think this is interesting for a whole variety of different reasons, but I will limit myself to two for the time-being:

  • The “Intelligent Design” movement is a fantastic example (maybe the best example ever) of how simply renaming something changes the values assigned to it by an audience. These folks were getting nowhere with the term “creationism,” largely because of the overt religious connotations. But “Intelligent Design:” well, who could be against that? It’s the same tactic we’ve seen with “The Death Tax” (which is a name that tested significantly better than what it really is, “The Estate Tax”), “Personal Savings Accounts” as they connect to Social Security, and so forth. But somehow, the language and approach of “Intelligent Design” seems unusually persuasive, perhaps beause the words “intelligent” and “design” so often have positive connotations.
  • The “Intelligent Design” movement is another example of what I see as a sort of re-emergence of religiosity into the public sphere. This is perhaps the most overt example, but I think that there are subtle ways in which the line that has traditionally separated “church” from “state” has become quite a bit more porous in recent years. Part of it is the Bush administration of course, but I also think a lot of it is a response to 9/11. Personally, I have nothing against religion per se, but a) I’m not a religious person and I don’t want to be compelled to be a religious person by the state, and b) we shouldn’t be teaching religious concepts of origin (or just about anything else, for that matter) as “science” or even as “scholarly,” and c) we shouldn’t be doing these things in publicly funded institutions.

Unless we do go down the Spaghetti Monster path. I’m all for that.

Keep dry, poptart

Friend Mary sent me a link to the_velvet_rut, a blog kept by a distant friend of mine from graduate school in Bowling Green who is now working (teaching?) at Tulane University in NOLA. Needless to say, she has a lot of thoughts about Hurricane Katrina right now, though as far as I can tell, she’s in Tennessee right now.

BTW, Tulane won’t be having courses this fall, which probably isn’t too surprising.

Birthday Boy




Will at 8

Originally uploaded by steven_d_krause.

Will turned 8 today, and a fun filled birthday it has been. Actually, his birthday celebration started just over a week ago with the trip to Cedar Point, and it will (more or less) conclude tomorrow with a Daddy/Will golf outting where he will try out his new golf clubs, one of his gifties.

Will started the day with a telephone conversation with Grandpa Dan and Grandma Jan. Then we took in cupcakes for his classmates at school, a big hit of course. After school, Will and I (okay, mostly me) baked the birthday cake you see before him (okay, from a mix). Then Grandpa Bill and Grandma Irmgard called and sang a chorus of “Happy Birthday.” And then we all went out to dinner at Will’s pick, California Pizza Kitchen, always a hit.

As I sit here and type this now, I think back to the night Will was born 8 years ago. I don’t have enough time to write up all of the details of it (and I’m not sure it would be all that interesting here anyway), but it’s funny because I remember it all quite vividly, even though– fast-forward to today– Will’s third grade teacher told me this morning, while I was holding a flimsy box of cupcakes, that we have raised a good little boy.